Bloober Team has made a name for itself in the world of horror. With the release of a range of different titles, including some established franchises such as The Blair Witch and Silent Hill, along with their own concepts with The Medium and Layers of Fear, the studio has shown an ability to craft complex and often terrifying worlds that demand to be explored.
But now, with Cronos: The New Dawn, it’s working on one of its most ambitious projects yet — crafting a deep and horrifying experience that looks to be as unsettling as it is unique. There’s no denying that Bloober Team has crafted something special with Cronos: The New Dawn, and it’s a game horror fans are eagerly awaiting as we edge closer to launch.
With the game launching this fall, CGMagazine took the time to talk to Game Director and Lead Writer Jacek Ziemba, and Lead Narrative Designer Grzegorz Like, to dive into the process of creating this new original concept. Discussing how it all came together and how the team managed to build something so different from past projects, they offer a glimpse of what fans can expect when they finally dive into the full experience.
Just to start, how did the concept for Cronos: The New Dawn come to be, and how did you, as a studio, decide this was what you wanted to do next?
Jacek Ziemba: A couple of months before finishing The Medium—we finished it at the beginning of 2021—our boss, Piotr Babieno, gathered people from different departments and said, “Okay, let’s talk about what we can do next.” We were finishing The Medium, we were in pre-production on Silent Hill, and we knew we wanted to go into third-person survival horror. That was decided from the beginning with the new game that would come after Silent Hill, and the team from The Medium would do it. So, he divided us into two teams and matched people who hadn’t worked together before to figure out a pitch.
So, we figured out two pitches. One was about a strange disease that morphs people—something like The Thing, but set in a Polish housing project, because we thought that could be interesting and unusual. The second group came up with a story about a traveller jumping to the past, sent by a strange collective to extract people who didn’t survive an apocalypse. The question was, which one is better? We said, “Neither, let’s just connect them—let’s merge them.” And then the final pitch happened, and that became Cronos: The New Dawn.
Grzegorz Like: I also think that while Silent Hill was in pre-production, we knew this should feel very different. We didn’t want to give people another IP that was just a camouflaged Silent Hill. We knew sci-fi would be a great direction, and adding this time travel element was super cool. It was an opportunity to keep it psychological horror but push it further into more philosophical territory—about humanity and all that.
Now, you’ve done a lot of different varieties of games with the studio. You’ve done less fighting-based games and more just—
Jacek Ziemba: Walking sim.
I was trying to find a different name.
Grzegorz Like: No, it’s cool, it’s cool. I loved it. In The Medium, we had an achievement you could unlock when you ran a lot in the game. It was called “running sim.”
So, what lessons as a studio have you learned that you brought into Cronos: The New Dawn that shaped it?
Jacek Ziemba: Each game—each horror game—we evolve with each one. Before our “horror era,” Bloober did different kinds of projects. So with Layers of Fear, we figured out how to do horror as a team, how we wanted to approach it. With Observer, we added dialogue choices; it was our first game set in Poland, so we started scratching that itch and worked with bigger names like Rutger Hauer. Then with Blair Witch, we worked with an IP and added companion AI and more gameplay features, but it was still first-person.
With The Medium, it was a big switch. It was still fixed camera, but we learned how to approach cutscenes differently because now you could see your character. We figured out how to work with emotions and performance in cutscenes, and we learned how first-person design required us to build levels differently—even down to gameplay metrics.
With Silent Hill, we started a little after them, but they gave us a foundation for third-person camera, combat, and shooting. So we didn’t need to invent everything from scratch—we could look at what they did, decide what we wanted to grab or learn from, and then at some point we diverged into our own direction. We knew this game needed to be gameplay-heavy. We wanted it to be gameplay-heavy so we could evolve, and now we’re ready as a company and a team to do something more complicated than anything we’ve done before.
Grzegorz Like: We’ve always been storytellers at heart, and I still sometimes see comments online like, “Oh, I liked story Bloober Team, and now it’s all action—it’ll be hard.” But it’s not like that. We still want to tell stories that engage people, that are complex and deep. But I think it needed balancing with gameplay. Creating a walking sim isn’t a super conscious decision, like, “Let’s do it, this is exciting.” It’s not that. We love all our games and put our hearts into them, but sometimes it’s about creating a game despite the limitations. We needed time to learn and evolve, and now we can do what we want. Cronos is a dream project for us.
Now, you mentioned The Medium that you worked on. Was there ever a thought that you needed to continue that storyline before starting something brand new, or did you want to go—
Jacek Ziemba: I think with each game we ask, “Are we going to do a sequel?” There are always talks about that for everything we’ve done. Even for The Medium, we have some ideas about how to push it further. But I think that would just be a next step, and with Cronos it’s a leap. It was more engaging. Yes, we’re creating new lore and everything, but at the same time, we love The Medium. It was a love letter to old survival horrors and adventure games. But Cronos is another dream project because when the Cronos idea came up—a third-person survival horror that we could truly make our own—it was like, come on, take my money.
Grzegorz Like: Yeah. And because of the ambiguous ending of The Medium, we felt like we needed to do something with it, but at the same time, maybe it’s better if we don’t touch it.
Yeah, fair.
Grzegorz Like: Just to keep the mystery box closed, you know?
Fair. The answer’s never as good as what people can imagine on their own, right?
Grzegorz Like: Yeah, yeah.
You mentioned setting things in Poland, and I’ve noticed that strongly in this game and in your past games. Has it always been part of the studio’s intention to represent Poland in your games, or has that just kind of worked out that way?
Jacek Ziemba: It just worked out that way. It was never our mission. For Observer, I think Mateusz—who was our art director and creative director at the time—said, “Hey guys, look what we can do when we mix communist Poland with technology. How different and cool it is.” That was interesting, but it wasn’t like, “Now we need to show Poland.” It just worked and fit. For The Medium, the idea to show the ‘80s and ‘90s and certain elements wasn’t part of a mission either—it just worked for the story. For example, taking a real hotel, normally in the city center, and placing it in the forest.
Also, the second world in The Medium, the ghost world, was very heavily inspired by Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński—kind of like the Polish H.R. Giger. So maybe that part was a mission: to promote Beksiński, because for us, he was a genius. But with Cronos, again, it was more about the cool factor, the interesting factor, artistically. Brutalist architecture, this Nowa Huta district—it’s awesome, different, and strange. But the more we dug into Nowa Huta’s history, everything started to click more and more. There was no way back. And again, without a mission, it just worked for the themes, the story, the whole game.
Grzegorz Like: Yeah. You could easily say, “These guys are so full of themselves—look at me, I live here, I made a game about my home,” like an MTV Cribs thing, but it’s not like that. For me, as a writer, when the idea of a blockhouse came up, I saw it as an aesthetic decision that worked really well with this cassette futurism.
My mission was to create another layer that would rhyme with that. As we asked ourselves what the story should be, we realized that not only was the aesthetic of Nowa Huta inspiring, but so was its background—not just historically, but also the people who live there. They fit so well into the narrative. And believe me, if it hadn’t worked, we would have changed it.
Makes sense. Now, the design—the concept for the look of Cronos: The New Dawn—just playing through the first hour or so, it’s a very unique-looking experience. It feels oppressive, and you really have to work your way into that universe. Was that always the intent? Did you always envision this as a universe that wouldn’t feel welcoming?
Jacek Ziemba: Yes. That was by design—to alienate players as much as possible, especially those outside Poland. We use Polish language in the world, and even with translation, you’re thinking, “Where am I? When am I? What’s happening here? What happened here?” That’s all by design. And brutalist architecture—it’s monumental, but it’s also oppressive. You feel small. And we do everything we can to make you feel alone at the beginning of the game.
Grzegorz Like: I also think the alienation Jacek mentioned was meant to work on many levels. It reinforces all the feelings you want in a horror story, like entering a foggy town where you don’t know what’s going on. And then in Cronos, you start as a traveller and think, “Okay, what’s a traveller? What’s happening? Where am I?”
All of that is by design because the journey of the traveller, how she changes throughout the story, and who she is by the end—that’s the most important thing that happens in the game. One of many important things, of course. To achieve that, we needed to reinforce that feeling as much as we could. If it feels weird, that’s good.
Now, when the first previews of this game came out, there were many comparisons to Dead Space and similar games. Was that intentional, or is it just a case of “it’s a game with monsters, so that’s what it looks like?”
Jacek Ziemba: Overall, we bet on sci-fi and body horror, and we’re not living in a vacuum. At the beginning, we approached it more like Resident Evil meets Dark, the Netflix series about time travel. Dead Space was somewhere in the mix, too, but as production went on, we diverged from Dead Space. I think Dead Space is much faster.
Even though both games have a suited protagonist, Dead Space is faster, the combat involves more enemies, and so on. We focused on different things. But yeah, there will always be that comparison. I think people just need to play the game and see that it’s a different kind of sci-fi, a different kind of story and world. Also, I think people sometimes forget—and I don’t want to antagonize—
Grzegorz Like: Yeah, yeah, thank you. Dead Space was, more or less, not based on but heavily inspired by Resident Evil 4. And we are also heavily inspired by Resident Evil 4, both the original and the remake. Also, we have some references—like our stomp animation is very similar to Dead Space, and that’s by design. It’s a wink-wink.
It’s fascinating to see how people react. They see a suited protagonist and immediately say, “Oh, this is Dead Space.” And we’re like, dude, just because of the suit? That’s like saying Game of Thrones is a ripoff of Lord of the Rings. Well, it’s not. Well, to me, Isaac is a completely different character than the traveller. Honestly, when I think of the traveller, I think of Samus from Metroid—that’s a more accurate comparison, and nobody has made it. I heard BioShock and I was like, Jesus Christ, why? Because of the bob? Okay.
Jacek Ziemba: I think the traveller is closer to Samus, maybe even to Doomguy, but she’s not such an action-heavy character. She wakes up in this world knowing her mission, more or less. Isaac and characters like James in Silent Hill are thrown into situations.
You mentioned the traveller being a woman, yet when you’re introduced into the world, you really don’t know—gender isn’t clear because of the giant suit. Was that intentional? Did you want to alienate who she really is under all that?
Jacek Ziemba: Yes. We didn’t want to design a sexy suit or anything that would reveal, “Oh, it’s a female because I can see it.” No—you don’t know who’s inside or why, or what’s happening. We chose a woman as the character because we felt it would be more interesting, but it’s also a little homage to sci-fi and horror, where many protagonists—like Ripley—are iconic.
Grzegorz Like: And nowadays, a lot of people think that creating a female protagonist is a statement. And, well, that’s a lie. If you’re doing it to enforce some ideology, it can backfire—you might have a cool character but a bad story. So we thought about the story first, and in early drafts, she was a he. It didn’t work that well.
Then we decided, okay, she’s a woman in this spacesuit, and that’s cool because it also rhymes with Ripley and all that. It fits, and Cronos is a love letter to all things ‘80s. And it was also an opportunity to call Kelly Burke from The Medium—not to reprise her role, but to work with us again.
Jacek Ziemba: Is this a connected universe? Oh no.
Grzegorz Like: No, but it was a way to get her back for the traveller. And I have to say, she worked completely outside her comfort zone here. Marianne is completely different. Now we have this bulky, strong “fridge lady,” but what Kelly Burke does so well is convey emotion. So that bulky character becomes more and more something else, and that’s great.
So, last question—just about how the story in Cronos: The New Dawn unfolds. I don’t want any spoilers, but narratively, how did it work to have a protagonist who knows more than the player?
Jacek Ziemba: It’s a big risk, but we feel—and we believe—it will pay off, based on reactions so far around the story. Whatever idea of Cronos you have after these first two hours, your perception of the character and your feelings will dramatically change as you play more.
Grzegorz Like: I feel like we advertise this game as a really Polish product—you have a lot of Poland in there—and very action-heavy. But we talk very little, so far, about the complexity of the story.
Jacek Ziemba: So far.
Grzegorz Like: But we can’t, because everything is a spoiler at this point. We made the risky decision to create this first act—the one you’ve played—as a very cold, cold open. The world feels alien, and she’s not very talkative at the beginning—she’s very cold. By the end of Act One, when you feel like, “Okay, I’ve grown into being a traveller now, I’m a professional,” then the story…
Jacek Ziemba: Then it goes to space—not literally.
Grzegorz Like: Yeah, yeah. And then you really start connecting with the character on a knowledge level.
Right.
Grzegorz Like: She also stops knowing things, and you discover them with her. It’s empirical, you know.
Just one follow-up on that—about the marketing so far. From the first trailer, you never really give anything away. You give just enough for people to say, “This looks weird—what’s going on?” Was that always the intention—to make people walk into this game thinking, “I don’t know what’s going on”?
Jacek Ziemba: Yes. When we designed the first trailer, the entire idea was to create a feeling—to intrigue players, not give them any answers, just show them a lot of things that work and set that tone right from the start. That’s what this game is.
Grzegorz Like: Yeah. And I feel like when you write something about time travel, it gives you opportunities—not only to create a cryptic universe, but also to design a game that, when you play it again, you notice subtleties and nuances.
It shifts. The perspective is completely different when you know more. And we ask a lot of questions—there are more questions than answers in this game. Things aren’t given to you on a silver platter. But I assure you, I hate when something is just secretive for the sake of being mysterious, where it’s all facade and nothing behind it. With Cronos, we really did everything we could to avoid that. The answers are in there, but you have to dig very deep to find them.
Jacek Ziemba: But you need to learn the language.
Awesome. Thank you so much.
Jacek Ziemba: Thank you.
Grzegorz Like: Yes, thank you.
