In Cronos: The New Dawn, martial law struggled to maintain its grip on a society that was falling apart. For many, this would be speculative fiction. For the game’s co-directors, Jacek Zięba and Wojciech Piejko, this was a trip into not-so-distant history. Some events within Bloober Team’s survival horror game are a glance back at the seismic events that struck Poland within living memory.

When the Polish government enforced two years of martial law in 1981, it was to suppress opposition to the communist regime after years of economic mismanagement. That is where Cronos diverges from reality. Here, martial law was decreed to contain The Change, an ominous plague mutating people into grotesque horrors known as Orphans, which eventually overrun the world.

Clad in a Soviet-era diving suit, The Traveler warps back in time on a mission to avert this dreadful fate. She arrives in Nowa Huta, a district on the outskirts of Kraków that has a fascinating history as a failed Soviet utopia built to house workers at a colossal steel mill. 

“This district was a Soviet dream come true,” explains Piejko. “Come to Kraków, we have an apartment for you close to the factory. You can work there. There is a school for your kids, a hairdresser, everything! It was a city within a city.”

Kraków was once known as the city of kings. The city, now home to Bloober Team, boasts an ancient history of noble grandeur and mythical dragons that was incompatible with Soviet ideals, according to Piejko. “Soviets wanted to push their own idea: no lords, no kings. Nowa Huta was created to counter it and show people a different world.”

That different world featured row upon row of Stalinist gray apartment blocks that dominate the skyline. That brutalist architecture lends itself to horror through its imposing scale. “Nowa Huta gives us unique architecture; you feel how monumental it is, and at the same time, you feel small,” says Zięba. 

In creating the game, the team benefited greatly from their close proximity to the city. Narrative Designer and Lead Writer Grzegorz Like is one of several developers born there to parents employed at the Vladimir Lenin Steelworks, today a tourist attraction that the Bloober Team got to visit in period-accurate vehicles.

In Cronos’s re-creation, a tower atop the town hall is particularly striking for two reasons: its awe-inspiring height and the total absence of its midsection, making it appear eeriely suspended in midair. In reality, plans for Nowa Huta's town hall were shelved. Yet here it looms in Cronos’s doomed world, a landmark standing in improbable defiance of both physics and history.
 

Apocalypse then

Despite its time-hopping plot encompassing several stops on humanity’s path to total annihilation, Cronos’s world is stuck in the 1980s in the same way the Fallout universe embodies the 1950s aesthetic. The result: a style the developers like to call “cassette futurism,” defined by all analog equipment and clunky mechanical operations. 

Nostalgia for the ‘80s looks different for those who grew up in Poland. While America rode high on Reaganomics, Piejko remembers rationing fuel when he went with his grandfather to a petrol station and feeling a pervasive sense of paranoia more often associated with East Germany under the threat of the Stasi secret police.

“The ‘80s in Poland weren't nice,” he says. “It was a very hard moment. People were reporting each other to the police if their neighbor did something strange. It was a really dark time, so it was also a good background to this philosophical but psychological horror.” 

Cronos explores the tension between individualism and collectivism, a fascinating topic made even more meaningful through the lens of a post-communist state that grappled with that debate on a national level to reinvent its society.
 

The leftovers of humanity

The Orphans are humans who have succumbed to the virus. The leftovers of humanity become gangling, mindless mutants, their forms disfigured with distended limbs and their reshaped, pallid bodies covered in spines and tentacles. Challenging enough as they are, they can merge with Orphans you’ve already slain to absorb their abilities and become even more formidable foes.

It’s an all-important step to retain the vital shock factor for players. When you’ve seen one zombie-like monstrosity, you might feel as if you’ve seen them all, but a new and unexpected spin can make them terrifying once more. It’s a concept reminiscent of the Gamecube Resident Evil remake’s Crimson Heads, a game-changing feature where dead zombies left unburned or with their heads still attached could become even more dangerous variants with punishing speed and raking claws. 

At their mention, Zięba proudly holds up a copy of the Gamecube game in question, while Piejko shows off a Crimson Head figurine on his desk. The pair know their survival horror games, and they’ve learned from the very best while creating their own contribution to the genre.

In a similar fashion, your options are limited by resources in Cronos’s tense, tactical ranged combat (a very deliberate contrast to Bloober’s melee focus in Silent Hill 2). You definitely won’t have enough flamethrower fuel to incinerate every corpse you make and keep Orphans from merging. Instead, you may resort to reducing the Orphan’s options by removing the corpse with abilities you want to avoid most. “After developing the system, our playtesters were more afraid of [a] merge than being hit,” says Piejko with pride at achieving his intention: fear and desperation.

As we found in our recent hands-on preview, an Orphan chaining multiple merges can result in unique build-your-own-boss moments. Careless players may find themselves up against enemies as fearsome as Capcom’s very own Nemesis or Mr. X. Initially, the enemies were even worse. Playtesters faced near-indestructible Orphans that’d grown so huge, they couldn’t even fit through a doorframe. 

In terms of the arsenal of weapons for dealing with these abominations, the developers wanted analog weaponry similar to that found in the Alien films or Blade Runner. Power comes from a charge mechanic that does more damage at the expense of time you may or may not have against an advancing Orphan with numerous options to close down that shrinking distance.

“It also re-created the feeling of old-school survival horror games when you were more glued to the ground,” says Piejko. “So if you charge the pistol, you're less agile. You can still move, of course, but this creates this feeling of ‘Will I land this shot?’” Although he promises there’s the occasional devastating exception, like a late-game RPG that fires the equivalent of a small nuke.

We saw a strong hint that the laws of physics don’t strictly apply to that gravity-defying town hall, and this carries over into the game’s level design. Supernatural anomalies have similarly trippy effects. You may find yourself upside down in a gunfight with wall-climbing Orphans, or use an anomaly to clone explosive barrels to dispatch a horde into a shower of gore.
 

Faceless horror

For everything the directors revealed about Cronos, one of the game’s greatest mysteries remains its protagonist, the Traveler, in whom Zięba hopes to make a sci-fi horror icon to rival Alien’s Ellen Ripley. Since her face was obscured by a large diving helmet, the team's cinematic artists were stunned when they found out what they were working with. 

“Guys, but she doesn’t have a face. It will not work. It will be so boring!” Zięba remembers the artists complaining, but they were soon convinced. “She's a terminator at the beginning, but the further we go, she's starting to change,” he says, her psyche increasingly haunted by the remnant consciousnesses she extracts along the way.

Kraków may have lost its claim as the city of kings centuries ago, but, with Bloober Team’s efforts, it may well gain a new crown as home to the new kings of horror.

You can pre-purchase Cronos: The New Dawn now on the Epic Games Store. It will be released on September 5.