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Bloober Team unveiled its new project Cronos: The New Dawn in 2024 with a cinematic trailer that I quite liked: Man in badass spacesuit plays chess with nice old lady and also blasts away at Dead Space-style creepos in a different time/space/dimension/whatever, and then when he loses the chess game he offs her anyway. Or does he?
It’s not really clear, to be honest. The job of the Traveler, as the player is known in Cronos: The New Dawn, is to go back in time and extract certain people who didn’t survive a world-ending apocalypse, presumably so they can help clean up the mess in the future (that’s not really clear either), and maybe that’s what the whole face-grabbing thing was all about.
But scooping people out of time isn’t the Traveler’s only job: As seen in today’s gameplay trailer, they’re also responsible for filling sticky bad guys full of lead. These creatures are known as “the Orphans,” and they’re “twisted, body-horror monstrosities born from humanity’s darkest nightmares.”
Like any good infestation, the Orphans are also tough to get rid of. The trailer is entitled “Don’t Let Them Merge,” which Bloober Team says is one of the game’s “core mechanics”: If you don’t burn an enemy after it goes down, its body can be absorbed by other Orphans, which makes them “faster, stronger, more resilient, and far more horrifying,” with additional combat abilities.
I’ll admit that I didn’t pick up on that at first: Bloober Team describes the merging as a “grotesque process” but as far as I can tell after watching the video a second time to see what I’d missed, the alive wormy guy sticks its tentacles into the dead wormy guy, and then gets bigger. You can see the process (I assume this is the process, anyway) at the 0:43 point of the video, and then again at 1:33.
That bit of it is definitely underwhelming—given how central merging is to the game, I’d expect a little more visual punch from the process—but overall, I like what I see. There’s a bit of Dead Space to the proceedings, which seems like an easy fit for Bloober Team, although it comes off as more of a third-person shooter than a survival horror game, which frankly is fine with me.
But it’s the mystery that’s really holding my attention for now. Who is this guy—and why, since he seems to be doing us a solid, are we pointing a gun at him?
Barring delays, we’ll find out later this year. Cronos: The New Dawn doesn’t have a release date yet but it’s up for wishlisting now on Steam and Epic, and expected to be out sometime in 2025.
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Kurt Indovina
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