As you make your way through New Dawn — the fictional Polish city in which Bloober Team’s new sci-fi survival thriller, Cronos: The New Dawn, takes place — you’ll be met with the uneasy feeling that you’re not alone. NPCs are few and far between in this game, but as you explore New Dawn’s apartment blocks, hospital, abbey, and steelworks, you’ll start to get the sense that everyone just left moments before you got there. Christmas trees twinkle in anticipation of the upcoming holiday, notes and work schedules litter office desks, and the graffiti of disgruntled citizens marks the walls. Despite being mostly empty save for monsters, New Dawn feels undeniably alive.
As it turns out, this is because many of the developers who worked on the game (which is out now on console and Windows PC) grew up in the Polish city of Nowa Huta, a name that translates to “New Steelworks,” and the inspiration for New Dawn. Lead writer Grzegorz Like grew up there, and during a recent interview with Polygon, he explained how his hometown became the perfect backdrop for Bloober Team’s first original horror IP since 2021’s The Medium, which was also set in Poland.
“At Bloober Team, at some point, we became experts of putting Poland into everything,” Like told Polygon, laughing.
As for how the game came to be about a spacesuit-wearing time-traveler stomping around the remains of a devastated Polish city on Christmas Eve of 1981, Like says the Traveler’s strange-looking suit came first.
“It started with the vision of this weird suited astronaut, a diver even, in an environment that is absolutely awkward for being in a spacesuit,” Like explained.
Like says Bloober Team first considered a rural setting for the game, before finally settling on a communist-era city supported by steel production, which Like said was a better match for the “cassette futurism” aesthetic he and the dev team were aiming for with Cronos.
“Very early on, the idea of mixing the suit with the cassette futurism aesthetics came, and we thought that also one of the ingredients in that recipe should be, in general, a blockhouse,” Like said, referencing the large, boxy concrete apartment blocks that popped up all over the Soviet Union during the communist era. “To see a suited astronaut in a blockhouse, that felt weird, and we don’t only like weird, but weird is good for inspiration, and we like our games to be appealing in an aesthetical way. Also, it really fuels the writing. So, we figured that if we put our characters into real places, why not use Nowa Huta?”
Like said he was “stunned” when he realized there was a chance the game would be set in a fictionalized version of his hometown, telling Polygon that once the Nowa Huta setting was on the table, he pushed hard for the idea.
“I wanted to create that game, because Nowa Huta is a very interesting place, but it’s also a place with a very dark history.”
Like says that, similar to Cronos itself, Nowa Huta “started as a dream.” Poland was devastated after World War II, and Nowa Huta was a place of hope. Over 40,000 of the city’s residents — including both of Like’s grandfathers and grandmothers — sought employment at the steelworks, which he describes as “the heart of the city.”
New Dawn’s steel mill is the heart of Cronos too, and is the first place players will start to get the sense that the city’s residents are growing restless. Distrustful of the government, many of New Dawn’s residents, especially the steelworkers, are skeptical of the pandemic that has left them quarantined inside the city, even though it truly is unsafe to go outside. Signs of social unrest show themselves in letters, graffiti, and the bodies of the dead. Just like New Dawn, Like said Nowa Huta had a grim side during the ’80s.
“At some points, it was like Gotham City,” Like said.
But in Cronos, players have far fewer tools at their disposal than The Dark Knight does. The game’s advertising isn’t shy about letting players know the game is difficult, accurately describing its survival elements as “brutal.” Like told Polygon that, upon learning how challenging the game’s combat would be, his first reaction was fear.
“I was like, ‘Shit, how challenging, exactly?’ And they said, ‘I don’t know, do you play Dark Souls?'” Like recalled. “I had a heart attack. I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ But then, when I finally got to play some of the builds, I discovered that Cronos is not about continuously rolling on the floor to create the best sword-fight experience in the history of sword fights. It’s more about being prepared. The fight starts before the fight. So if you’re prepared, if you know your environment, if you have everything crafted and your guns reloaded, every kind of fight you have later on, it’s more of a puzzle [than a combat encounter], but it’s an action puzzle.”
Like also has a word of advice for players who are intrigued by Cronos, but too scared of intense combat to take the plunge: roleplay. The writer says that when he tackled Cronos’ challenging combat, he roleplayed as a “depressed Mandalorian without a neck,” referencing the Traveler’s odd, collar-less Dive Suit.
“My advice, if you think that the challenge is too big for you, well, roleplay,” he said. “Because the Travelers are awesome, and they wouldn’t falter. So if I roleplay, it’s all fine. It’s cool. I’m a Polish Mandalorian, and it works.”
Regarding the game’s Christmas Eve setting, Like told Polygon it was chosen in part because it evoked the pain of wanting to gather with loved ones during a time when gatherings are not allowed because of quarantine, and in part “because we always wanted to write a Christmas story.”
The game’s quarantine plotline wasn’t only inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was partially based on actual events that took place in Poland in the early ’80s. In 1981, martial law was imposed, preventing people from gathering via curfews and other restrictions.
“People started to get together, they started the solidarity movement, and the government panicked,” Like explained. “So they locked up everyone in their homes. There were hours you can’t go out, just to keep the students and the workers at home and prevent them from gathering.”
Like referred to this era as “the darkest time of the Polish communist period,” but said it made for an engaging setting for Cronos: The New Dawn.
“We wanted to use that [era] and ask, ‘What if martial law wasn’t imposed because people were getting together to fight the regime, [what if] it was actually imposed because there was a true danger?'” Like elaborated. “We wanted to use that very dark period to show the real sparks of kindness between people.”
It seems that in the real world, those sparks of kindness have caught fire. Despite his previous comparison to Gotham City, Like said that unlike the fictional city of New Dawn, his own hometown is doing much better these days.
“Now, Nowa Huta is thriving, and they’re even making games about it!” Like said, grinning. “So that’s cool.”
