In Bloober Team’s latest survival horror title, Cronos: The New Dawn, players step into the magnetized boots of The Traveler: a mysterious female protagonist whose face is never shown. Like the domed metal helmet of her Temporal Shell (read: time-travel spacesuit), The Traveler herself is opaque. She’s hard to read, and other than an undying loyalty to the shadowy group she works for, known as The Collective, she doesn’t have a whole lot of personality — or so I thought.
Most of Cronos is a solitary experience. You’ll bump into a couple of humans here and there, though most of them are unfriendly at best and downright paranoid at worst. But most of your encounters will be with creatures called Orphans: horrific, twisted versions of humans who have been corrupted by a deadly virus. But not long into my trek through the game’s creepy take on 1980s Poland, I stumbled across a surprise: A cat was in my path, and it marked the first living thing I’d encountered in-game that wasn’t a terrifying monster or a dangerous human. Even better, I could pet it! The real question was: Why? Why would The Traveler — this seemingly unfeeling character who views the world through an extremely utilitarian lens — bother taking the time to pet a cat, let alone call it a “handsome boy?”
According to lead writer Grzegorz Like, Cronos‘ devs used two mechanics to show players a more relatable, human side of The Traveler: music and cats. Like says he came up with the game’s cat-collecting mechanic as he was looking for a simple way to show that The Traveler has a spark of humanity inside her — a spark that players can choose to fan into a flame, or snuff out entirely.
“She becomes more and more human by petting the cats,” said Like, who has two cats of his own.
Each time I came across a cat in Cronos, I took a moment to pet it, and every time I did, The Traveler had something new to say. Sometimes she complimented the cat, sometimes she wondered aloud what it was doing there, and at one point she even remarked that “We will soon need a bigger cat room,” referencing the Terminal room where each cat you’ve pet can be found (and pet some more). The game even catalogues the cats you have pet in a codex, and there’s an achievement for petting all of them.
“There’s no, like, big theory behind that,” Like said of the cats’ presence. “It works because she becomes nicer and more warm by doing this thing.”
Cronos‘ cats may be a simple mechanic, but their presence truly does wonders for the connection between the player and The Traveler, especially during the first half of the game, when she shows very little emotion and is quite difficult to relate to.
Admittedly, the cats aren’t the only ones doing the heavy lifting here — voice actress Kelly Burke (who also voiced the protagonist in one of Bloober’s previous horror titles, The Medium) does a phenomenal job of bringing this strange, faceless character to life. But without these feline familiars to interact with, players wouldn’t get to hear Burke’s voice nearly as often, so the cats really serve two purposes: tethering The Traveler to humanity, and connecting the player to The Traveler.
“Deep down inside every human being is the urge to pet a cat,” Like said. “And it’s stronger than everything.”
