I personally maintain that Resident Evil, going all the way back to 1996, has always been more of an action game than a horror game. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that RE4 marked a shift not just in Capcom’s own flagship series, but the greater gaming world. The Leon-led 2005 shooter served as the high watermark for over-the-shoulder, third-person ‘action horror,’ and the following five years were marked by successive variations on the theme: Gears of War, Dead Space, The Last of Us, The Evil Within. But then the wind started to change back. Since around 2017, classic survival horror has started to once again take root.
It began cautiously, with safe bets like a remake of Resident Evil 2. But the survival horror comeback has gradually gathered momentum thanks to low-budget independent hits like Signalis and Crow Country, and the flame-fanning remakes of Dead Space, Alone in the Dark, and RE4 itself. Created by Bloober, the fear-centric developer behind Observer, Layers of Fear, and last year’s reimagining of Silent Hill 2, Cronos The New Dawn marks the end of survival horror’s redemption years – after a trepidatious half decade, the genre is fully, confidently back.
Its influences are apparent – Dead Space’s chunky, tool-like guns; Control’s non-Euclidean level design; RE4’s off-the-shoulder shooting (of course) – but Cronos The New Dawn nevertheless feels like a game the likes of which we haven’t seen for a while: a high-production-value, mechanically traditional horror that isn’t either a remake, a remaster, or a hardly disguised homage. A bricolage of the genre’s history, Cronos The New Dawn is, nevertheless, a new survival horror game – new idea, new world, new premise, new story. For the past few years, developers have been trying to prove the viability of the old-school style of horror. Cronos suggests the test phase is over.
A mysterious, maybe cosmic cataclysm has destroyed the planet. As the mononymic Traveller, you are sent back in time, to Krakow in 1980, to locate people vital to the present-day reconstruction effort and rescue them before they’re killed in the past. From the outside, you look like a 19th-century deep-sea diver – the Traveller’s suit is bulky and cumbersome, in contrast to Cronos’ sci-fi overtones. Your enemies are similarly abstract. Whatever force is behind the apocalypse, it takes the raw flesh of dead people and repurposes it into gnarled, body-horror monstrosities.
If one of these creatures finds the corpse of another, it will extend its tentacles and pull the meat lump into itself, growing bigger, stronger, and deadlier in the process. Thus, the key to Cronos’ combat is to kill enemies separately and try to prevent them from bunching together. Bullets are rare. You can move while aiming, but only slowly. In between battles, you return to a save room where you can catch your breath, rotate your inventory, and upgrade your equipment. The pace is slow and deliberate. Speaking to PCGamesN, co-director Wojciech Piejko outlines Bloober’s approach to horror, and how it informs Cronos.
“The atmosphere needs to be heavy, kind of slow. Our game is like a slow burn. You shouldn’t over-rely on jump scares, either. If you constantly jump on the player, that isn’t scary. If you do want to do a jump scare, you should do it properly. There needs to be a build-up and then drop the tension – or maybe build up and do nothing. It’s important not to repeat yourself. And it’s not good if the player feels constantly on the edge. You just get tired.
“People love survival horror,” Piejko continues, “but at some point, everything went too deep into action. People like Resident Evil 6, but in terms of horror, they might feel like it’s not really there. It was all action games, but then Dark Souls came – in my opinion, Dark Souls is really a survival horror game. And then people were like ‘oh, the tougher, challenging games are cool.’ And then the Resident Evil 2 remake, I think that changed everything. It was so good, everyone was like ‘okay, maybe it’s time to bring survival horror back.’”
But for modern developers, survival horror presents a problem. The early pioneers – 1993’s Alone in the Dark, the first (and best) Resident Evil, Parasite Eve – all had the benefit of the fixed camera. The player’s path forward was inherently cloaked in uncertainty. Enemies, or anything else waiting to jump out, could easily be kept off-screen until the time was right. Without a complete visual vantage, the player naturally felt less confident and more vulnerable.
Today, that’s all changed. Now, as standard, the horror-game camera isn’t fixed high in the ceiling or peeking around a corner – it’s on the character’s back, and the player is free to move it around. On Cronos, this shift in genre standards means that Bloober has to be imaginative.
“You hear scratching from behind a wall,” Piejko says, comparing the execution of an effective scare to playing a magic trick. “That’s the ‘pledge’ moment. You slowly open the door, and sitting there on the floor of this room, it’s just a cat. That’s the ‘turn.’ And then something jumps you from behind. That’s the ‘prestige.’ It doesn’t always work. Sometimes the player gets to the corridor and it’s just about to happen, and then they rotate the camera away, and it all happens behind them. But overall, you can still do it. You can grab attention.”
Other, newer terms have entered the survival horror lexicon. Resident Evil 3 did it; so did the comparatively obscure, Atlus-published Hellnight, from 1999. But the invincible, irrepressible ‘stalker’ enemy, who follows you throughout the game and can never be killed, only really entered vogue after Amnesia, Outlast, and Alien Isolation. Piejko says these can be effective if they’re “done right,” and not overused. The bigger question is weapons, and when – or if – you should kill the player.
“I think it’s scarier if you’re totally vulnerable and you cannot fight back,” Cronos’ co-director says. “But again, at some point, it becomes repetitive when you just have to run away again, and then run away again. In my opinion, it’s always about the experience of being scared. In horror, less is more. When we [Bloober] design our weapons, even though it’s a sci-fi world, we couldn’t make them into laser guns. Sci-fi is an open invitation – ‘yeah, let’s make a gun that transforms into a sword!’ – but no, don’t do it. If everything were futuristic and high-tech, it would be a different game.
“I’m always saying to my designers that we don’t need to kill the player, because the player should be afraid that they will be killed. It’s funny. From a psychological perspective, after you get killed for the first time, you are less scared.”
Survival horror died once. With the wilderness years behind it, and the likes of Cronos The New Dawn on the way in 2025, there’s no reason for the genre to be timid anymore.
