Latest news with #SilentHill2
Newsweek
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
Bloober Team Says Its Newest Game Isn't Meant to be About the Pandemic
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek's network of contributors Bloober Team, the developer behind the very well received Silent Hill 2 remake, is about to launch a new original game, but despite first appearances, it's not actually about or directly inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. Cronos: The New Dawn features a devastating pandemic that wiped out a big chunk of humanity and brought the world to its knees, as part of a cataclysmic event called The Change. A twisted, tar-like creature among a mountain of burnt corpses in Cronos: The New Dawn. A twisted, tar-like creature among a mountain of burnt corpses in Cronos: The New Dawn. Bloober Team According to a new interview with DBLTAP, though, the game's co-director Jacek Zieba has revealed that the events of the game weren't inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic – at least not consciously – and that the similarities were mostly coincidental. "It's something we realized after, like 'oh f***, we are making a game about a pandemic.' We didn't intend it, that wasn't the idea," Zieba told DBLTAP. "I think, subconsciously, we may have gone through some kind of therapy by including that. We know it lands as it lands, but [it's not a game about COVID]. There will be some themes – it's horror, we are touching on that – but it's not a game about that. It's a game about change — even symbolic change." The COVID-19 pandemic hit the games industry particularly hard, with a rapid shift to remote working necessitating major changes across the industry that many developers weren't particularly equipped for. Dozens of games, from tiny indies to massive triple-A productions, were delayed or changed significantly as a result, the effects of which are still being seen to this day, five years after the start of the pandemic. That said, it wasn't all doom and gloom for the industry, as Zieba points out. Moving to remote development meant broadening the talent pool when the time came to expand teams for new projects, and Bloober Team – whose projects were previously largely staffed by Polish developers – found a lot of fresh faces who otherwise wouldn't have been able to join the team. "The pandemic also helped us," Zieba says. "Because the games industry in Poland was growing, but without the people that are working remotely right now, I think we wouldn't be in the place we are right now. We hired people not just from Poland, but from Europe and so on. This really leveled us up as developers." Bloober previously revealed in interviews that Cronos: The New Dawn won't have an easy mode, citing the game's horror-focused roots as the primary reason, with Zieba at the time saying "it's survival horror, to make it work it needs to be a bit challenging." "The first experience is the first experience," Zeiba said at the time. "So if you do easy mode, okay, somebody will play it and maybe have less scares or something, but to play as intended, this is why we decided to go with our difficulty at the beginning." Cronos: The New Dawn is set to be released on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam in 2025.
Daily Mirror
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Cronos: The New Dawn's mix of time travel and merging enemies could make for a new breed of horror
Following its stellar work with last year's Silent Hill 2 remake, Bloober Team returns to over-the-shoulder horror with a promising time travel story. After playing a solid chunk of Bloober Team's upcoming survival horror, Cronos: The New Dawn, it's clear that there's plenty of potential due to the way enemies are prone to overwhelm you. Nobody would blame developer Bloober Team for playing it safe with its first project following last year's pretty great remake of Silent Hill 2. And yet, after having played an early preview build of Cronos: The New Dawn for roughly two hours, I sense a willingness here to push forward the genre envelope – ever so slightly. The Polish studio's latest builds upon classic survival horror traditions such as inventory crafting and limited resources not just by relying on past tropes, but by creating a universe and ruleset all its own. The upcoming game isn't just another attempt to recapture the magic of Dead Space or Resident Evil 4; it's Silent Hill meets Twelve Monkeys. Which is to say an atmospheric time travel story neatly blended with a new style of enemy, made scarier due to how tough it can be to put down if left unchecked. At the centre of it all is The Traveler, a mysterious, faceless figure clad in armour who makes a striking first impression. She emerges from her travel sphere with two simple goals: pick up the mission data left by the last fallen Traveler and find your target in need of teleportation, yes, back to the future. Your job is to dive back in specific moments of the past and save people who didn't survive the end of the world the first time. I'm a sucker for a good time travel story as it is, but when you serve me up a premise as specific yet thought-provoking as this? It helps makes every action I take in the demo all the more weighty. Taking place right at the start of the game, my demo set me on a path that required exploring a series of dilapidated, brutalist buildings that offer little respite from the stormy sky and wrecked landscapes that surround. Cronos: The New Dawn very much throws you into the deep end, as it were, instantly setting the stakes impossibly high with The Traveler equipped with little more than a simple pistol and a pretty beefy stomp – a la Isaac Clarke. Both manners of dispatch do well to help me get closer to my objective. Not helping, however, is the fact that – at least in this timeline – the world has been plagued by a series of mutated creatures disturbingly referred to in-universe as 'Orphans'. Bloober Team is keeping quiet as to the nature of how these gloopy, grotesque-looking Orphans came to be and in what ways they tie into the world-ending event at the heart of Cronos. But if EA's addition to the survival horror oeuvre served as one simple instruction, 'cut off their limbs', Bloober Team's original over-the-shoulder take asks something very different from you: 'don't let them merge'. It's a piece of advice left behind for the Traveler to find fairly early on into this reality-tearing journey. But not only can it cause problems from a hypothetical standpoint. In practice, letting any Orphan merge with another can cause series problems when your back is against the wall. I'm on fire Putting an Orphan down and then moving on to your next target isn't enough, you see. Instead, The Traveler comes equipped with a flame burst technique that means burning the bodies of her enemies so that larger, more terrifying variants of the foe just taken down don't suddenly rise off the floor. The problem is, fuel tanks that power the flame burst aren't always something to be relied upon, forcing you to try and lure any existing sludgy Orphans away from those lying on the floor – yet even then this might not be enough to stop them seeking any available former friends to consume. There were various points in my demo where Cronos: The New Dawn locked me down into specific locations, unable to progress beyond a locked door until every enemy was dealt with. So far, so standard, as far as applying pressure in a game is concerned. However, here it's easily to quickly find yourself overwhelmed and make the situation worse for yourself, should you not act swiftly or take the initiative to seek enemies out (rather than the other way around). The threat of enemies merging and becoming significantly tougher brings a great deal of strategy to the modern survival horror format. The kind of which I've not seen since Mr. X was introduced in the Resident Evil 2 remake as Leon and Claire's determined pursuer. Outside of these high tension moments, Cronos admittedly elects to play it a bit safer. While exploring the abandoned wasteland of what used to be Krakow's Nowa Huta steelworks, there's the usual rigamarole of moving through areas while searching for resources, a light but of code-centric puzzle solving, and making the most of newly unlocked suit and weapon upgrades after reaching any one of the conveniently situated safe zones. All this is coated in a decent amount of lore-building texture, however, which for a short while ground you enough to temporarily forget where you might have seen such systems before. But then again, Bloober Team, did a good job with Silent Hill 2, so it'd be a shame to not lean into this knowledge somewhat. By the time my preview demo ends I've survived several bouts of tense 'me versus them' where my ammo reserves have been depleted, fuel tanks are scarce, and the enemies merge far more often than I'd like. All this, plus a newly acquired function that lets my gun manipulate the environment between various states of degradation, leave me hopeful that Bloober Team is attempting to strike the right balance between survival horror nightmare with neat puzzles, and atmospheric time travel story where all is not as it seems. Sadly, it's when jumping into a portal to find my first target that the screen fades to black, and I'm left wondering whether the capturing sequences that follow will be just as intriguing. After all, this element of 'rescuing' people from the past won't just be a one and done deal, according to Bloober Team, as The Traveler's suit will increasingly become more haunted with their essence. None of this was available to experience in my short, hour-and-a-half demo, so I'm curious to see how it plays out. For now, however, Cronos: The New Dawn is doing a pretty good job at taking familiar aspects from the modern survival horror genre and mixing in new elements of its own. It doesn't make or a gameplay experience that's entirely new per se, but one willing to take chances on features you think you know by twisting and tweaking the usual rules; particularly with regards to enemies. Rather appropriately for a game based around time travel, Cronos is remixing elements from the past to (hopefully) build an exciting future.
Metro
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
EA Sports FC 25 costs just £15 in huge PlayStation Store summer sale
Metro journalists select and curate the products that feature on our site. If you make a purchase via links on this page we will earn commission – learn more Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6, Silent Hill 2, and EA Sports FC 25 have all received significant discounts in the latest PlayStation Store sale. Summer might be the least active time of year for the gaming release calendar, but it's arguably one of the best times to pick up a bargain. Amazon Prime Day has been and gone (although some discounts are still up) but there's also events like the Steam Summer Sale. Beyond that, the PlayStation Store always has a summer event, which is usually better than Sony's other sales throughout the year. This year's sale is live from today until August 13, with more additions set to be added from July 29. It's a really good line-up too, with sizeable discounts across big franchises like Call Of Duty and Assassin's Creed. For football fans, the main draw will be EA Sports FC 25 at £14.69, which is a massive 79% off the original price. This discount comes in advance of the next game's unveiling this week, but it is also another indicator that last year's entry fell below sales expectations. More Trending Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 has similarly been reduced, as the series' next entry, Black Ops 7, is due to be unveiled at Gamescom next month. Activision's juggernaut shooter is 45% off, at £38.49, which is a pretty cheap price for a current Call Of Duty title. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. A bunch of games out this year have been reduced too, including The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered at £39.99 and Assassin's Creed Shadows which is 25% off. As for deals on the ultra cheap end of the spectrum, Borderlands 3 is a mere £5.99, if you want to gauge whether you'll click with its upcoming sequel. The Quarry, one of Supermassive's better narrative horror adventures, is also a steal at £8.44. You can check out all the deals through the PlayStation Store, but we've compiled some of the best bargains below. If you're in the market for a PlayStation 5 console, Sony has knocked £90 off those too. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: This is what Link looks like in The Legend Of Zelda live action movie MORE: Donkey Kong Bananza review – great ape odyssey on Switch 2 MORE: GTA 6 will earn a record breaking £5,000,000,000 in 60 days claims analyst
Mint
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
Polish Studio Behind ‘Silent Hill' Remake Plans Original Games
(Bloomberg) -- Few expected a small Polish studio like Bloober Team SA to do justice to Silent Hill 2 with their remake of the survival horror classic. Yet the game turned out to be one of last year's biggest hits, selling two million copies in just four months while winning award nominations and critical acclaim. The game has been a windfall for the 17-year-old outfit and its founder Piotr Babieno after starting out making low-effort games for quick cash. Shares of Bloober have surged more than 13% since Silent Hill 2's release, and last year earnings grew sevenfold to about $6 million. Fresh off that success, the studio is returning to the franchise with another Konami Group Corp. collaboration — a remake of the series' 1999 debut title, which is already in production You may be interested in Not content with just doing remakes, Babieno is now looking further afield. His 250-person studio is slated to release its first shooter-horror hybrid this year. It's also working with fellow Polish developers on five horror titles with a target 2027 release. They're all original ideas, which amount to bold bets in a games industry increasingly obsessed with sequels and live-service games like Fortnite. 'We would like to create Bloober Team as the most impactful horror house in the world,' Babieno told Bloomberg News during an interview in Beijing, where he was attending game exhibitions. 'Making your own IP will be challenging and expensive if you would like to deliver the same quality. But for game designers, it's like raising a kid, something coming from your heart.' In Cronos: The New Dawn, you play as a time-traveling agent fighting monstrosities in a sci-fi wasteland version of 1980s Poland. Bloober's spin on the action-horror genre is that players have to keep monsters from merging with one another even after slaying them. Babieno said the premise is a metaphor for our times. 'We are in information bubbles and those bubbles are sometimes connecting and sometimes not.' Bloober is now preparing for the roll-out of Cronos on console and PC before the end of the year. The game drew inspiration from thriller films and horror franchises like Resident Evil. But for Babieno, the remastering of Silent Hill 2 — which began production about 10 months ahead of Cronos — has paved the way for Bloober's developers to take on its first original mass-market horror game. Bloober has come a long way from its origins as a tiny outsourcing studio with no specific expertise. It got its name from a rushed business registration while developing a title called Double Bloob for the Nintendo DSi handheld. Babieno, who played the original Silent Hill 2 multiple times through different phases of his life, eventually decided to settle on psychological horrors, or walking simulators where players explore a haunted house or dark forest and solve puzzles. Bloober's productions in this sub-genre have received mixed reviews. 'We are trying to learn from our mistakes,' said the former reporter and marketing executive. 'It's not revolution. It's like evolution.' While reimagining Silent Hill 2 was a dream come true for Babieno, convincing Konami to partner on the project wasn't easy. Bloober lacked a proven track record producing the complicated combat gameplay action-horror games are known for. Babieno said his first pitch to the Japanese conglomerate came as early as 2015, followed by years of on-and-off discussions. When the tie-up was officially announced in 2022, it took many fans by surprise. Another gaming giant that saw Bloober's potential was Tencent Holdings Ltd. In 2021, Tencent acquired a 22% stake in the Polish studio, becoming its largest shareholder. The investment adds to a long list of bets the WeChat operator made in up-and-coming games developers in Europe, ranging from Baldur's Gate 3 maker Larian Studios and Alan Wake studio Remedy Entertainment Oyj. Tencent will help Bloober market Cronos ahead of its China launch, said Babieno, who last week traveled with a Tencent representative to Shenzhen and Beijing. 'They are a minority investor, but they are one of the most supportive companies which I ever met in my life,' he said. Back at home in Kraków, Babieno said most of his designers are either crafting the Silent Hill 1 remake or planning the studio's next original title, which he promised won't be a sequel. He's also assembled a team of less than 40 people to work with third-party studios on the development of new games that mix horror elements with other genres like strategy and role-playing. Such collaboration, Babieno said, would free Bloober's core team to focus on what they do best — story-driven, single-player horror games that sell copies. 'We would like to work with the best in their own niche.' — Mark Anderson and Zheping Huang More stories like this are available on
Bloomberg
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
Polish Studio Behind ‘Silent Hill' Remake Plans Original Games
Few expected a small Polish studio like Bloober Team SA to do justice to Silent Hill 2 with their remake of the survival horror classic. Yet the game turned out to be one of last year's biggest hits, selling two million copies in just four months while winning award nominations and critical acclaim. The game has been a windfall for the 17-year-old outfit and its founder Piotr Babieno after starting out making low-effort games for quick cash. Shares of Bloober have surged more than 13% since Silent Hill 2' s release, and last year earnings grew sevenfold to about $6 million. Fresh off that success, the studio is returning to the franchise with another Konami Group Corp. collaboration — a remake of the series' 1999 debut title, which is already in production
