With Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team have found their happy medium; will Cronos codify their new dawn?
With their newest title, Cronos looks to turn the clock back and forth to move the studio forward.
Though the Resident Evil series pioneered survival-horror as a commercial genre, its spiritual kin in Silent Hill imbued the genre with an accute psychological core - rendering beasts from trauma rather than covert biological experiments. The series’ inaugural instalment introduced elements that would define later entries and the industry writ large: from a perpetual shroud of constricting fog cannily guising technical limitations in enhancing the ambient terror to a sparse, grumbling soundscape. Furthermore, the minimalistic precision of the mis en scene signified a grander literary ambition dormant within the medium; the relationship between player autonomy and an implacable evil reconsidered the bare texture of game design. Its successor, however, expanded upon these notions to produce a profoundly unsettling exercise in ontology, corrupting Northeastern quaintness to a daringly perverted form. That a major publisher in Konami permitted a title as intrinsically distressing as Silent Hill 2 onto the market represented a novel triumph in considering video games as art, rather than kinetic product designed to serve as pure escapism. Thus, through Silent Hill, the industry had asserted itself as textually mature - given its popular standing as a curated service, not a contained work.
In Silent Hill 2, you can shoot your problems away - albeit only after considering the ultimate weight of your guilt.
Nevertheless, we are in an era wherein video games are regarded with immutable esteem: from corporate estimation to creative scope. Thus, an electic suite of titles in Disco Elysium, Stardew Valley, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Hades - each produced on a comparably independent scale - represent the progress made outside of the traditional studio structure; Hollywood filmmaking bears a similar model. In parallel, however, Elden Ring, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Death Stranding - each shepherded by major labels in Bandai Namco, Nintendo, and Sony respectively - treat the medium with due consideration and complexity, understanding the purpose of gameplay in relation to sanctioning emergent means of narrative. Each successive generation of development teams gain a greater literacy in the conditions of the form, codifying their interpretation of the ambidextrous union between technical and philosophical measures of design. Therefore, in learning Bloober Team - an enterprise derided for their often tactless means of portraying mental illness - were enlistened to revise Silent Hill 2 for the current generation, skepticism from both players and gaming historians of a greater ilk than myself was indeed warranted.
Consequently, it came as a genuine surprise when Bloober’s long-gestating remake received a thoroughly warm reception from both critics and consumers; it earned a hearty 87 on OpenCritic, with 94% of reviewers actively recommending the game. Seldom does a title recover from a universal lambasting, much less through asserting itself as a potential Game of the Year candidate. Bloober’s team recontextualised the fixed camera of the original title to sanction engaged, third-person motion - yet the terror remained tantamount. In an intertextual regard, changing the raw framing of the game is similar to making a frame-for-frame recreation of Casablanca through CinemaScope: how does the cinematography change to convey Rick’s isolation and Ingrid Bergman’s painterly profile?
The revised camera angle proposes greater control - or does it?
This method of immersion is in conversation with Resident Evil’s own remake: claustrophobia is made manifest through tight spaces, with your enemies standing at an equal or greater height to yourself. Moreover, the robust mechanics of a survival shooter with a melee component provides a frantic weight to each encounter; your weapon will often strike slightly slower than a monster’s mashing. In an atmospheric respect, one’s laboured crawl into each encounter arouses a particular dread: you do not have the safety of a framed remove from James’ shoes. This explicit manner of horror revitalises the classical roots of the series, as fixed camera horror has become an antiquated practice - mimicking a film camera’s evolution from robust film to instantaneous digital.
Thus, against news of Silent Hill 2 producing a prodigious one million sales in four days, Bloober Team announced Cronos: The New Dawn: a similarly chilling third-person survival-horror, reciting notes familiar to the Dead Space triptych and the heightened brutalist milieu of The Medium - ironically, a fixed camera horror developed by Bloober themselves. The trailer portrayed a haunting didactic, showcasing a chess encounter shaded by warm tones and … well, the chillingly blue aftermath. Evidently, Bloober have found their stride, rehabilitating their immediate image through one faithful remake. Therefore, Cronos - theoretically burdened by less expectation than its predecessor - stands as a test of the ultimate gust of their second wind
With one false move, Bloober’s hot hand could freeze over.
Cronos’ director/designer, Wojciech Piejko, revealed the game was developed partially in tandem with Silent Hill 2 - a blank cheque, as it were, written in advance. Piejko, furthermore, acknowledged the hostile reception his studio received upon the announcement of their remake, praising the character of his contemporaries in delivering a title they knew bore great fielty for the original’s revelatory design. Humorously, director/producer Jacek Zieba admitted that the attitude within the studio originally shifted with the release of 2016’s Layers of Fear: though the team “made some shitty games before”, they knew their productions would gain complexity with each endeavour. Consequently, though the external narrative would paint this as the beginning of Bloober’s redemption tale, it may represent mere vindication for the team within.