Bloober Team: "We're kind of experts of putting Poland into every one of our games"

Cronos: The New Dawn has arrived and is available to play as of today on PC and consoles. The game is developed by Polish Bloober Team and the studio is using its Polish heritage and expertise to bring to life a devastated Polish world in the game, all set in a rather terrifying suburb of the city of Krakow.

With this being said, we recently caught up with lead writer and narrative lead Grzegorz Like, where we asked about Bloober's decision to return to its roots and present Poland in this striking and frightening video game, and also where the New Dawn element of the title came from.

"Oh, yeah, you know, it's fun because at some point we realised that we're kind of experts now of putting Poland into every one of our games," Like explains. "Well, besides Silent Hill, of course. And, you know, we recreated one of our tenement buildings from Krakow City in The Observer. Then we used that same tenement building in The Medium, and also we recreated the hotel, where the whole game takes place. But now with Cronos we decided to go big, you know. And we recreated the whole district of Krakow that is called Nowa Huta. But we, you know, translated that into New Dawn.

"It's fun because it's very personal for me because I live in that place. I was born in it. And when I showed the trailer to my mom, she was like, 'why did you do that? That was such a beautiful city, you devastated it.' But, you know, it's cool. And we chose that city not because, well, because of our egos, but because Nowa Huta was very interesting with its backstory and with the, you know, history and the creation of it. After the Second World War, we've been under Soviet influence, you know. Very dark times for Poland, but we decided to put the game in that space to kind of choose that moment, because it was very testing for the nation. And we decided to have this test for our characters and their relationships and all that. Because, you know, as David Lynch once said, in the great darkness, the little sparks of beauty shine the most.

"So this is why we chose that. And it also blends very well, like, the old brutalistic architecture. It blends very well, surprisingly well with the cassette futurism. You can see the whole kind of technology of the Travellers and of the Collective. It blends very well with the communistic architecture, like Soviet social realism, as it's, you know, called professionally."

Catch the full interview below for more on the game that impressed us greatly when we reviewed it earlier this month.