Cronos: The New Dawn Devs Explain Why You Can’t Just Kill Enemies Haphazardly

by James Lara June 23, 2025 10:02 pm in News

[summaraize]

Bloober Team, the development studio behind the Silent Hill 2 remake for Konami, is concocting their own survival horror game based on a new IP titled Cronos: The New Dawn. Although it draws inspiration from many familiar titles in the genre, the studio is aiming to keep things fresh with an interesting new mergering mechanic, that sees enemies absorbing one another to become stronger in other to keep the stakes rather high.

To tell us more about this, the studio released a new deep dive video that not only gives us a deeper look into the merging mechanic, but also the core combat of Cronos: The New Dawn.

What’s Dead May Never Die

For those who prefer to read instead of watch, here’s a summary of everything talked about in the video (via Shinobi)

  • In addition to careful resource management, enemies can merge with each other during battle, potentially radically altering each encounter and ‘exponentially increasing its difficult in real-time’
  • Orphans (the game’s enemies) become more resilient after merging and have new attack patterns
  • Adds complexity to combat because by killing Orphans, you’re effectively ‘providing fuel’ to other nearby enemies
  • Most enemies are capable of merging, goal is stop them at all costs
  • Spatial awareness is critical, spacing out kills, lure enemies away from fallen bodies, use environments to your advantage, interrupt merging attempts mid-fight
  • Javelin: Rapid-fire capacity, perfect for crowd control
  • Hammer: Deals heavy damage at close range, ideal for finishing off tough enemies before they can merge
  • “Doppelganger” is an enemy with a variety of types like runners that rush towards you, others have ranged attacks, and ‘bruisers’ are heavy and durable and can soak up damage
  • Others are more sneaky or act as traps for the player
  • There are also special enemies that only appear in certain locations
  • Weapons, tools, and your suit are upgradeable, such as firepower, stability, charge speed, reload, etc
  • One tool is a weapon scanner you can acquire that tells you how much health enemies have left
  • There are bosses in the game, studio will share more on those at a later date

So far, Cronos is looking rather impressive, and we cannot wait to see what the final game looks like. Luckily, the release is just a few short months away, as Cronos: The New Dawn is set to release in Fall 2025.

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James Lara

A gamer at heart, James has been working for MP1st for the last decade to do exactly what he loves, writing about video games and having fun doing it. Growing up in the 90's gaming has been in his DNA since the days of NES. One day he hopes to develop his own game.