The New Dawn Needs More Than Silent Hill 2’s Goodwill to Succeed

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home November 30, 2024 5 Views 6 Min Read
The New Dawn Needs More Than Silent Hill 2’s Goodwill to Succeed

It’s no secret that Bloober games have often been maligned, whether for a perceived lack of actual gameplay or mishandling of horror tropes and representations of mental illness. Bloober itself has explicitly acknowledged its less-than-stellar track record thus far, and it’s now probably fair to say that the Silent Hill 2 remake is one of Bloober’s best works to date.




Indeed, the Silent Hill 2 remake is an interesting turning point for Bloober, suggesting that it should have been developing third-person survival horror games all along. That may have been a revelation the studio came to as well and it wasted no time in announcing Cronos: The New Dawn, an over-the-shoulder horror game that is presumably inspired by its own work on Silent Hill 2. Still, given that Cronos: The New Dawn is an original IP, Bloober will have to demonstrate that it has the chops to deliver a phenomenal survival-horror narrative.

cronos trailer

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Silent Hill 2’s Remake is a Godsend for Bloober in This Trying Time


Silent Hill 2’s remake had a lot riding on it to be halfway decent and it’s fair to say it exceeded all expectations. Even with its early reception to a gameplay trailer aside, Silent Hill 2 being remade was tumultuous as it’s easily one of the most seminal and revered pieces of psychological/survival horror media. Silent Hill 2 deals with rich, dark subject matter in incredibly nuanced ways, and while Bloober didn’t necessarily need to rewrite the narrative it was going to have to recontextualize it through a modern perspective of contemporary cinematics and performances.

The larger concern, however, was always how Bloober was going to approach over-the-shoulder gameplay, much less combat. The original Silent Hill 2’s combat has been both defended and criticized with vigor from both sides of the Silent Hill community, with one side defending it for reinforcing how tense the atmosphere should be and how it doesn’t represent action tropes that a Resident Evil would have, and one side criticizing it for being too elementary with James Sunderland and his foes trading unsatisfying blows.

The
Silent Hill 2
remake does lean heavily on action after all, but because combat is kept basic in its mechanics it has been received well—no flashy combos like in
Silent Hill: Homecoming
, and no superfluous inventory of miscellaneous items and appliances like in
Silent Hill: Origins
.


That said, Bloober surprised players with a faithful adaptation that explored themes and characters a little differently and almost every change, big or small, seems to be met with positivity. Silent Hill 2’s remake may not have made the nominations list for Game of the Year, and yet it’s tough to dispute how influential it will likely be for horror games going forward.

Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 Remake Puts Even More Pressure on Cronos: The New Dawn to Do Well

Bloober could’ve decided to hop back to its bread and butter with another bare-bones first-person horror game, but it has earned itself a ton of goodwill that will at least carry over into Cronos: The New Dawn with many more eyes on it than there might have been if the Silent Hill 2 remake received a sour reception. Cronos: The New Dawn’s science-fiction atmosphere looks unlike anything Bloober has put out before, to be fair, and its cinematic trailer is cryptic enough to ask enough questions without answering anything.


Gameplay was teased with a tiny snippet and official screenshots revealing Cronos: The New Dawn will be a third-person shooter, and it can only be presumed that this was decided on as a result of everything Bloober has learned working on Silent Hill 2’s remake. That’s not to say that Cronos: The New Dawn is guaranteed to play similarly to Silent Hill 2’s remake, but with both games being developed so closely together it would be alarming if a lot of features or gimmicks weren’t adopted from one to the other.

Regardless, Cronos: The New Dawn’s biggest challenge will be delivering an original narrative as it didn’t need to do so with Silent Hill 2, and the hope is that it can stick that landing and contribute something refreshing and meaningful to the horror genre. Bloober has shown enormous potential now with what it can achieve with a third-person survival horror game, but how it fares with its own IP will be another question entirely.

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