I was walking to my grandmother's apartment from the Black Sea. Blinking stray cats watched me avoid gaps in the city's cobblestone sidewalks like they knew me, and I, separated from my life in New York at that moment, was calm for once. Memories like these float to the surface as I play Cronos: The New Dawn, Polish studio Bloober's first original title since releasing the Silent Hill 2 remake in 2024. Not even its occasionally frustrating combat experience can break how nostalgic this survival horror game makes me feel.
The more I play, the greater sense I have that I'm becoming entwined with its retrofuturist version of the Soviet '80s, where I open wounds in spacetime to bound across different versions of Kraków's real Nowa Huta district. I'm the stoic Traveler, who's been tasked by her shadowy employer to discover why its inhabitants started morphing into a mindless mass of pink skin, vomit, and many limbs. Things get gross.
