One of the most wonderful things about videogames is their power to transport us to places we’d never have visited otherwise – and increasingly that’s not just imagined fantasy worlds but ones rooted in real-world locations. Bloober Team recently straddled the two, taking us to a supernatural version of small-town America in its excellent Silent Hill 2 remake. But for its follow-up, Cronos: The New Dawn, the developer is returning to its native Poland.
For Edge 410’s cover story, we visit Bloober’s studio in Krakow for a world-first hands-on with the game – and to scope out the real-life locations on which it’s based. Touring the streets and bunkers of Nowa Huta, a Communist ‘ideal city’ that was never completed, we learn why Bloober chose it as the basis of its sci-fi horror game. It’s a fascinating place, recreated in Cronos with the same painstaking detail as Silent Hill – even before Bloober drops an apocalypse on it, tearing the buildings asunder and transforming its residents into monstrous creatures.
