NEW DAWN

A trip to silent Hill reinvigorated Bloober Team the Polish horror studio is ready for its homecoming

By Alex Spencer

Game Cronos: The New Dawn

Developer/publisher Bloober Team

Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series

Origin Poland

Release 2025

owa Huta was built to be a utopia. Founded in 1949 just outside Kraków, funded by the USSR, and designed by some of Poland’s top architects and urban planners, this ‘ideal city’ was intended to be precisely that – a three-dimensional demonstration of ideology, where all workers’ needs were met by the state and every line of architecture carried the party line.

“It was built by Communists, to show that Communism can be great,” says Jacek Zieba. The city was constructed alongside Lenin Steelworks, home to the biggest blast furnace in Europe – and, at its peak, over 40,000 workers, many housed in stark apartment blocks, built in the Moscow-approved Socialist Realist style. “Everything was there,” adds Wojciech Piejko. “You get a job, you get an apartment, there’s a school, there’s a hairdresser – you don’t need to leave. You don’t need to go to Kraków.”

Nowa Huta remains fully operational today, albeit as a district of the city it was originally built to rival. But on our visit, as we stand in the central square and look down the long, wide promenade that runs right through the centre of the city’s pentagonal layout, we can’t help noticing that the road doesn’t actually go anywhere.

In the end, its intended terminus, a monolithic town hall, was never built; nor was the obelisk that was supposed to be just where we’re standing now, on the central square that was renamed in 2004 – after Ronald Reagan, of all people. Just off the central square, a 20-foot-tall statue of Lenin was built in lieu of these monuments, but that was pulled down in 1989; today, our guide tells us, it can be found in a Wild West theme park in Sweden, having been bought by a millionaire at less than material cost. Off to one side of the promenade, in one of the storefronts originally meant for Nowa Huta’s workers, is a Caffè Nero. None of this, we presume, is quite what the Soviet Union had in mind.

IN THE CENTRAL SQUARE, LOOKING DOWN THE PROMENADE, WE CAN’T HELP NOTICING THAT THE ROAD DOESN’T ACTUALLY GO ANYWHERE

This concept art might well have been painted while the artist sat in Nowa Huta’s central square. We’ve walked beneath those arches; Caffè Nero is located just over on the left

While the fictional New Dawn might not be named after its steelworks, the foundry here is no less important than the real-world facility was to Nowa Huta – indeed, Bloober hints that the industrial site might represent ground zero for the Change

If you sense a touch of Metro 2033 , it’s worth noting that the book series includes one set in Nowa Huta, Paweł Majka’s The Promised District

But what if Nowa Huta hadn’t been the only such city to be built in Poland? That’s the question posed by the new game from Silent Hill 2 studio Bloober Team – or at least one of them. “What if they really made it, and proved that Communism works?” Zieba says. “What if we built the town hall that isn’t there [in Nowa Huta]? There was an idea to build it, but they never did. So let’s make that our landmark.” Welcome to New Dawn.

The day before our trip to Nowa Huta, and a few miles away, at Bloober’s Kraków office, we sit down for the world’s first hands-on with Cronos. Over the course of the game’s opening hour, we’re introduced first to our protagonist – the mysterious Traveller, her face always hidden behind a kind of retrofuturistic diving helmet – and then its world.

New Dawn (a riff on ‘New Foundry’, the English translation of Nowa Huta) is a place of claustrophobic tunnels and grey debris that, at first, doesn’t bear any obvious resemblance to its real-life equivalent. Until, that is, we guide the Traveller out of those tunnels and up a set of subway stairs to be greeted by a vista: a wide promenade flanked by apartment blocks, all working to guide our eye towards the screen’s centre – where, against the dark clouds, a brutalist colossus looms.