Bloober Team's Silent Hill 2 was a pleasant surprise. While the studio had been responsible for several fairly well-received horror games since its pivot to the genre with 2016's Layers of Fear, none of them boasted the sophistication of Team Silent's GOAT. There was a gulf between Bloober Team's spooky walking sims and the 2001 twisted survival horror game, and expectations were not high.
I found Konami's decision to choose the studio to be baffling at the time. I quite liked Observer, its gloomy cyberpunk outing, but I found the Layers of Fear series to be both derivative and, when it came to the scares, pretty cheap. Silent Hill 2, though, seems to have shown it was up to the challenge. While we called it a "fun but flawed take" on the original in our Silent Hill 2 review, it's gone on to be the studio's greatest success, and currently enjoys an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam.
"They recreated a legendary game," Bloober Team director and designer Wojciech Piejko told GameSpot. "They made the impossible possible, and it was a bumpy road because of all the hate on the internet. The pressure was big on them, and they delivered, and for the company, it's an amazing moment."
"It was tough for those couple of years before [Silent Hill 2's] release," director and producer Jacek Zieba added. But the team didn't let it get under their skin. "They made it. We made it. And now, it's very good spirits inside [the studio]. We want to show what we can do on our own, how we can evolve our ideas."
That evolution is Cronos: The New Dawn, the studio's first original survival horror game. The project started to spin up after the launch of The Medium in 2021, so it's been in the works concurrently with Silent Hill 2, with a different team.
"Players will take on the role of Traveler, an agent of the enigmatic Collective with a mission to extract selected people who didn't survive the apocalypse from the past," Bloober Team said when the game was announced last week. "To complete the Collective's mission, players will need to survive a deadly wasteland created by a cataclysmic event known as the Change, filled with monstrous abominations that will challenge players' combat abilities."
It's set both in 1980s Poland and a pandemic-ravaged future, and as a fan of Bloober Team's previous sci-fi outing—also set in its homeland of Poland—my interest is piqued.
Despite being designed by a different team, the work done on Silent Hill 2 has had an impact. "It helped in the case of technology," Zieba said, "to jump from first-person to the third-person camera [with] ranged combat and other stuff. So the basis [for Cronos] when we started in pre-production was there [thanks to] the Silent Hill team." And it's another survival horror game, of course. But the similarities seem to end there.
The studio considers this stage of its evolution to be "Bloober Team 3.0", its second phase as a horror developer. "We want to be a horror company," Zieba said. "We want to find our niche, and we think we found our niche, so now we just—let's evolve with it."
The specifics of how it plans to evolve "is more complex," he added, "but it also happens organically in a way, like with [2016's] Layers of Fear, people in the studio were like, 'OK, we made some shitty games before, but we [can] evolve.'"
In a separate interview with IGN, Piejko also kept the door open for more Silent Hill games from the studio. "There are opportunities that you have to seize," he said. "Like Silent Hill 2, you can remake the legend. So yeah, I do believe that everything's possible."
Unsurprising, given how well Silent Hill 2 is doing. But the fate of the series is ultimately up to Konami.
