Silent Hill 2 Remake Dev Had Initial Concerns With New Horror Game Because of Dead Space Remake and Callisto Protocol

Last week at Microsoft’s Partner Preview event, Bloober Team, the studio behind the recently released Silent Hill 2 remake for Konami, surprised everyone by unveiling a new horror game titled, Cronos: The New Dawn.

If you saw the game’s reveal trailer, you might have noticed similarities between that and EAs Dead Space franchise, and even Striking Distance Studios’ The Callisto Procotol (which is understandable given the original co-creator of the Dead Space franchise headed the development of The Callisto Protocol).

The studio knows about the similarities, and even acknowledged in an interview with IGN that Dead Space was one of the inspirations for Cronos. In that same interview, Cronos game director Jacek Zieba revealed that development of the new horror game started in 2021 even before The Medium was finished. Not only that, but Zieba even admitted that the dev team had concerns initially seeing both the Dead Space remake and The Callisto Protocol in development and be released, given Cronos’ similarities with both games.

We were concerned at some moment. Nobody knew about Dead Space remake when we started our production. And on Callisto, we were very curious on various levels as a developer, also as gamers, like how it’ll play If this is a spiritual successor of Dead Space. And it wasn’t good in the case of gameplay.

So we could cool off, like, ‘Okay, it’s not new groundbreaking, survival horror, we can still have a shot.’ And in case of Dead Space remake, it was just awesome to play it again and see how it’s done and see how this can help us in our production. So definitely two interesting moments, but mostly we just learned something from it, more than be discouraged on our journey.

We don’t think in categories like, ‘Okay, people don’t like Callisto or people don’t like Dead Space Remake, so now we have a problem.’ No, we are also doing something different than these two games. – Jacek Zieba, Game Director, Cronos: The New Dawn

Here’s to hoping that Bloober continues its momentum from Silent Hill 2 to Cronos: The New Dawn when it releases next year.

If you haven’t played the remake yet, go read our review to understand why it’s one of the year’s best games.

As for the two franchises mentioned above, there’s no word whether we’ll see a remake of Dead Space 2. While EA hasn’t released official sales numbers yet, the publisher debunked rumors that the horror game didn’t sell well, which is why a remake for the sequel wasn’t greenlit. While there’s still a chance of seeing a remake for Dead Space’s sequel, the same can’t be said for The Callisto Protocol. Not only did it not fare critically, but it also didn’t perform well commercially. Having said that, the game’s universe is still alive and well, as Striking Distance is using it as the theme for its new sci-few roguelike game, “Redacted,” which will be released this coming week.