Cronos: The New Dawn’s Developer Explains How Corpse-Merging Foes Determines Game’s Combat

Cronos: The New Dawn’s combat system was explained thoroughly in a new dev diary showcase, posted on June 23, 2025.

Game director Jacek Zięba and lead combat designer Shamil Yanbukhtin have outlined how enemies, called Orphans, merge with corpses to evolve mid-battle and gain new abilities and why they display different behavior.

In the upcoming Q3/Q4 2025 release of Cronos: The New Dawn, Orphans have the ability to absorb dead bodies and transform into a stronger and more resilient enemy with altered attack behavior.

According to the game’s publisher and developer, Bloober Team, such a mechanic adds one more layer of complexity to combat, as killing a foe turns it into fuel for other enemies. The developer highlighted that most enemies in Cronos: The New Dawn can merge with each other, which makes the simple elimination of the Orphans a secondary problem after preventing them from evolving into more hardcore monsters.

As the developer explains, the game’s protagonist will often be locked in arenas filled with multiple enemies, so players should work out tactics to prevent merging attempts mid-fight.

Talking about enemy behavior, Bloober Team used the Doppelganger as an example, highlighting that some enemies of the same type can look and act differently, requiring players to adapt to the patterns of each subtype in order to shred them into meat chunks. Some Doppelgangers rush toward the protagonist like rhinos, some deal damage with ranged attacks, and all of them are capable of merging with each other, surprising players with a total change in behavior and attack patterns.

Bloober Team also revealed that Cronos: The New Dawn will feature special enemies that will only appear in select locations, but more details about them are yet to be revealed.

Talking about the combat system, the game’s developer concluded that the merging ability of enemies will push players to use every unit of their gear during fights — from rapid-fire weapons for crowd control to close-range weapons that deal high damage, preventing foes from merging.

Slated for release on PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X|S, this survival horror title — played from a third-person perspective — will follow the story of The Traveler, an agent for an organization known as the Collective, as he must survive a futuristic wasteland and travel back in time to Poland in the 1980s to extract selected people who did not survive the Change, a cataclysmic event that turned humans into monsters known as Orphans.