After a few hours with Bloober Team's Silent Hill 2 remake, it became clear to me that the oft-derided developer had made something special, and the conversation about the studio was about to change. After a few hours with Bloober Team's next game, the sci-fi horror Cronos: The New Dawn, questions about the studio's capabilities are virtually an afterthought for me. I'm no longer wondering if the team can set and achieve lofty goals. Cronos has impressed in the two hours I've played it so far, and though I still have questions and will reserve my final judgment for the full game later this year, it's clear the team has found its secret weapon in how it has designed Cronos' combat gameplay.When I previously saw Cronos during a hands-off showing in June, I likened its "merge system" of combat encounters to Dead Space, only played almost in reverse. Rather than strategically "cut off their limbs," like the famous bloody wall scrawl once instructed Isaac Clarke to do, Cronos delivers its own desperate plea: "Don't let them merge!" Enemies can absorb their defeated comrades, creating towering monstrosities that may well combine multiple classes into something more threatening.For example, if one of the stalking husks of biomass that has blade-like appendages merges with one of the others that spews toxic bile at you, well, now you've got yourself a third, worse thing, offering the most horrific of both worlds. Sometimes the stakes are heightened from the get-go, with no shortage of motionless husks lying around any momentary battlefield you might find yourself in, and it may cross your mind to first burn away those buffs with a flamethrower--and maybe with a nearby fuel recharger, you can even accomplish this at times.By merging, enemies combine their strengths and become much more fearsome.But the real tension of any encounter comes when you're trying to manage not just how you'll kill enemies, but where. With an area-of-effect blast of your flamethrower that shoots out toward the ground in a small circle, you can permanently burn the bodies and prevent them from merging into a still-active enemy. This left me constantly worrying about where defeated enemies would fall, forcing me to sometimes purposely evade, but not yet kill, the game's monsters, or "orphans."Flamethrower fuel was extremely limited in my demo, so the best practice was to get a few of them to die almost on top of each other, then light them ablaze like a big sci-fi viking funeral. But that's easier said than done, so inevitably I'd be faced with the choice to kill an enemy outright, whether its place of death was advantageous to me or not...which would then feed this felled monster back into my path as I'd watch it merge with other monsters still pursuing me.It's a really clever wrinkle that once more gives Bloober Team an exceptionally tense combat system to lean into. In my Silent Hill 2 remake review, I wrote abou how I'd often make it out of a fight for my life and "observed my breathing return to normal, and felt my shoulders release their tension." Similar feelings defined my Cronos hands-on preview. Initially, I was quite proud of my smart combat decisions that did just what I was instructed to do: I wasn't letting them merge. However, as encounters became more complicated, some merging felt like an unfortunate inevitability. I couldn't be everywhere at once, and I didn't have enough fuel to burn away all the bodies, so I saw more than a few merged, ambulating nightmares, which always provided the healthy kind of stress and anxiety that horror games should offer.With a gun that slowly charges to fire off its most powerful shots, ammo scarcity went beyond just the fuel, too. I could quickly fire off multiple, weaker rounds, using up more ammo, or I could try to nail more powerful single shots, but they were sometimes very difficult to land on target, and the enemies would charge toward me in the meantime, of course. Combined with the merging enemies, this created combat encounters that demanded I constantly consider my moment-to-moment choices. Lining up shots on one particular boss' weak points was difficult enough, and supplies were low enough, that it took me about four or five tries to finally kill the thing. Since my demo started from the game's opening, I understood this to be the first boss of the game. Future bosses are not likely going to be more forgiving, I assume.The slimy world of Cronos sets the stage for a time-travel horror story I'm eager to see for myself.With gunplay and exploration taking plenty of cues from the genre's long history, I now find myself a few months out from Cronos' launch without much to worry about when it comes to gameplay. Upgrading my suit and weapons provided hard-fought and welcome buffs, I was constantly rewarded for going off the main path--like when I rescued a cat tied to a side quest that tasks you with saving many of them over the course of the story--and I especially loved the downbeat vibes of safe rooms, made whole with their own theme song like one of Capcom's finest.There's still so much more to see before I know how the whole experience comes together. Bloober Team says the game will take about 16 hours to beat on a typical playthrough--more if you plan to see everything it offers. Cronos comes from a team of people within Bloober Team that is different from those responsible for Silent Hill 2. Naturally, the Silent Hill 2 remake enjoyed the blueprint of Team Silent's effort, so Cronos is the studio's chance to show it can do it all on its own. For now, at least, it seems the studio has found a way to make combat compelling and put its own original spin on the horror genre.