It’s remarkable that in the space of just 11 months, Polish developer Bloober Team has gone from a studio I had reservations about to a team that I have a significant amount of faith in. If you thought last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake could be a fluke, fear not. Bloober’s new survival horror title, Cronos: The New Dawn, solidifies the studio as one to watch closely.
Seeing as my beloved Dead Space franchise has reportedly been iced in the wake of disappointing sales for its own 2023 remake, Cronos: The New Dawn has stepped in to deliver sci-fi chills that suitably fill the void in my heart left by EA potentially calling quits on Isaac Clarke. Cronos: The New Dawn doesn’t just feel inspired by Dead Space; it feels like Bloober Team picking up the baton and running with it in some style.
While the haunting world is spooky in all the right ways, the mysterious story around its central protagonist — a solemn, hulking figure known as the Traveler — isn’t quite as compelling as I’d hoped. But when Cronos: The New Dawn throws mutating foes at you, and panic sets in as your ammo clip runs dry, it’s hard to deny its potential as a survival horror cult classic.
Cronos is survival horror done right
Cronos: The New Dawn is certainly not here to reinvent the survival horror genre, but that’s totally fine with me. It follows the standard blueprint of a third-person action-horror title, where resource management is key with precious items like ammo and healing packs in short supply. Still, I do wish it weren’t so stingy with the inventory size upgrades.
After a novel opening cutscene, which sees you complete a Rorschach test, you’re thrown straight into an eerie wasteland in ruins after an event known as the Change. The brutalist architecture and thick fog surrounding you instantly make you uneasy, and even though you regularly travel back in time to 1980s Poland to extract vital information that could help you in the future, the atmosphere in both periods is oppressive. Strong sound makes playing with headphones a must.
Of course, the horror is just one aspect; the game is also about survival. Your task is to fight your way through hordes of grotesque creatures known as Orphans. While the enemy designs aren’t as memorable as the Necromorphs in Dead Space, they are aggressive beings and can close distances fast, which leads to nerve-shredding combat encounters.
Your arsenal is the expected collection: a futuristic pistol, shotgun, boltgun, a landmine launcher etc. Adding some strategy to how you encounter enemies is that every shot can be charged up to dish out additional damage. In fact, I’d go as far as saying charging every shot you take is a necessity if you want to have enough ammo to stay alive. This makes good positions, and not just standing still, critically important.
Another aspect you’ll need to consider is the Orphan’s merge ability. When you’ve downed a foe, one of their remaining fellows can shamble to the fresh corpse and absorb them into their own bodies to become even stronger. You can stop this process using a wrist-attached flamethrower, which again adds a pleasant strategic element as you have to track the enemies around you to prevent them from merging and gaining too powerful to defeat.
If you’re reading all of the above and thinking it sounds like typical survival horror fodder that you've played numerous times in the past, that’s because it is. But it’s mechanically sound, and after playing around half the campaign (a patch during the review process wiped my save, so I had to start over), I’ve found the difficulty balance just right.
I usually feel I have just enough resources to tackle each encounter, but not enough to blast my way through. That's the sweet spot for horror.
A time-travel tale that doesn't quite thrill
While Cronos: The New Dawn has delighted me from a gameplay and core design perspective, the area that hasn’t quite hit the sweet spot is its story and characters.
Returning to my Dead Space comparison, I was so absorbed in the sci-fi universe inhabited by Isaac Clarke that I've even watched the two Dead Space animated movies (they’re both pretty bad) released to coincide with the launch of the first two games. I can’t say that if we ever get a Cronos: The New Dawn flick in the future, I’ll be leaping to stream it.
The core setup of a futuristic Traveler, working for a mysterious organization known as the Collective, following in the footsteps of their missing predecessor, also traveling to the past to find clues to prevent a dystopian present, seems on the surface ripe with twisting sci-fi potential (even if it's rather derivative of Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys").
However, the Traveler is an overly stoic protagonist, and the story is often relegated to little more than background noise. Cutscenes mostly come in between lengthy levels, making the narrative feel quite disjointed and only really serving to give you a breather after finishing a tough section.
There are plenty of optional lore pick-ups to find scattered throughout levels that range from a steelworks factory to a crumbling hospital (what survival horror is complete without a hospital level?), and these help to give your overall mission greater context. Unfortunately, they can’t add enough color to a universe that feels too bland to be memorable.
To caveat the above, I'll flag again that I'm still working my way through the game, so there’s always the possibility that the narrative is going to shift into gear as I progress towards the finale. But at this point, Cronos has hooked me with its gameplay and atmosphere, but not its universe.
Should you buy Cronos: The New Dawn?
If you’re a survival horror fanatic like me, then you should absolutely pick up Cronos: The New Dawn. Spooky season is on the horizon, and it’s the perfect game to play to get you in the mood for Halloween. It’s not at the same level as Bloober’s own Silent Hill 2 or Capcom’s excellent Resident Evil series, but even being a step down is still a very good place to be.
For prospective players worried about performance, I played on PS5 Pro, and while I did experience a fair amount of framerate issues, patches released during the review period went some way to ironing these out. Any bugs and glitches encountered have been minor annoyances rather than progress blockers, apart from one, where an enterable door locked itself, preventing me from continuing until I booted up an older save.
Cronos: The New Dawn feels like the game that really announces Bloober Team’s strong command of the survival horror scene. It proves that Silent Hill 2 was not a one-off; this is a team that knows how to craft an atmospheric and intense horror experience. It will have a small part of you wanting to stop playing out of fear, but most of all eager to press on to see what horrific sights are waiting for you in the next shadow-draped corner.
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