The spooky season is upon us, and Bloober Team, hot off the heels of their fantastic remake of Silent Hill 2, decided to drop this surprise: an original horror title, Cronos: The New Dawn. Seemingly inspired by classic horror titles like Metro 2033 and Dead Space, it’s time to see if this new game is a nice and tasty treat or just a beautifully wrapped trick.
I See You’re Well Travelled
Cronos: The New Dawn has you controlling a character known only as “The Traveler,” who works for a group called “The Collective.” They are tasked with exploring an almost Earthlike wasteland, looking for rifts in time. These rifts allow them to travel back to the beginning of an outbreak in search of people of great importance, looking to save their “essence” and figure out what caused the outbreak to see if they can change the trajectory of the world.
The game starts out very vague and isolating as you are thrown into this world with a very vague objective. Slowly over the game the story starts to bloom and you get more answers, more direction, and even start to feel less lonely. It’s a fantastic way of pacing the game and story, and while it presents gamers with a rather rough few first hours, it creates a genuine connection between “The Traveler” and the player.
A few hours in you meet another character called The Warden, whose appearance genuinely eases the isolation you feel as the player. This is just one of quite an interesting set of characters you’ll meet through your time-traveling escapades. I feel that these characters you meet later really shift the balance of the game; I didn’t feel quite as alone and it helped me push on after the rough initial couple of hours had me questioning if I was actually getting into the game or not.
The story mixes sci-fi, horror, and time travel. At various points, you’ll enter one of the rifts you have been tasked with finding and get sent back to 1980s Poland at the start of the Outbreak. It’s here where you find more about what happened to the world, which in the current day is a distorted mess of ruins, with gore and gravity fluctuations all over the place. While not the most original in terms of overall narrative, the way it’s presented in bit pieces and keeps you reading through notes and trying to piece it all together more than makes up for some of the more obvious twists and turns.
I went from initially not being sure about the story or what was going on to getting incredibly invested in not only the characters but also the world and what happened. That slow burn that Bloober Team created here in Cronos: The New Dawn was a risky move, but I can wholeheartedly say it pays off in droves. I eagerly jumped into New Game+ to see what else that second playthrough would uncover. It really shows that the team can be true masters of their craft when it comes to gripping stories.
Dead Weight
If you are familiar with horror games, one look at any trailer or even screenshots of Cronos: The New Dawn is going to bring up an inevitable comparison with EA’s sci-fi horror masterclass Dead Space. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because outside of that game the only other games that come to mind in that similar vein are Cold Fear and The Callisto Protocol, so I am more than happy to welcome another into the mix.
“The Traveler” is quite a weighty character to control. While the game uses a typical third-person control system with full movement, they don’t quite have the speed of other heroes you might be used to (like Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil 4 Remake); instead there is a lot of intentional weight behind their movement. They wear a bulky suit and are exploring a ravaged land, riddled with a thick atmosphere and fluctuating gravity. It’s deliberate, and while it takes a while to get used to, once you do you can quite easily handle yourself when the need arises.
Every good third-person survival horror needs some kind of threat and Cronos: The New Dawn has “The Orphans”. These are the result of the outbreak: grotesque body horror creatures that build in mass by absorbing life forms around them. This could have been the fate of any unknowing Travelers or even corpses of dead Orphans. They mutate every time they consume and have a horrible habit of evolving ways of stopping you from putting them down. Fortunately they have one extreme weakness in fire; burn the corpses and stop the growth.
Count Your Bullets
This brings me onto the combat of the game and the delicate resource management balancing act. Resources are extremely scarce. You have to play smart, otherwise you will find yourself without any means to stop the Orphans. I found myself several times without ammo and having to embrace death, giving me the chance to reassess my options. The game will provide you with just barely a touch more ammo than you will need, and I literally mean a bullet or two extra. It truly leans into the survival horror standard of fight-or-flight.
For the most part this is more than manageable if you play smart, picking and choosing your fights and avoiding combat wherever possible. Unfortunately, this isn’t always an option as the game does have a habit of throwing you into combat arenas which if you aren’t prepared for can be quite a painful learning experience. Admittedly this isn’t my favourite mechanic in the genre and seems to have become a lot more commonplace recently. In Cronos: The New Dawn’s favor however, the developer does somewhat signpost these sections with the obvious hints such as an abundance of ammo and explosive barrels around the area.
Combat generally follows these rules: use explosive items found around the environment, hit the squishy weak points on the Orphans, and do not waste ammo. You have a melee attack to break boxes and push enemies away, but don’t rely on it in any combat situation. And make sure to burn the corpses in an efficient way. You’ll get access to weapons such as a shotgun, as well as a rapid-fire and a more cannon-style weapon. The real combat crutch is the standard handgun, which can be charged for a stronger but slower hit. Charging is less draining on your ever-dwindling resources and has some fantastic feedback upon scoring a hit.
Another factor to consider with resources is the limited inventory space. After all, what fun would a survival horror game be without having to backtrack to your item box because you’ve put away the bolt cutters for the umpteenth time trying to favor an extra stack of ammo or a healing item? (Not a true story, honestly!) While you can expand your inventory and crafting capacity, this requires you to find Cores throughout the world and also spend Energy, which acts as the game’s currency. There’s a balancing job of whether to take the core and valuable items to sell in order to upgrade your inventory for the short term at the expense of not being able to hold as much ammo, or leave them for later trying to remember where they all are and potentially come back for them when applicable.
Early on in the game, you’ll get the ability to “restore” certain parts of the environment using an add on to your gun. This is often used for puzzles to restore or destroy the world around you, but can also be used to restore certain explosive barrels to help with your combat arenas. There are also a bunch of anti-gravity sections but outside of altering your perspective and jetting you round the remains of the world, these do little else.
Emulation Station
Cronos: The New Dawn nails the survival horror genre that it is built from while having enough of its own unique spin on things. It may look and initially feel like Dead Space, but it has more of a focus on the lack of resources and forcing you to fight smart rather than leaning more on action. There’s a beautifully healthy medium between the two main schools of the genre.
I would have to say the weakest elements of the game are the forced arena battles and the boss fights that don’t really differentiate themselves from each other enough to be truly memorable experiences. Still, it is slightly refreshing to not have a “stalker” enemy to deal with for once in a game like this. Cronos is also one of the longer horror games around, clocking in at around 17 hours give or take for your first playthrough. This gets even longer when you factor in that there is additional story in the New Game + mode.
Beautiful Destruction
Cronos: The New Dawn is a beautiful mix of distorted sci-fi horror and real-world environments left in ruin. Sometimes the world will present what could easily be a lived in area, where you can see a place where life used to blossom. Then the next minute you’re presented with a mishmash of destruction and death, with parts of the environment just floating around, from a well-worn train station toy store, toys littering the shelves, to the outskirts of the town that resemble a desert wasteland, buildings slightly pointing out of the destruction.
Not everything is quite as beautifully crafted though, and I can’t tell if it was the system limitation or just an oversight. I played the game on the Nintendo Switch 2, and one of the main issues I had with the visual style of the game was that the character models outside of The Traveler and other similar characters were horrendous. The “human” cast you meet throughout your trial look distinctly dated, standing out painfully when it comes to the brilliantly crafted world. They stick out like sore thumbs, and it sadly does detract from the immersion.
The musical score does a fantastic job of ebbing and flowing when it’s needed. There is an engrossing ambiance for the bulk of the game, but certain set pieces or story sections will cause the score to kick in and really grip you. The fact that music isn’t used a lot really makes it stand out when it does kick in.
The voice acting is also fantastic; The Traveler is especially brilliant, as they start out almost robotic and as you play on, you can literally hear the humanity slowly bleeding into the vocal performance. I can’t understate how well this was done. Several other characters you’ll meet grow not only in story but in the way their acting is handled.
Performance Meeting
As mentioned, I played this game on the Nintendo Switch 2 and it often looked amazing for the hardware, but at times it presented some really low-resolution textures and jagged visual artifacts galore. It also runs at 30fps for the most part, both docked and handheld. While it doesn’t take long to adjust, I would suggest playing the game on other formats if you have the means to. There were sections where the frame rate would tank randomly and the fluidity of the combat and action sequences just didn’t quite feel right. It’s not the worst performance from the Nintendo hybrid Switch family of consoles and for the bulk of the game, it is actually quite impressive what Bloober Team have managed to do. Just consider this a heads-up that it isn’t the “ideal” way to experience this title.
Verdict
I was incredibly curious to see if Bloober Team could make it 2-for-2 since 2024, especially considering that up until the Silent Hill 2 remake, they hadn’t dealt with combat before. I’m glad to say not only is Cronos: The New Dawn a success with its combat, but they also managed to really nail the tension of working with low resources and making key choices in the way you can only get from a survival horror.
Cronos: the New Dawn offers a gripping tale, plenty of jump scares, more tension than the bottom of the ocean, and a world you’ll just want to explore. It did a fantastic job of reminding me exactly what I love about the genre, and wasn’t afraid to humble me when I got too cocky. This is an essential title for horror fanatics and people looking for a unique way to spend their Halloween.
CRONOS: THE NEW DAWN IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for a different type of horror game, check out Inhuman Resources: A Literary Machination.
Many thanks go to Bloober Team for a Nintendo Switch 2 review code for Cronos: The New Dawn.
Pride of utopia & greatest thing ever, I found the One Piece, Collected the Dragon Balls & won the Mortal Kombat Tournament in one night, it was quiet for me that night! Follow me on Twitter @powahdunk
