Cronos: The New Dawn Review

Bloober Team and I have a mixed history. I’ve always found the studio’s original work conceptually compelling, but aside from Observer, it’s been unable to nail the gameplay side of the equation. Last year’s free win with the remake of Silent Hill 2 allowed the team to focus more on getting the gameplay right, and it seems that the studio has learned some lessons as a result. Its latest offering, the third-person sci-fi horror Cronos: The New Dawn, comes to the party not only with its premise locked in, but also delivering a super tight and mostly satisfying survival horror gameplay experience.

Cronos: The New Dawn is set in an alternate 1980s Poland, where a devastating event known as The Change occurred, resulting in a destructive disease that swept through the country, infecting the citizens and causing them to mutate into violent creatures known as Orphans, that can merge together to become even deadlier. You play as a female Traveler who awakens with no memory, quickly discovering that you work for a mysterious group The Collective. Your mission is the Vocation, requiring you to travel back in time to explore the post-apocalyptic city of Kraków to find and extract a specific few that survived The Change. To do so, you’ll scour the future ruinous Kraków in search of time rifts, allowing you to jump back in time to the area where your target is located.

If you’ve seen the trailers for Cronos and thought “Gee, that looks like Dead Space,” you’re not wrong, with Bloober Team clearly influenced by EA’s much vaunted sci-fi horror series. But Cronos is more than a Dead Space clone, with the game equally as inspired by Capcom’s genre-defining Resident Evil 4, with a little bit of Silent Hill story fuckery for good measure. I mean, if you want to dance with the best, you may as well have a piece of their DNA.

To burn or not to burn

Just like Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you’ll recognise many of the mechanics or features emulated here. Whether it’s the yellow-stained boxes you can destroy for resources, the gravity puzzles that add verticality, or the safe rooms where you can take stock, save, stash items and upgrade in the handful of stations, a lot of Cronos will feel familiar to those who have played survival horrors before. But despite its obvious influences, Bloober Team has created something that feels different enough to stand on its own space boots.

It probably doesn’t surprise many to hear that while Cronos’ overarching premise is clear enough, the story details are obscure and vague. There are plenty of notes and voice recordings strewn about the world that help paint a picture of what happened before and after The Change, but they never give you any definitive answers. Regardless, I was compelled to learn more about the events of the retro-futuristic world we find ourselves trying to survive.

From a visual design standpoint, Cronos is dripping in atmosphere. From the dull brutalist architecture of Eastern Europe to the grotesque areas consumed by the biomasses born of The Change, everything is brought to life with incredible detail thanks to Unreal Engine 5. The star of the show, though, are the enemy designs, which are genuine nightmare fuel, even more so when they merge. And the sound design amplifies the tension, with guttural screams and squelching punctuating the minimalist atmospheric score in an almost suffocating way.

Choose your upgrades wisely

Impressively, this is Bloober Team’s best gameplay experience yet, with tight gunplay, tense action sequences and immersive environments, Cronos does tons of stuff right mechanically. Divisively, it’s also incredibly difficult, purposely designed to punish harder than it rewards. As resources are limited, and with no difficulty settings, some may feel the games leans into unfair territory, but the core loop is rewarding in its own way.

Enemies are aggressive and hit hard, so you need to make your shots count. What separates Cronos and its inspirators is the enemies’ ability to merge and become more powerful and harder to kill – the game warns you early on not to let them merge. To make sure they don’t come together, you’re encouraged to burn them (just like in the 2002 remake of Resident Evil). But what makes Cronos tense is that it constantly asks you to make decisions that almost always come back to haunt you. Do you burn a corpse or save your fuel for later use? If you choose the latter, I guarantee you that some monster down the track is going to hoover it up and merge into a bigger bastard.

Your weapons include several guns and explosives, all of which eat up a slot in your limited inventory (you start with six slots). Guns have a satisfying heft to them, and each gun has a charge shot – a more powerful attack that still only uses one bullet but takes longer to execute. In a room full of enemies, a charge shot with your shotgun may take out more than one creature, but it leaves you exposed slightly longer. Unlike Dead Space, there’s no dismemberment here, so you’ll need to be on the move constantly or attack from a safe distance (at first). If you get really desperate, you have a melee and stomp attack, but don’t rely on these to get you out of a jam.

If it’s written in blood, you know it’s true

If you do find yourself running out of supplies, you can craft ammo, health kits, and explosives with resources (chemicals and metal scraps) you find along the way, but you can only carry a certain amount of each. There’s actually a neat mechanic that allows you to craft select items on-the-fly by holding the button that weapon or health is assigned to.

Both your suit and weapons can be upgraded, the former with Cores that are scarcely located throughout the world, allowing you to increase your suit’s integrity, the number of inventory slots and the number of resources you can carry. Weaponry upgrades are done by using Energy, the game’s currency, and include your stock-standard damage increase, faster reload and charging, bigger clips and the like. But buying supplies like ammo and resources also costs Energy, and the conundrum quickly becomes what do you want to invest in at that given moment.

Survival horrors are known for their limited resource management. Frustratingly, Cronos can be so stingy on the supplies needed to even get through combat-heavy sequences or a boss fight. A good survival horror will give you just enough to survive an encounter, making you feel like you’ve truly earned it, often Cronos struggles to strike the right balance. What makes it worse is that Bloober Team hasn’t utilised modern sensibilities that see your key items and valuables to sell in a separate inventory. Instead, if you come across a key or valuable, you’ll need to waste supplies or trudge back to your stash to free up room to acquire it.

These boots were made for anti-gravity

Traversing the world of Cronos offers a brief respite from the game’s brutal combat and gives Bloober Team a chance to inject some puzzles into the experience. Early on, puzzles require you to repair sections of the world (bridges, stairs, roofs) by using your gun’s attachment to rewind areas to earlier intact forms to make them accessible. Later in the game you’ll obtain a pair of gravity boots that allow you to jump and walk on the walls and ceilings, or even whole entire other platforms. They’re clever and simple sequences that allow you to soak in the environment and world design.

Final Thoughts

The story of Cronos: The New Dawn may struggle to make sense, but Bloober Team’s gameplay vision is clear – this is survival horror dialled up to 11. As a genre veteran who grew up playing Resident Evil and Dino Crisis, there’s a fine line between challenging and rewarding, punishing and unbalanced. So much of Cronos is everything you want in a survival horror – brutal and satisfying combat, disturbing enemy design and an immaculate atmosphere that instils tension. Yet, too frequently, Cronos punishes the player for its own design choices, and ultimately, it’s what stops it from sitting alongside the greats in the genre.

Reviewed on PS5 Pro // Review code supplied by publisher

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