Around this time in 2024, Bloober Team — a studio famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) for their numerous outings in the horror genre — debuted their reinterpretation of Silent Hill 2, one of the spookiest survival horror games in the history of the medium. And, despite the studio’s questionable track record leading up to that point, most would say that it was easily the best game they’ve ever put out to the public. But Silent Hill 2 also introduced a problem for Bloober Team. Now that they’ve raised such a high bar for themselves, how on Earth can they possibly match or even surpass Silent Hill 2 without external oversight or the foundation of an established franchise?
Lo and behold, Bloober Team’s next original game has already debuted barely a full year after their previous success. Cronos: The New Dawn not only continues their streak of action-oriented horror games, but it does so with a distinctly Polish-flavored edge in a dystopian sci-fi setting. There’s also time travel. And gross flesh monsters. And collectible cats.
I’m a bit late to the party, but I figured I’d give my own thoughts on Cronos: The New Dawn after it came out during an already extremely-packed weekend of releases. Is it Bloober Team’s next big hit? Is it the worst thing they’ve made since Blair Witch? Is it some other ludicrous extreme? After just about 10 hours, I think I have a clear answer.
A New Dawn (For Bloober Team)
Cronos: The New Dawn really dumps you straight into the fryer on your first playthrough. You awaken in what appears to be a futuristic pod, with only a series of cryptic mantras, Rorschach tests, and a loose gun to accompany you before the surrounding world is unveiled. Suffice to say, things aren’t great. The ground is fractured and floating freely in space, loose corpses and debris from a broken city are strewn about like ordinary litter, and strange anomalies tying the remnants of humanity together dot the sky like blood red stars. It’s a full-on post-apocalypse.
Before long, your mission is made apparent. You are a Traveler, a heavily-armored representative of the enigmatic Collective, tasked with harvesting the Essence of key figures to hopefully fix what went terribly wrong so long ago. It’s simple: find drop points, travel back to the past, and find those tied to the emergence of “the Change”, an event that led to the creation of grotesque biomass monstrosities (called “Orphans”) that are currently wrecking havoc on the future. But things are never so simple. Sooner or later, the events of the Change become the backdrop for a much more sinister mystery, one that will ultimately determine the fate of both the Traveler and the mysterious world she inhabits.
It’s difficult to discuss the efficiency of the game’s narrative without unfurling the whole mystery, but I’ll try to get some broad strokes in. I won’t lie and say that the gradual focus on a more personal journey as opposed to the grandiose one you start out with didn’t initially put me off. But I feel as though the reveals were doled out gradually enough to make the transition at least feel natural towards the end. As early as your first Ascendance sequence, a colorful scene that delivers your Essence to the Collective, hints of something else going on in the background slowly come to light. Plus, if you do enough exploring, you can find more and more insight into both the Change and everything tied to it through audio logs, text archives, and even bloody scribbles lining the many walls of the Steelworks, hospitals, tram stations, and so on.
I do have to appreciate the shotgun approach of just dumping you into the world, too. Everything feels so alien and strange in the first hour. You don’t even get a title card until about 30 minutes in, well after your first few battles. It was a great way to really put you in the Traveler’s shoes.
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As for the game’s performance, it was about what I’d expect. I didn’t necessarily meet all of the recommended PC specs, sans video memory, but I had decent enough performance with only some occasional frame drops throughout the whole game on Medium settings. Things do take a nosedive in the game’s busiest and most detailed environments, but any combat is typically minimal if not nonexistent during these sections, so it wasn’t too much of a bother. I will say that the game looks absolutely gorgeous though for how little storage space it takes up. Much like Silent Hill 2, the elaborate environmental design is all here and accounted for, with some impressively grotesque implementations of fleshy biomass dotted all throughout the dilapidated dystopian setting.
What took me by surprise was the music. I adore the original score by Arkadiusz Reikowski, and though their work can be heard throughout almost all of Bloober Team’s back catalogue of games, the retrofuturism vibe combined with stinging synths and haunting ambience really tickled me pink. I absolutely love that kind of sound, so I’m biased. There were even a handful of times I stopped moving around just to let the game’s music calmly play out. “What Do You See”, all parts of “Traveler Remains”, and “Centipede Nest” are all big favorites of mine.
Playing Cronos: The New Dawn
Then you get to actually playing Cronos: The New Dawn, and this is where pretty much all of my thoughts — good and bad — lie.
Cronos: The New Dawn is a third-person survival horror game with a focus on action, even more so than Silent Hill 2. Puzzles aren’t necessarily pushed to the wayside here, but they’re given nowhere near as much focus as they were in Bloober Team’s previous effort. Instead, you’ll be primarily running, gunning, collecting, surviving, and occasionally thriving. Emphasis on “occasionally”. You’re given one static difficulty setting for your first playthrough as opposed to the usual Easy, Normal, and Hard, so you’ll definitely have to manage your resources well to keep the game going.
Not only does resource management come into play here, but so too does minor crafting elements and even inventory management. No longer can you stockpile an entire arsenal in your inventory, nor can you comfortably ferry key items between point A and point B. Ammo stacks, weapons, explosives, keys, loose pocket lint, they all take up individual spaces in an already pretty cramped inventory. Whatever you don’t find in the environment, you can occasionally craft on your own with a mix of chemicals and spare parts, though you can only carry so much of these as well.
And you’re going to need every last one of them. While Silent Hill 2 did have quite a bit of combat, you eventually reach a point where you’ve successfully identified every enemy weakness and can dispatch any of them with relative ease. Here, however, there’s a much tighter focus on wisely using your limited ammunition. Melee combat is practically a non-option, reserved as a tool for making space as opposed to a weapon, forcing you to use the game’s small variety of guns and some precision aiming to dispatch your foes. This is where I start to feel a bit mixed.
You have a limited, if not effective arsenal here, comprised primarily of a pistol, shotgun, rifle, and a high-powered arablest, with variations of the former three being optional discoveries to find in the game’s open areas. Each weapon performs as you would expect, with the ability to “charge” the weapon for an additional effect. This means you’ll be firing slower, but the trade-off is almost universally worth it. For example, you’ll be dealing additional damage, or switching from burst fire to a homing burst of automatic shots.
Now, in a survival horror game, wherein ammo management is not only important but essential for progression, why would you ever bother using regular shots instead of charged ones to dispose of your enemies? Especially in the case of the pistol, where charged shots are the difference between killing a monster in three shots versus potentially twice that? With no additional ammo cost for all charged shots! I wouldn’t normally harp on something like that, but given the game’s proclivity for throwing tanky enemies your way with little in terms of variation, you really can’t afford to go with any less efficient options.
Encounter design is a huge thing for me in survival horror games, specifically those where fighting things is a huge focal point. I want to feel like I’m facing impossible odds, or fighting creatures that all require different strategies and prioritization to take down. In Silent Hill 2, I felt like Bloober Team managed to do that fairly well, with the main three baddies you fight all having different behavioral patterns that occasionally intermingle in meaningful ways. On a first playthrough, at least.
In Cronos: The New Dawn, I didn’t really feel that. The Orphans come in only a few different varieties:
- Your everyday zombie-like Orphans. Some are weaker than others, some are stronger than others, but they all home in on you and attempt to swipe your head off.
- Ranged Orphans, which practically do the same thing as the regular Orphans, but they also spit green slime at you in a handful of ways.
- Crawler Orphans that can scuttle along walls and ceilings, plus they can spit the aforementioned slime.
- Explosive Orphans that appear almost solely out of biomass accumulations, with their sole attack being the ability to detonate themselves on contact with you. They also leave slime behind.
Excluding bosses and a stationary Orphan that acts more like a hazard than a regular enemy, that’s all you’ll really get. You’ll occasionally fight giant Orphans, sure, but the strategy for fighting them doesn’t really change. You’ll just have to dump much more ammo into them. You’ll enter an arena, Orphans swarm in, you’ll pop them one by one (or blow up a convenient gas tank near a crowd), and that’ll repeat for nearly the entire game without much need to shake things up.
Compare that to something like Resident Evil 4, whose dynamic Ganados can occasionally mutate into more dangerous monsters, react in a number of ways to your shots, and come equipped with weapons of all kinds that each demand different strategies. Or how The Evil Within would thrust you into all kinds of different environments littered with death traps, or invisible foes, or persistent chases. Even Silent Hill 2 had this. Mannequins slithered away and hid in the environment, Nurses had full combo attacks that you’d have to play around, and Lying Figures scuttled around and occasionally detonated after their demise.
I’ll concede that Cronos: The New Dawn does have something unique going for it, though. Nearly all Orphans in the game leave behind a corpse once they’re killed, not only making for grimy set dressing, but presenting a new variable that you have to account for. Orphans have a tendency to stick together. They’ll migrate towards any nearby corpses, envelop themselves in scarlet flesh tendrils, and attempt to absorb the deceased. If they’re successful, they’ll become stronger, more heavily armored, and just more dangerous in general. Keep them from doing that. Shoot them in the head with powerful guns, divert them away from corpses before they catch their scent, or just kill them quick enough to keep any absorbing from happening.
Or, you could destroy the corpses. Fire plays a significant role here in destroying not only walls of thin biomass, but for completely destroying corpses among other useful things. It’s easily the most engaging mechanic Cronos: The New Dawn has going for it. Fire is a tool to escape being grabbed by Orphans. It’s a tool to keep enemies from becoming more dangerous. It’s a tool to make space and buy yourself some time, or just expose boss weaknesses. It’s great, and I can only wish there was even more focus on its use. The same can be said for the handful of tools you can find to navigate the environment.
You start the game with an anomaly manipulation tool that can manipulate . . . well, anomalies. These anomalies take the form of red and yellow spheres that are hitched to floating pieces of debris or other objects that are just too heavy or out of reach for the Traveler to move. Point your gun at them, hold the corresponding button, and you can switch the anomaly to the opposing color, along with moving whatever they’re attached to around in free space. While I wished they were used for more dynamic puzzle solving, they’re most often just used for getting from point A to point B, with their use in combat rarely if ever coming to fruition. The same goes for your other tool introduced later in the game, which allows you to connect power sources to deactivated generators for further progression. You can also find anti-grav boots that allow you to jump through the air to corresponding platforms, but again, their use is limited almost solely to progression.
Speaking of which, you have the ability to upgrade the Traveler’s assorted arsenal of guns through gathering the game’s currency. Whether it’s found loosely in the world around you, or through the selling of rare artifacts to an in-game shop, you can collect money to upgrade your guns with a handful of static boosts and useful additions. Enhanced stability, faster charging speeds, bigger magazine sizes and damage values, they’re all worthy things to grab. The Traveler herself, meanwhile, can only be upgraded with the acquisition of Cores — dedicated items that take up inventory space — which can improve the Traveler’s inventory space and armor. This includes the ability to hold even more crafting ingredients as well. Additional inventory space is definitely a must, as several items (namely the bolt cutters) may as well become a permanent fixture on your person.
My ultimate complaint with how Cronos: The New Dawn plays is that I feel like there are interesting ideas here, but their implementation comes off as bog standard. In fact, that’s how playing the game as a whole feels. It’s functional, but nothing mindblowing. And that’s a real shame, because I feel like Bloober Team already proved that they can make something that’s functional but effective with Silent Hill 2.
The corpse mechanic, the way fire is used, the anomalies, all of these could make for an interesting game by themselves But all of these being smashed into a single game doesn’t really give them the opportunity to really breathe and form interesting scenarios. Why can’t I use an anomaly to set up traps for enemies? Why not have a section where ammo is so limited, you have to carefully utilize fire in order to successfully survive? Why not use the anti-grav boots to avoid attacks from more than one boss? I understand there can only be so much to do in one game, but these are opportunities that I’ve already seen explored in other games I’ve played.
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Should You Play Cronos: The New Dawn?
In a way, Cronos: The New Dawn is the closest thing to a traditional survival horror game Bloober Team has made yet, which legitimately surprised me. Hell, it even addressed my biggest complaint from the Silent Hill 2 remake. It has an honest to God ranking system, not only grading you based on your total deaths, saves, and enemies killed, but also how many times corpses were absorbed by Orphans. That alone deserves some praise.
At the same time, though, I can’t in good faith say that Cronos: The New Dawn really rivals the likes of Resident Evil, or The Evil Within, or even Dead Space, the latter of which it unabashedly borrows from. It’s certainly a step in the right direction, but it’s more like a baby step than some giant leap forward. It’s a welcomed evolution from a formula that Bloober Team have only recently managed to break themselves free of, leaning more towards traditional gameplay paired with a compelling narrative instead of letting the latter pull most of the game’s weight. They’re just not all the way there yet.
But there’s nothing so offensive here as to make it not worth playing. Rather, if you’re a horror fan who’s just here to shoot things, uncover a mystery, and look at spooky imagery, you won’t really be disappointed with Cronos: The New Dawn. If you’re looking for something beyond that, I think you’d be safe in waiting for a sale or just looking elsewhere. I had fun for a majority of the game, at least.
Cronos: The New Dawn is available on Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch 2.
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