It has been endearing to have followed Bloober Team for so long now and watch their evolution and growth as a video game development studio. Founded in November 2008, they have always focused on atmospheric, psychological, and horror experiences. They have created multiple IPs from the Layers of Fear series, The Medium, and Observer. Recently, they have been handed franchises like Blair Witch and last Fall’s fantastic Silent Hill 2 Remake, with their work on a Silent Hill 1 Remake recently announced.
So, as a fan of the developers, it was exciting to see Cronos: The New Dawn announced and released seemingly out of nowhere within less than a year from announcement to release. Bloober Team had been working on this original IP all this time, which is the game we are focusing on today, Cronos: The New Dawn.
To be fair, the survival horror genre doesn’t have many large AAA or AA games being developed, especially outside of big franchises like Silent Hill f coming up. The Dead Space Remake did not sell well enough, and it was leaked out that EA cancelled a remake of the second game due to this, so a chance at that franchise continuing seems gone.
It is with great excitement that Bloober Team is continuing their efforts in survival horror with a brand new IP, which brings together the best the genre has to offer. This game takes from Dead Space, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill in all the best ways, all while creating a world that is horrifying as it is mysterious. Come with me and let us explore the world of Cronos: The New Dawn and see if this game meets the high expectations its influences have created over the many years.
A Mysterious Future
You are the Traveller, a helmeted and mysterious humanoid that is part of an effort to “fix” the world. The world is now a wasteland, an apocalyptic event called the Change caused humans to turn into mutant creatures they named Orphans. The game takes place specifically in Poland, with the Traveller travelling back in different points of time in the 1980s to “extract” individuals who have been selected by the organization that has sent you, The Collective.
If this all sounds mysterious and ominous, it’s because it is! The world they set up is not fully explained to you; the game does a great balance of showing and telling you about the past, present, and future of this world. You will find audio diaries, letters, notes, reports, and more to listen to and read, which provide clues and connections you will use to build your head canon of what is happening. The game has a satisfying story and conclusion, but it still leaves a lot left unexplained, which is fine unless we never see a second entry, but being left wanting more while feeling satisfied with the story told was a great feeling. There are also 3 total endings, 2 you can earn on regular runs, and the third you can earn doing a New Game Plus run, which all extend replayability day one, along with harder difficulty modes you can open up to. So many games launch these days without these types of features, so it was great to see them here after I saw my first ending.
All Senses Horrified
The world that Bloober Team has created here is absolutely gripping and engaging. Every inch of this world is ornamented with detail that enhances the realism of this alternative Eastern European Poland, which they have chosen as the setting for their own home country. The architecture and art direction of the buildings, signage, homes, and more fit the 1980s setting perfectly, along with the location. You will also visit different time periods of the same area, which provides new gameplay loops and areas to explore, along with its tie to the story itself and why you are there. The use of Unreal Engine 5 here is fantastic, with ray-traced Lumen lighting being used to great effect to create pitch-perfect lighting.
One thing that drags down the look is the HDR and SDR look of the game; the default brightness in either mode is simply too bright. So please take some time and adjust the game to be dark. A good spot to test and adjust is near the start of the game when the flashlight in your suit turns on for the first time. The room should be extremely dark, so make sure to use that flashlight to look right in that room to help you adjust.
As I said, every inch of this game is greatly detailed, with everything creating a world unlike anything I have ever seen. It includes the Sci-Fi trappings of Dead Space, with the atmosphere of Silent Hill and the impeccably designed levels and battle arenas in the modern Resident Evil and Dead Space Remakes. This is one of the best-looking games on any platform, including the Switch 2, where I played it for a bit as well, where it looked and ran great, although at 30fps, but was locked other than in 2 locations for a tiny bit, which I found to be heavy areas on PC where I played with an i9 and 4090.
The sound is also industry-leading. I used headphones to play through the entire game, and it is definitely the way to go and is recommended by the developers as well. Every corner of this world emits sounds that are properly emitted based on distance and direction. Even basic virtual surround options will enhance your experience with any set of headphones, so please do yourself a favour and use headphones! The sound of entering one of the biomass caves filled with flesh and bodies on the walls is such an unnerving experience as you hear the damp, moist, and gross atmosphere, with dripping and fleshy sounds that are almost impossible to describe. It will haunt you.
Run for your Life
The core component that brings the entire experience together is the gameplay itself, the most important part of any survival horror experience. Cronos leans into the survival heavily, so if you find that recent games in the genre leave you flush with ammo and resources, you will be pleasantly surprised here. The game slowly ramps up your resources as it ramps up the difficulty, keeping a good balance between both, with large battles wiping out large portions of your inventory, littered with periods of exploration to refill and craft. There is a good balance here, which can be a bit harsh in the early game, along with some over-reliance on closed arena battles in the early game that can drag things down a tiny bit, but keep going, survive, and push through.
There is also a wide variety of enemies, called Orphans, each with unique strategies to defeat them best. The best part of the gameplay loop and combat is slowly learning their patterns, attacks, and weaknesses, testing different weapons, and finding which work best in combination with other tools you have. The weapons and tools you get are also extremely satisfying to use. They may seem weak at first, but they are all upgradable, and it won’t take long as they become efficient killing machines. These include pistols, machine guns, shotguns, and devastating Sci-Fi weapons. I did find that the enemy feedback can be a tiny bit underwhelming sometimes; some more blood splatter and dismemberment would have helped. After the Dead Space Remake literally having skin peel away or DOOM The Dark Ages, where enemies are gored to the bone, the enemy feedback felt a bit weak here. You also have a melee strike and ground stomp like in Dead Space, but they are extremely weak, not that I want to do a melee-only run, but it was useless to even get an enemy that was too close to back off for a moment, leaving it an entire system I didn’t even touch other than breaking open boxes for resources.
Another fun part of the game is the gravity-changing experiences and puzzles. You will be given tools to charge “oddities” that change the environment, like rebuilding a broken bridge, and it will slowly ramp up how it presents them in a fun way. This same tool also allows you to rebuild things like explosive canisters during combat. It can be a bit slow, so it’s fun to take the risk and get the great reward of using one to take out a few enemies all at once. There are also areas where you will use gravity boots to jump from areas a massive distance, turning you upside down, right side up, and allowing the level designers to create absolutely brain-bending environments that are used to great effect. I felt they could have been used a bit more, with the final boss making the gravity jumping gameplay a core part of the combat loop, without really ever doing that before. So you could see the potential that wasn’t fully utilized, and then made the final boss a bit chaotic with unfair patterns and just feels too repetitive, leaving it as a war of attrition by the end, versus any form of excitement.
Another very important tool you have is a fire-based area of effect attack that will burn any enemy nearby. This is useful during combat to stun and weaken enemies and take them all out with one shotgun blast. However, more importantly, the enemies can also merge together if you do not burn the dead bodies. This reminded me of the Crimson Heads in the Resident Evil 1 Remake, not in how the enemies work, but the paranoia of leaving bodies behind that can come back to make things worse for you later. It was a wonderful mechanic, and you can stop merging by shooting an enemy as well, and you will know they are preparing to do so as their body begins to wrap with tentacles and start to grab nearby bodies. If you let this process run freely, they will merge into larger and armoured enemies that are much more difficult to kill.
Some things I did find annoying were the turn speed for your character can be a bit slow at times, there is no quick turn, so it can be a bit painful dodging some quicker attacks. It could use a tiny increase; increasing the look speed helped a bit. I also found the character getting stuck sometimes on the spot, with aiming sometimes helping fix it. On Switch 2, I also had the save system entirely break down, autosaves stopped working, and so did manual saves. Restarting worked once to fix it, but after that, nothing could get it going again. The game overall feels less polished than Silent Hill 2 Remake at launch last year. Cronos did just get its first major update the other day, but it still wasn’t out for Switch 2 as of publishing this.
Death is not the End…
Cronos: The New Dawn is a fantastic survival horror experience, while some things like its melee system and difficulty spikes need some balancing, these are minor things that don’t affect the overall game enough to be an issue. If anything, I think of these as recommendations to make the game perfect, as it is so well done. I wholeheartedly recommend this game if you like this genre or any of the games it has been inspired from.
The game is also BIG, it took me almost 30 hours to finish the game on my first playthrough. I always take my time with games like these. I explored every nook and cranny, took lots of screenshots, videos, and more, all while preparing notes for this review. So, if you are worried about games being too short or too long, Cronos is the perfect length with great pacing throughout.
I cannot recommend this game enough. The early game can feel unbalanced and a bit repetitive, but that does not carry over to the entire game; it only gets better the more you play, and it becomes one of the best new survival horror video game franchises in over a decade.
You can watch my full video review here:
Cronos: The New Dawn
Pros
- Absolutely stellar world building and art direction that brings this new IP to life in a big way, you will be engrossed and gripped into this world
- A mysterious story that leaves you wanting more while providing a satisfying conclusion, with great plot twists and set pieces, a variety of environments with great survival horror based level design
- Fun gravity swapping level design moments that provide various puzzles, gameplay variations and combat options
- Fantastic combat system with meaningful upgrades, allowing you to upgrade weapons, health, inventory and more that all feels satisfying
Cons
- The early hours rely heavily on closed room arenas which limit experimentation and get repetitive very quickly, luckily the rest of the game doesn’t rely on them as much, but they will still occur right to the end
- Final boss has unfair patterns and is too repetitive, leaving it as a war of attrition by the end versus any form of excitement
- HDR is broken and needs to be fixed along with the overall state of the game having a lot of soft locks, save issues and more on every platform, it seems less polished than Silent Hill 2 Remake at launch (I played the game on PC and a bit on Nintendo Switch 2, along with chatting with the devs and other players in the offical Bloober Discord)
- The melee system is extremely weak and isn’t even useful as a final resort or to get enemies to back off for a moment
Leave a Reply