Cronos: The New Dawn Review

Cronos: The New Dawn feels like a statement of intent from developer Bloober Team. It has spent the past decade developing all manner of survival horror titles, ranging from Layers of Fear to The Medium to Blair Witch. Most of these games are good, but none are great, and Bloober constantly feels like it’s scratching at the confines of its enclosure, striving to achieve something more.

With last year’s Silent Hill 2, it showed the world not only what it was truly capable of, but what we can expect from its future output. With the fruit of this labour now sitting in the palm of my hands, it’s time to uncover if Cronos: The New Dawn can mark a new beginning for the studio, or if it has fallen back on old habits with underwhelming impact.

The truth sits somewhere in the middle. This new adventure can be horrifying and irksome in equal measure, while its inconsistent execution makes it impossible to truly fall in love with this world without worrying it might suddenly fall apart at the seams. But when this experience shines, there is nothing else quite like it.

For The Collective

You play as the Traveller, a faceless clone who emerges from a strange machine in the first few moments after answering a series of unsettling questions. You are one of thousands to walk in the very same footsteps, brought into existence to complete a mission that remains unclear right now.

All you must do is follow instructions, responding to each command with a monotone malice that puts aside emotion in favour of cold, hard logic. As the narrative goes on, you’ll learn more about their intended purpose as a more considered personality starts to materialise, but Cronos definitely wants you to feel like a stranger stepping into a strange land.

Said land is Poland in the 1980s, with the Soviet territory caught in the grips of a viral outbreak that has slowly but surely turned its inhabitants into ungodly monsters. There isn’t anything particularly original about them, however, and most of the enemies you face will undoubtedly surface comparisons to Dead Space’s necromorphs or the vast majority of body horror we’ve seen in film, television, and video games over the past several decades. It’s hard to tell whether Cronos is paying homage to horror classics or believes it’s coming up with these ideas for the very first time.

Myriad household objects float in the air of a blood-soaked corridor in Cronos: The New Dawn

In the first couple of hours, you’ll also stumble across a hub area of sorts that you will return to between missions. A single comrade calls this place home, although his motivations can be very unclear. Oh, and there’s a room full of cats you can pet, collect, and spend time with.

Lack of originality aside, everything about Cronos’ post-apocalyptic slice of Soviet Europe is beautifully presented. The atmosphere as you explore dilapidated cities ripe with decay will suffocate you with how utterly disgusting it feels.

Decaying corpses have formed together to create literal walls of flesh that line once bustling streets, while apartment complexes awash with random trinkets remind you that thousands of people used to call this place home. You very rarely stumble across living things that don’t want to kill you, with most of the campaign spent alone, aside from a few friends you won’t want to abandon.

An acid-spitting enemy hanging from the ceiling attacks the player in Cronos: The New Dawn.

Unfortunately, the Traveller’s mission often requires them to track down targets and travel through time in order to procure individuals or information key to stopping a mass extinction event from taking place. The dialogue is weak and the voice acting stilted, but the mystery awaiting at Cronos’ core was compelling enough to keep me invested. There are twists and turns galore alongside a thematic underbelly about the flaws of communism that helped to cause this outbreak in the first place.

Audio logs and dossiers you stumble across represent a comprehensive critique of this society from developers who, with the studio being Eastern European itself, write with a more measured, personal perspective. Horror can take many forms, and sometimes that form is dissecting the misguided role communism can play in building the ideal society.

Don’t Let Them Merge

As far as moment-to-moment gameplay is concerned, Cronos expands upon the same style of third-person horror we’ve seen the genre flirt with for decades now. The Traveller can only take a few hits before biting the dust for good, while their iron-clad suit means they navigate the world with significant weight, which makes it hard to move quickly or dodge enemy attacks.

In fact, there is no dodge button to speak of, meaning when facing up against foes, you must make every single shot count or prepare to restart from the previous checkpoint. Fortunately, you have the usual arsenal of weapons at your disposal, ranging from standard pistols to ferocious shotguns, all of which materialise from a single alien construct capable of unleashing both standard and charged blasts of energy.

Every single weapon feels amazing to fire, imbued with such ferocity that I worried the controller was going to fly out of my hands when pulling off charged headshots. You will often need to take the time to hold the trigger to pull off charged attacks if you want to survive as well, once again forcing The Traveller to sit in place while contemplating their own oblivion.

The Traveller stumbles across a normal human being in Cronos: The New Dawn.

The upgrade system and gradual rollout of weapons are also evidently inspired by the likes of Resident Evil and Dead Space. If anything, the game gets much easier as it goes on, as you grow more powerful and learn to deal with the same few enemy types.

Most combat encounters involve filling fleshy adversaries with as many bullets as possible, although merged opponents will come with specific weak points you’ll need to target. As with a lot of its ideas, the game presents the merging of enemies as a groundbreaking mechanic, as any creatures you eliminate but fail to burn the bodies off will be fodder for other enemies to absorb into themselves to become more powerful.

But since you can only take a few hits before dying, most of the time, I found myself reloading checkpoints to stop merging from taking place at all. Otherwise, I’d risk hitting an artificial wall of difficulty that Cronos has no desire to let me navigate. That’s where my biggest issue arises — the level design, enemy placement, along with the overall difficulty scaling are completely out of whack sometimes.

The player emerges from an ominous red space pod in Cronos: The New Dawn.

One early boss encounter exemplifies this perfectly. I found myself facing down a monster in a cramped apartment with only a few bullets and healing items to my name. I needed to stay alive and kill this creature if I wanted to survive, which was far easier said than done.

With a range of weak points that could only be revealed by shooting explosive barrels in a cramped space, no means to dodge attacks that stunlock you into an early grave, and very little ammo to pick up within the boss arena itself, this encounter was an exercise in dated game design. Several bouts of combat repeat these mistakes throughout the campaign, making the act of survival feel like a matter of luck rather than skill.

This feeling doesn’t wane until the very end, made even more pedantic by major set pieces that frequently send you filtering down linear corridors, taking down infected until you’re free to progress the story. Time travel also isn’t utilised in the most creative ways either, basically progressing you to areas that look and act the same as those in the present.

Infected form together to form a fleshy mass in Cronos: The New Dawn.

Manipulation of time is also used to solve certain puzzles, such as making destroyed platforms appear out of rubble or constructing makeshift elevators, while explosive barrels and other objects can be brought back into existence again and again to make your life a little easier. Once more, these are decent ideas that other games have already done.

Cronos is very well-made, and it’s wonderful to see Bloober Team produce an original property with ample potential for future expansion, but so many of the elements here feel like things better survival horror games have already moved on from.

It’s also worth noting a handful of technical problems I encountered during the review build, such as save files being deleted, areas failing to load in, and cutscenes leading me to black screens I had no means of escaping. Most of these should be ironed out with a patch.

Cronos: The New Dawn is easily the most confident original game that Bloober Team has ever produced, but this unfettered ambition also brings with it teething issues that are awfully difficult to overlook. Combat is punchy yet clunky, exploration is atmospheric but predictable, while the central narrative is often held back by lacklustre performances and clumsy writing. There is a great survival horror game at the centre of Cronos, but it would have been much stronger if it had broken new ground rather than wondering tentatively on what came before.