Bloober Team is one of those studios that got off to an incredibly rough start. Their initial batch of titles, such as Layers of Fear, oozed pretentiousness whilst lacking in horror and payoff, and to be honest, I was hugely worried about the Silent Hill 2 Remake once Bloober Team was announced to be the ones working on it. However, it turned out to be one of my favourite games of the last year, a fantastic remake that not only lives up to the legacy of the original game but also improves on it in some ways. It proved that Konami could still be trusted with the IP and that Bloober Team has some serious talent and untapped potential. 

Silent Hill 2 was a turning point for Bloober Team, as they transitioned from their previous psychological horror to a more action- and survival-based approach. Cronos: The New Dawn takes this newfound direction with confidence and paves the way for a new era of Bloober Team games. However, it’s not one without some old issues resurfacing. 

Story

The Change has annihilated the world, a mysterious infection that has ravaged humanity and brought them to the brink of extinction, merging everything it touches into a biomass until there’s nothing left. You play a Traveller of the Collective organisation, which sends travellers across the world to travel back in time and extract the essence from people of interest, bringing them back to the present. 

The Warden is a surprisingly compelling character who brings a little humanity to The Travellers.

From the moment you start up Cronos, you are thrust into a world of mystery; you are given no context, only your purpose and your goal. It’s an interesting opening that had me hooked as to who the collective was and why we are extracting the essence of survivors. However, throughout the adventure, you will delve much deeper into the world’s history and its many mysteries. As you travel between the past and present, The Traveller will develop a greater understanding of what happened and how to potentially save what remains of humanity. 

The story of Cronos certainly has some interesting ideas, with a fascinating world history and characters that are more complex than they seem. The Warden, in particular, is a surprisingly complex character who has studied and collected relics of human history, becoming deeply attached to them. It creates some memorable moments that highlight that Cronos’ world has the potential to do something great, but stumbles in the process. Regardless of the issues, it’s a story worth exploring. 

Gameplay 

Much like their previous game, Cronos The New Dawn is a third-person survival horror. It takes heavy inspiration from Resident Evil 2 Remake as well as Dead Space for a slow-burning horror experience that puts a Bloober twist on it. For much of the game, you will be dealing with the biomass creatures that spew out “Orphans”. A rather generic foe, but one that brings the tension.

The core gameplay mechanics here are pretty solid. As the traveller, you will gain access to a small number of weapons, from a pistol that can charge up to deal more damage and pierce through several enemies. To shotguns and carbines, which all have their uses. Wearing a giant bulk suit of armour, The Traveller isn’t exactly the most agile, with no special dodging abilities or suplexing enemies. However, you can still move fast enough to outmanoeuvre most enemy types and stomp on enemy heads if you knock them down. 

Crimson Heads are one of my favourite zombie special types in all of gaming, and I’m happy to see Cronos take some inspiration here and put a new spin on it. In Resident Evil Remake, killing a zombie in that game might not kill them permanently, and they come back as a stronger enemy type later on. Cronos does something in the same vein but takes it into a slightly different direction. Orphans can “merge” with dead orphans, which will mutate them even further. From here, Orphans will evolve, giving them brand new attacks and additional armour. Burning them is the only way to stop it entirely, and in hectic situations, this can be tricky. 

Seems… Familiar…

It’s a fascinating spin on the concept of the dead coming back to life, with the living dead absorbing the dead to grow stronger. Much like Resident Evil, the only way to stop this from happening is to burn them. Fire is an essential part of Cronos, and you are given free fire canisters as an area of effect around the traveller. These can burn dead bodies and stun enemies if they are surrounding you. Giving you time to reposition for a quick escape or critical hits through multiple enemies with the clever weapons you encounter. 

The level design is also a strong suit here. Balancing more guided linear sections with multiple pathways and backtracking opportunities. Most of the time, there is a side path nearby that will lead you to some loot and interesting rewards, yet it doesn’t make this a breeze.  I wanted to explore every inch of these intricately designed maps, despite knowing what’s around the next corner might want to kill me. Or you might find a friendly cat, which is also rather neat and brings some levity to a game that can be best described as oppressive. 

Cronos is a challenging game, but it gives you the tools to manage it if you think ahead. Harkening back to old school survival horrors, where even a single enemy provides a threat, and if you mess around too much, you can die to one of them. Every enemy, every encounter, every lockdown is a real fight for survival that will test your limits and sometimes your patience. Early on, I realised I don’t only have to be smart with my resources in combat, but also pick and choose my fights. Sometimes, finding an escape is the better option than taking on more enemies, or maybe enemies would be in a docile state, and if you’re careful, you can get by without waking them up. The more you play and the more you realise the rules set by Cronos, the more you realise that it’s a remarkably balanced experience. One that punishes mistakes and rewards mastery of the mechanics. 

Open wide.

I didn’t die much, and I felt like I was reasonably rationing my resources throughout my playthrough, but the pressure was always there. You never know when the next save station is located, or if your supplies will last you through to it. And this game has some enormous gauntlets to get through. If you played Signalis, the level of inventory management feels very similar, as you will need to find a balance between combat supplies and exploration. It’s constantly tense from beginning to end and surprisingly doesn’t rely on jumpscares too often, letting the scares come more organically as you play. 

Finally, the Traveller can upgrade their weapons and armour. With the ability to upgrade weapons with a variety of stats, including straight-up damage increases, clip size, or stability when charging a weapon for attack. This is split between Energy, which you find everywhere in the world, and is used primarily for weapons. And Core, which upgrades your suit stats, but is a lot trickier to find. I suggest getting some inventory upgrades as soon as possible; it’ll make your life so much easier. There’s a solid sense of progression here.

Unfortunately, it’s not perfect, and a few issues stand out. The few boss fights you encounter throughout lack original ideas and mostly revolve around you running around an arena, shooting explosive barrels, and glowing orange weak spots. There’s not a lot of strategy, and I often walked away with more resources than before. Additionally, the game incorporates the original Dead Space‘s awkward Zero-G sections, which ultimately feel clumsy and out of place in this context. They weren’t great in 2007, and Cronos does do much better with them. 

Cronos as a whole is an exciting game. It attempts to harken back to old-school survival horror, where inventory slots are minimal and ammo is a resource you can’t afford to waste. Then it incorporates it into a more modern-feeling game. For the most part, the results are spectacular. Every encounter is tense, the combat loop is surprisingly deep, requiring the player to think before blasting every enemy in sight with an excellent ammo economy that makes you feel powerful without becoming overpowered. 

Sound and Graphics 

Visually, Cronos is absolutely impeccable. It’s a dark and moody game with a dense atmosphere that clearly borrows some stuff from the Silent Hill 2 remake. With thick, dense fogs that enshroud areas and an overwhelming sense of darkness. Mix that in with the retro-future aesthetic and grotesque creatures, and you’ve got a familiar but wonderfully dark visual design that always impresses. Though I wish there were a little more variety in the locations. Biomass hallways start to look the same after the first dozen or so.

Unfortunately, I have to bring up yet again more issues with Unreal Engine 5. This has become such a common occurrence, and there are some issues here. Performance isn’t the greatest, with some stuttering when transitioning between zones and some significant drops as well.  I’ve even had a few crashes throughout, mostly during very specific cutscene transitions. It’s not game-breaking, but at this point, a warning should be displayed when a game is running on Unreal Engine 5, as it’s happening at an alarming rate. Bloober Team may have mastered the visual components, but it’s time to get some more optimisation.

With its excellent visual design, we also have an incredibly immersive sound design that truly elevates the game to the next level. You always feel isolated, and with the constant rumblings in the walls, you never know what might pop out and when. Mix this in with a surprising 80s synth-inspired soundtrack. This is easily some of the best sound design in a horror game, and it left me on edge throughout the entire game. 

However, it’s the voice acting that leaves me mixed. The Travellers speak in a drawn-out, almost monotone and uninterested way that makes them sound rather mundane. I understand the direction is to keep the games’ cryptic storytelling at the forefront, but it doesn’t gel with me. It gets better later in the game and as you meet more human characters, but the drawn-out moments don’t stick for me. 

Keep an eye on the walls.

Verdict 

Cronos: The New Dawn is an unforgivingly brutal survival horror experience that harkens back to the old-school design with more modern sensibilities. And this is how it should be, with a confident approach to level and enemy design that maintains high tension from start to finish. However, it’s not perfect, and you will encounter issues throughout, but regardless of this, Cronos has become an instant surprise in my mind. 

Cronos: The New Dawn is available now on PC, Xbox Series, PlayStation 5 and Switch 2. 

Reviewed on PC with an RTX 4070, Ryzen 7 7800X3D and 32GB RAM.

A copy of Cronos: The New Dawn was provided by the publisher.