Cronos: The New Dawn (2025)

Article: Cronos: The New Dawn Review - Solid Survival Horror by Kyle Hilliard

Score Report: 7.75 / 10

Cronos: The New Dawn has an excellent, thoughtful premise that feels dark and dangerous, but does a poor job of executing on its promising sci-fi ideas. A questionable religion born from trying to save the world in the face of a rampaging disease with clear parallels to the global pandemic we all recently experienced is great fodder for a story, but I was left shrugging my shoulders by the end. Thankfully, the gameplay, though familiar, offered plenty to pull me through the approximately 12-hour experience to see the end.

Cronos: The New Dawn delivers a unique and compelling setting, with a narrative that keeps you intrigued throughout the game, even if said narrative ultimately fails to develop into something truly remarkable. Some story threads are left unresolved, hopefully as groundwork for future entries set in the same universe, and what I initially expected to be a strong, self-contained narrative never fully materializes.

Where the game truly shines is in its gameplay. Having played several recent survival horror titles, this one stands out by placing you in control of a powerful character while still perfectly capturing the genre’s core tension: scarcity. Resources are genuinely limited, every bullet matters, and the small amounts of energy you find by meticulously exploring every nook and cranny feel immensely valuable. For me, this is one way of representing survival horror at its best.

Because of that, Cronos ends up being one of my favorites. I can easily forgive its minor shortcomings, such as a lackluster main narrative (despite excellent worldbuilding) and somewhat repetitive boss fights, thanks to how well it nails its gameplay loop and atmosphere.

Cronos is the gaming equivalent of someone who desperately needs to be right, even if it bites them in the ass. Singular Fixation, The Game.

Is it technically difficult to spawn things on top of you, and have triggers for enemies bursting through the wall be a guaranteed stagger on your character in a game with severely limited healing items? Technically, yes, that does make things more difficult. That would make you right in calling it difficult. It also makes it more difficult to eat if I glue my mouth shut. Doing that would make me a dipshit, though.

Cronos is kind of a dipshit. The kid who doesn't care if doing something is worthwhile, but does it just to be right. The kind of person who tells on themselves if it'll also get you in trouble. Like I said; a dipshit.

There is so much good squirreled away in this game, sandwiched between game design choices that just feel annoying and malicious. Not scary, not tension inducing--just annoying. Everything just feels like the devs needed to be right, at the expense of being enjoyable.

And it is so, so close to being great. The atmosphere is fantastic, the sound design is fantastic, the world building is provocative and thoughtful. I wanted to wander everywhere, see everything, read everything. But it is an absolute chore to play, because being right is more important than being enjoyable. And, technically, the game is difficult, in the same way that performing your own colonoscopy might be. Towards the Church, I just found myself dreading the next combat encounter. Not because it was scary, or tense, or difficult, but because it was so tedious and remarkably unenjoyable. I saw a bunch of explodable shit everywhere and just decided, nope, I am not sludging through another half-baked 'all doors lock until you kill every enemy' shooting gallery with the most unmaneuverable character since the tank control days of old. Running in circles charging my shots and trying to craft ammo while dodging enemies with attacks that seem wholly undeterred by walls or doors or any other obstacles. And there was no way I was going to do yet another boss fight where I have to play ring-around-the-rosie with pillars while its projectile attacks clip through and still damage me anyways.

And, by god was I not going to spend another full 72 seconds (yes I counted, because it was just so goddamn slow) climbing a ladder like a geriatric riddled with arthritis.

I love slow burns. I love atmosphere. I love difficulty. But I also love my time, and respect it more than anything else. And Cronos really wanted you to die in dumb ways just to be right about being able to kill you. And even mostly failed at that as I only died about 7 or 8 times total by the time I reached the Church. Even when the game threw cheap unavoidable hits at me (again, the favorite in this game is enemies that smash through a wall at random places and stun you into damage, with the trigger being directly where the enemy bursts out into). It felt like getting together with friends for some D&D and having a DM who makes up new rules to hamstring you every time you're doing too well, or like going on a date with someone who is angry at you for agreeing to go out so they keep sticking their fingers in your food and drink and farting loudly to try and get you to leave so they don't have to 'be the bad guy' and end the date themselves.

Again, a dipshit.

Cronos has so much to love, and there was so much I did love. But by god did Bloober want me to really know it didn't want me there and didn't want to end the date themselves.

But I don't know if it's this one.

Don't get me wrong it has some things that I like. The setting really works for me. Nowa Huta is such an interesting place and that combined with the first three acts of the story kept my attention throughout. The combat felt clunky at first but like many other survival horror games it's something you get used to and end up appreciating to a degree.

But there's just too much in this game that I found disappointing. Having a compass without a map probably could have worked if each room and hallway were easier to differentiate. Absent that, however, it's easy to get lost in certain areas of the game where everywhere you go is basically the same biomass-infested corridor. They probably should have gone with a map.

I also didn't find this game very scary. I mean, it has atmosphere in spades to its credit. Outside of a couple jump scares however, I didn't feel that same sense of dread that other better survival horror games can elicit. Part of that is that the enemy designs aren't very original or scary. Additionally once you do get a feel for combat, it wasn't often that I felt like I was dangerously close to running out of ammo.

Above all of these disappointing aspects though is the way the story just kinda fizzles out about 3/4 of the way through the game. I had so many questions about how the virus started, who the pathfinder was, who the warden was, who the player character was, but none of the answers we got were very satisfying in my opinion. That last quarter of the game really drags as well. If they had ended the game after the abbey I probably would've given it 3 stars instead of 2, but alas...

Anyway, probably skip this one, but if they develop a sequel for this game I'd be interested to see if Bloober Team can improve upon these areas that I found so infuriating.

This game might have the strangest physical release I've seen since... Well, The Thaumaturge. Also this year.

• Sept 9: Amazon and GameStop get PS5 copies.
• Sept 19: Walmart (USA) gets PS5 copies.
• Oct 21: Street date provided to me by Microplay and Walmart (Canada); they use the same distributor.
• Oct 21: Switch 2 key-on-cart version releases.

It's almost like they started rolling out the PS5 version, then decided at the 11th hour they were also gonna do a Switch 2 version, and then withheld the remaining copies?

It's so weird, man.

I've been really slow on gaming lately, and I now have 2025 releases Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip, Heck Is Us, and Ninja Garden Ragebound on the backlog. Guess I'm just gonna wait for a discount on Cronos. 🤷

Cronos was the true test to see if Silent Hill 2 remake was a flash in the pan success or if Bloober really has evolved. In an interview, the said that every game they made before SH2 was simply them learning, focusing on atmosphere and storytelling as they taught themselves how to make games. But they felt they’ve entered a new era, where they can exit the walking simulator genre and enter modern survival horror.

For me, it passed the test. Cronos is unique, fun, and a solid modern action horror experience. It is heavily influenced by Dead Space, but I definitely see influences from their previous game as well. It’s a fun, linear, exploratory romp through a unique body horror landscape in an alternative apocalyptic hellscape (largely based on Krakow I believe?).

The setting, story, and atmosphere were quite unique. I definitely prefer the more nonlinear level design of classic survival horror (and I wish there was a map), but for a linear Dead Space type game I had a lot of fun regardless. Thankfully, there was at least some optional exploration and backtracking here and there, which makes a huge difference for me.

The story and dialogue and lore… it went way over my head. The cutscenes were probably my least favorite aspect of the game, partially because I had no idea what was going on, but also because they are so slowly paced. I felt the same about the audio logs and lore you find- I just didn’t care and it slowed the pacing down a lot.

But otherwise - amazing body horror enemies and environments. I actually loved the combat - so everyone that heard a Callisto Protocol 2.0 - nah, it’s way better. And the minor environmental puzzles (and even 1 riddle!) were lots of fun as well. I definitely prefer my survival horror to be nonlinear, puzzle-heavy, and including a map… but I enjoyed this game a ton regardless. I am totally on board with whatever Bloober puts out going forward. They have proven themselves to me.

I know quite a few people dislike the more lumbering combat, the need to flee, to reposition, to count your bullets and your prayers because you can't evade and your melee attacks are not really serviceable, but for me, that all is the hallmark of survival horror.

It is very intriguing to me that the developers compare this as being more like Resident Evil than Silent Hill, but traversing New Dawn, it is Silent Hill I am often reminded off, probably for good reason. Granted, my experience with Resident Evil is mostly with the remake of 4 and my ongoing playthrough of Biohazard, but Re4:Re quickly became more of a dark-y shooter than something properly horror. Or at least my taste of survival horror. It was fun, and it definitely had its moments, specially those where you controlled Ashley, but otherwise I rarely felt afraid or tense.

That tension and sense of fear is here in heaps and bounds, as it was in both Silent Hill 2 and in Dead Space. Some people might call it imitation more than elaboration, but I am not sure I agree. The game clearly has an idea of what it wants to be, and it sticks very much to that idea. There are plenty of encounters. Plenty of times where you face off, and yet that sense of dread never really leaves. That sense of nothing is scarier always accompanies you. The game hits maybe a more perfect balance on that front that Dead Space and maybe even Silent Hill 2, and that maybe, alongside its music and design, is what I love so much about it.

I quite heartily recommend it.

What’s that you say, Bloober can’t make a game when it’s not propped up by the bones of another, better game (not that I think their stab at a beloved series was particularly praiseworthy)? Colour me surprised 🙃

Chronos: The New Dawn review

Combat in Cronos feels grating at times. I felt like I was almost always either cheesing my way through packs of Orphans by the skin of my teeth in an effort to save precious resources or forced to spend everything I had to take just one big guy down. But then, sometimes I found myself blasting through enemies with ease without having to use too much ammo at all—the difficulty level of encounters just didn't seem consistent enough for me to ever get a read on the situation at hand.

I found Chronos' story similarly muddled, and it takes its sweet time to get going. For the first eight hours or so, all the game seems to be is yet another take on the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic. I don't know if it's because I had a rather nasty time over those few years or whether it's just that the subject has been completely overdone at this point, but I really have no patience left for tales about being placed under a restrictive lockdown, barred from social gatherings, and kept in the dark.