Cronos: The New Dawn review: Bloober Team’s latest travels back to the past, in more ways than one

This time last year, Bloober Team was just about to prove itself.

Having previously struggled to establish itself as a top studio following lukewarm receptions to the likes of Blair Witch, the Layers of Fear games and its divisive 2021 title The Medium, players were concerned when Bloober was confirmed as the studio behind Konami’s remake of Silent Hill 2.

Despite this, the Polish studio managed to pull off what very few studios do when their project is earmarked for failure by the often stubborn gaming community – it proved the internet wrong.

Instead of the missed opportunity some were predicting, Silent Hill 2 was an exceptional modern retelling of Konami’s classic survival horror, to the extent that the studio is now working on a remake of the first game in the series too. Until then, however, we have Cronos: The New Dawn to keep us occupied.

Rather than the core Silent Hill 2 team, Cronos is co-directed by the producer and designer of The Medium. It’s perhaps fitting, because it left me feeling more like The Medium did – it’s a game that looks and sounds fantastic, but will ultimately divide players due to its awkward plot and somewhat clunky core gameplay.

Cronos: The New Dawn – 25 minutes of gameplay footage:

Cronos puts players in the role of The Traveler, a mysterious female protagonist wearing a large diving suit style apparatus. The Traveler works for The Collective, a similarly mysterious group which has tasked her with travelling back through time to collect people who survived The Change, a cataclysmic event that took place in the 1980s and turned the human race into monsters. Sure, you remember it.

The general aim at first, then, is to explore post-apocalyptic Poland in search of time rifts, which will take the Traveler back to the same location in the 1980s, where they can then find their target survivor and perform a harvesting process to take their essence. You can then bring these essences with you, giving you new abilities.

It’s an interesting concept for a storyline but one that starts to get a little convoluted – which will come as no surprise to those who played The Medium – and which admittedly had me scratching my head a little throughout. Still, it wasn’t enough to stop me playing on to see what happens next, so in that respect it’s a success.

Also a success is how incredible the game looks at times. While wandering around dark and gloomy corridors doesn’t often provide the most impressive results, there are moments – often taking place outdoors – where Bloober Team takes the opportunity to show how well it can pull off environmental design.

The game’s use of ray-traced lighting is really effective at times, and there are some truly stunning scenes which had me hammering the screenshot button for my desktop wallpaper collection. Here’s a freebie I took for you:

Cronos’s gameplay is curious in that its greatest strength and most notable weakness are the same thing – its familiarity. So many elements of this game have been borrowed from other survival horrors that on one hand you have to understand Bloober for going with what’s already been proven to work, while on the other hand acknowledging that you’ve likely seen so much of this before.

The faceless protagonist with a big suit gives serious Dead Space vibes, as do some of the creature designs and the typical viewpoint, which is over the shoulder with a small flashlight-illuminated area in front of you.

The anti-gravity puzzles from Dead Space are also here thanks to the discovery of gravity boots at one point, and if you were to tell me the punching and stomping melee attack animations had been lifted directly from that game I wouldn’t need much convincing.

The safe rooms, limited ammo and the ECG line representing your health are straight out of Resident Evil, while some of the apartment designs early in the game even feel like they’ve come straight out of Bloober’s own Silent Hill 2 remake.

Other elements can’t be pinpointed to one specific game, but that’s because they’re tropes you’ve seen time and time again. Safes that require numerical codes to unlock, which are conveniently written on memos sitting on nearby tables. Doors locked with chains which require bolt-cutters. Bosses with glowing, pulsing bits that clearly have to be burst to stun them. It’s a survival horror greatest hits mixtape, for better or worse.

“So many elements of this game have been borrowed from other survival horrors that on one hand you have to understand Bloober for going with what’s already been proven to work, while on the other hand acknowledging that you’ve likely seen so much of this before.”

To its credit, Cronos is not entirely without its own ideas. If fallen enemies are left lying on the ground, other enemies are able to absorb their flesh and turn into much more powerful ones. You therefore have to try to set fire to enemies you’ve killed (using a finite resource of incendiary devices, of course) to prevent this from happening.

It’s a bit like the Crimson Heads in the GameCube remake of Resident Evil, except that was zombies eventually getting up again themselves whereas this is something you have more control over. It also makes the occasional enclosed battles – the game likes to lock you in a small area from time to time and throw a bunch of monsters at you – more tense.

After all, while normal logic dictates that when in a group battle the more enemies you kill the easier it gets, in this case the more enemies you kill the more power-ups you’re essentially leaving lying around for the others, unless you’ve got enough fire to burn them away (or make use of the conveniently located exploding barrels, another useful video game trope).

Some of the other features unlocked as you progress through the game are also interesting. One of the first ones you get is an add-on for your gun which acts like a health sensor for enemies. When you point your gun at a monster the gizmo shows a little coloured display – if they have full health this display is green, and as you wear them down it turns yellow, then red then goes off when they die.

This makes for an entertaining scene right after you pick up the sensor – which can be seen in our gameplay video above – where you make your way through a maze which has loads of seemingly dead mutated creatures hanging from the walls. By pointing your newly upgraded gun at them you can tell which ones are actually dead, and which ones make your gun light up and are therefore alive and waiting to pounce at you. It’s a nice moment of tension.

Perhaps the most divisive element of the game, however, is the lack of clear difficulty settings. Cronos is designed to overwhelm players at times, and while you can eventually upgrade your guns and your suit there are some moments even in the first couple of hours where you can expect to die a few times until you figure out how to get through certain mass enemy encounters or boss fights. It helps that sometimes the AI is dumber than a bag of guts, but even so.

This won’t be an issue to some players who will welcome the challenge, but for others who may have enjoyed The Medium – which sits on the opposite end of the spectrum because it had no combat at all and was relatively easy to get through – and are here more for the storyline, there are no real concessions here to help them through it.

Go into it aware of this, however, and Cronos is an entertaining enough survival horror that will certainly hold your attention until the credits. It’s far from original and never really does anything particularly spectacular (with the exception of its wonderful visuals), but nor does it ever do anything that’s particularly awful. It’s perfectly fine, and sometimes that’s all you need.