Cronos: The New Dawn solidifies the Bloober Team style

Seemingly against all odds, Silent Hill 2’s 2024 remake was both a critical and commercial success story. Bloober Team’s previous titles, 2021’s The Medium and 2023’s Layers of Fear, got saddled with a mixed reception, and fans feared that Silent Hill 2 would meet the same fate. But in rebuilding a horror classic, something wonderful happened, and SH2 just worked. It didn’t reinvent the wheel, and took a more familiar, post-Resident Evil 4 approach to camera and world design, but it was a resounding success, and proved to all the doubters that Bloober Team understood exactly what it takes to create a faithful, modern interpretation of a horror classic. With Cronos: The New Dawn, Bloober Team doesn’t want to change a winning formula.

Cronos is a time-travelling sci-fi adventure where you play as The Traveler as they explore an alt-history, ‘80s-era Poland. “We chose the ‘80s in Cronos because it wasn’t a pleasant time for Poland,” co-game director Jacek Zięba explains to DBLTAP. A bad time for the country makes for a great horror setting, though. “So it's good for horror and good for our story. “

Nowa Huta was intended to be a post-WW2 socialist district in Soviet Kraków, but its once-utopian hopes and ideals never came to fruition, and the district – along with the infamous steelworks – are now a point of contention in the minds of modern locals. “We chose Nowahuta because it's special; the utopian city with brutalist architecture that works very well with our cassette futurism,” Zięba explains. “But it’s also monumental.” It’s monumental in the literal sense too, as a planned but never-built clocktower has become one of the game’s most essential pieces of iconography.

The goal in Cronos: The New Dawn is to find information on where select important people were when The Change happened and altered humanity, and then time travel to where and when they are to extract them before The Change occurs.

The Change is an apocalyptic event that collapsed streets, ravaged buildings, and transformed the human populace into Orphans — mutant creatures that grow in power from eating flesh. Any flesh. That’s not just a bit of lore to justify why they chase and attack you, but Orphans can merge with dead Orphans to become bigger, stronger, and more difficult to take down.

To fight against the threat of the “Merge system” you must burn up the corpses of monsters you take down, forcing you to smartly weigh up how to use your resources. A quick tap of a button sends a wave of flames out from the Traveler, and this can burn up corpses or masses of biological material to clear a path to new areas. Fuel for your flames is strictly limited, so it simply won’t be possible to use fuel on each corpse you drop. You’ll need to pick your moments carefully and make careful choices about which corpses might pose a threat in the future and which won’t.

The Traveler is resistant to flames, at least, which is nice. Explosive barrels and fuel cans can be shot to detonate them, but you can also just punch them and tank the damage if you’re being chased by enemies. Since ammo is also in short supply, you’ll want to make each shot count, and that’s where charging your shots comes into play.

Every weapon can charge its shots, so instead of wimpy pistol pop shots, you can tear flesh apart with a single charged bullet aimed at a weak point. The catch is that you’ll have to stand still to let 'em rip, and enemies have projectiles that aren’t threatening until you have to stand still. It brings a small risk versus reward element to every encounter — if you want to use your limited resources efficiently, you’re going to have to put yourself in danger. It’s a lot like running into a crowd of Ganados in Resident Evil 4 in hopes of pulling off a headshot into a roundhouse kick combo, but just a bit more grounded.

It’s not accidental, either. When asked how much Resident Evil has inspired the team, Zięba simply says: “A lot.”

Co-game director Wojciech Piejko agrees: “Resident Evil 2 remake is one of my favorite games of all time.” It’s clear that the team would love to tackle a Resident Evil project, but only time will tell when and if that will happen.

The final boss of the preview build had me using up all of my ammo in my initial attempts, unsure if I actually had enough resources to finish the fight, only to pull off a smooth run with efficient and precise charged shots delivered one after another. I felt rewarded for learning the arena layout and what to expect from the monster, on top of my slick shooting. If you do ever run out of ammo entirely, you can punch and stomp your way out of small-scale encounters with satisfying Dead Space-like weight.

At its heart, it feels a lot like Silent Hill 2 remake’s game design template again, but with a distinctive setting. That’s no bad thing, though; Silent Hill 2 is a product of decades of survival horror game design being filtered through a genre classic, and that’s why it was so well received. Cronos might not have the iconic setting and characters of Silent Hill, but it nails the remake’s gameplay.

The Brutalist sci-fi setting and real-world inspirations give Cronos: The New Dawn a distinct vibe and atmosphere, which is unlike most survival horror games. It doesn’t need to stay faithful to any past game or story; it can stand as proof positive that even when left to their own devices to make and publish their own game, the developers at Bloober Team can make a beloved survival horror experience. That’s the hope, at least, and from the first few hours, I have faith that Cronos will be one of the best horror games of 2025.