Cronos: The New Dawn review – The fear of change

Hallways. Endless hallways of concrete, steel panels, and mutated flesh. It’s dark, and a guttural gurgling sound is coming from around the corner. An iron spaceman stomps through the hall with each step booming and echoing when it’s not squelching from viscera. A screech, an electrical charge, and finally a gunshot. Cronos: The New Dawn is thick with atmosphere and encounters that pierce through the relative silence. It leaves a fantastic first impression, but sadly this song only has one note.

Cronos is another survival horror game from Bloober Team, the team responsible for 2024’s acclaimed Silent Hill 2 remake. The pitch is pretty simple: take the survival horror formula the team has built and solidified with their past releases, and infuse it into a brand new IP that the team can carry into the future as its flagship franchise. Again, the first impression is fantastic, and it’s undoubtedly polished, but it suffers from an overall lack of original ideas.

If you compare the Silent Hill 2 remake to the original, you can see the influences of modern survival horror games seep through — and like almost all third-person shooters, a lot of inspiration comes from Resident Evil 4. That game heavily influenced later survival horrors like Dead Space, The Evil Within, and Alan Wake, and with the SH2 remake and now Cronos, its influence feels ubiquitous with the genre. 

RE4 influences include the third-person perspective, enemies reacting to limbs being shot, upgradeable weapons, treasures to sell, and a mostly linear level design with a few side areas with treasures and resources to find. These are all present in Cronos, though the bigger Resident Evil inspiration comes from the remake of the original. Crimson Head zombies are faster and stronger than your standard shambling corpse, and they will spawn from the corpses of downed zombies in REmake if you don’t burn those bodies.

It’s a fantastic mechanic that makes even experienced players think twice about their routes and resources, and it’s present in Cronos. Any mutated zombie beastie you encounter in Cronos can absorb and merge with the corpse of another creature, and this gives them a predictable – and intimidating – power up, vastly increasing their health, speed, and damage output. 

To counter this, you’re given Torch fuel which you can use to burn up bodies and select fleshy obstructions. Torch fuel can be crafted, or given out freely from certain resource vending machines — as long as you’ve used what you previously had available. This means the resource management aspect of burning bodies is more of an afterthought, except for when you’re in those long, long hallways.

Which neatly wraps us back into the main problem with Cronos: The New Dawn: it has no variation. It is afraid of change. The hallways feel endless, and I regularly found myself feeling bewildered and lucky to find the critical path thanks to one key issue: there’s no map. It is a more linear adventure than most of the aforementioned survival horror games, but not to the point where a map wouldn’t be useful. Making this issue worse, sometimes taking a step down a path basically locks you into it until you can wrap back around. Halfway through the game you get gravity boots that can send you flying towards select gravity pads — but just because you can get to a pad doesn’t mean you can make the return journey. 

The lack of a map does an absolutely incredible job of making navigating the game world far more frustrating than it needs to be, but it’s not the only frustration. Save points aren’t too frequent, so autosaves before enemy encounters are appreciated. But you don’t get an autosave when passing that boundary a second time — so if you double-back to pick up resources, you’ll need to do that on each reattempt. There are also no autosaves following big encounters like boss fights, and you just might be stuck in a situation that requires several minutes of gameplay after the fight to get to a save point. I guess I was a fool for expecting the game not to force me to kill a boss again when I turned the game off for the night after a stressful encounter. I also do not appreciate the enemies preparing attacks around corners that require damage and death in order to learn what to do, and the multiple minutes of gameplay it requires to get back to that point.

After you manage to find your target and extract them from the past as society breaks down, you’ll be almost immediately sent straight back into a series of labyrinthine hallways of concrete, steel panels, and mutated flesh. You do get to chat to The Warden, an old and mysterious Traveller that knows more than he lets on, but the Travellers talk like AI chat bots that require loading time between each word. I was interested in what they had to say, but didn’t want to dedicate the minutes required for them to get through the dialogue.

I don’t dislike Cronos: The New Dawn, but the minor frustrations coupled with the overall tedium wear on you. It’s a polished game that works well, but shooting zombie mutants gets old, and raiding boxes for batteries isn’t that exciting in the first place. A decently atmospheric horror for the Halloween season, but not quite the new era of Bloober Team that I was hoping for.