Cronos: The New Dawn review – classic survival horror tropes wrapped around a cool sci-fi mystery

Bloober Team takes its favourite pieces from previous survival horror greats to create something just as brutally horrific and tense, wrapping it up in an original time travel story with several mysterious threads to pull on.

More so than any other genre, horror tends to work best when it hits close to home. Bloober Team knows this more than most. Because while Cronos: The New Dawn might not mark the first time the studio has set its gritty spooks on Polish soil, it certainly is the most impactful with the way it grounds you in the developer’s home territory – despite all the supernatural elements at play.

Such knowledge has been used to create a wildly original time travel story that, while undeniably influenced by some of survival horror’s most beloved entries, never failed to leave me captivated or willing to push on for the 14 or so hours it lasted. With Cronos: The New Dawn it feels like Bloober is finally sure of its own mastery. For the first time on its own turf, rather than someone else’s.

Cronos: The New Dawn places you in the heavy-duty boots of The Traveler, an armour-clad figure of mysterious origin whose job it is to explore a war-torn Krakow that’s been taken over by mutant creatures called Orphans. She does so in an effort to jump through time and save the essence of key figures before the world’s point of collapse.

Being a sucker for a good time travel story at the best of times anyway, the one Cronos: The New Dawn spins up immediately had me hooked. And this is despite the game purposely going out of its way to explain very little to you in the early hours.

You know what your overarching purpose is and what you must do to get it done. However, what the true nature of these Orphan creatures is, how the world became ravaged, and what it all amounts to, largely stays a secret right up until just before the credits roll. Keeping such vital context hidden could have been frustrating.

Here, though, such threads serve as the primary reason I felt compelled to search around every crevice and corner. After all, especially when compared to other recent horror bouts, this is a decayed universe begging to be explored, with buildings caught mid-collapse and other cool time anomalies serving as a frequent sight. All this contrasts brilliantly with the more industrial, brutalist imagery of The Traveller herself and the shady organisation she’s employed by.

It helps that blasting through hordes of these fleshy, mutated Orphans is both chilling and satisfying in equal measure, as Cronos: The New Dawn’s over-the-shoulder perspective lets you get a handle on things without feeling too overpowered. Much like, yes, Dead Space and certainly Resident Evil 4 before it, dispatching enemies from this viewpoint has a good sense of heft to it. Doubly so since you have access to all kinds of futuristic weapons (several with alternate fire options).

Where Cronos mostly differs from its survival horror forebears, however, is in how Orphans can act, and more specifically, the ways it’s easy to screw yourself if you don’t dispose of them as efficiently as possible and as quickly as possible. You see, this is a survival horror, not just about inventory management, but enemy management too.

Whereas Dead Space famously had, ‘cut off their limbs’ as its rallying cry against the Necromorphs, Cronos: The New Dawn similarly posits one crucial recommendation: ‘don’t let them merge’. Essentially, at any time when a foe is defeated, another threat can come along and consume them to take on a bigger, stronger, more formidable form.

This makes dispatching Orphan crowds constantly a case of managing who and how – who to take down first and how to best do it. Luckily, in addition to your suite of firearms, fending off swarms using your torch-like flamethrower burst is a great way to slow them down and strategically conserve ammunition.

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Merge with me

I can’t tell you how many times I was left scrambling around an area, trying to find more resources, hearing the sound of an enemy merging and thinking, ‘damn’ as I realised just how much harder the confrontation was about to become. It makes for a unique feeling of dread, I can comfortably say I haven’t felt too often in other games of this ilk.

That said, in broader terms, I wouldn’t say that merging enemies is quite as game-changing as Dead Space’s iconic limb dismemberment, but it still works to make every combat scenario disturbingly tense, as the threat of facing off against larger monsters as a result of my own poorly timed actions constantly looms.

When you’re not trying to prevent gloopy monsters from merging, you’ll spend a good deal of time searching for your targets. A lot of the time this means exploring all kinds of dilapidated locations complete with their fair share of combat challenges and environmental puzzles. In the latter’s case, this usually boils down to finding the correct code or key by first going out of your way and doubling back on yourself.

Such actions are well-worn territory for the genre by this point, true, but it’s made more rewarding by the raft of valuables and collectables you can discover if you’re willing to explore every inch of these locations. By then visiting one of the many stations left behind by previous Travellers littered around, you can use these resources to upgrade your suit, Torch, and weapons in myriad ways, all of which gradually make it a tad easier to survive against any forthcoming nasties.

Despite how confident and absorbing Cronos: The New Dawn comes across in its setting and ideas for the most part, there are a few areas that niggled me. One is just how punishing managing your inventory can be at times. Six slots just aren’t enough to begin with, first of all, but it’s made worse by the fact that both your weapons and tools (such as the all-powerful bolt cutters) take up an entire slot.

Sure, this forced me to think more about what ammo and gizmos to bring in with me and made for some incredibly stressful bouts of resource crafting on the go, but it wasn’t ideal whenever I had to sacrifice a slot to make way for the next key puzzle item.

Then there’s the issue of ammo itself, which, rather than appear in the world according to which guns I had equipped, seemed to appear totally randomly. This would lead to combat situations that felt unnecessarily unfair, with me encumbered with, say, carbine rounds used in the Javelin gun despite me only having the handgun and shotgun equipped.

Admittedly, any unwanted ammo or supplies can be sold at a Traveller station for energy, but in the moment? It felt like the game was working against me a bit too harshly, leading me to scenarios where I’m scrambling around for more appropriate ammo (or resources needed to craft it) while in the throes of battling the next horrific nightmare of mush. That said, such punishment is almost definitely a feature implemented by Bloober Team and not a bug, which I inevitably was always able to work around.

It’d be easy to take one look at Cronos: The New Dawn and point towards all the other titles it takes influence from. Resident Evil 4’s inventory management and over-the-shoulder shooting; Dead Space’s stomping and slow-moving suit; heck, there’s even the hospital and apartment settings from Silent Hill 2 thrown in for good measure. Unashamed about its survival horror inspirations, it may be, but rather than ape these tenets and leave it at that, Cronos: The New Dawn wraps them around a wildly evocative and engaging time travel story that sets a truly atmospheric tone.

Combine this with the unique ‘merging’ nature of your foes, and it makes for a distinct flavour of horror. I’m hoping this marks the start of a bold new universe, one where Bloober Team continues to use past inspirations to forge something truly unique to itself.

Rating: 4/5