Cronos: The New Dawn

Through two Layers of Fear titles, The Medium, and finally Silent Hill 2, I have a long and varied history with developer Bloober Team. Although they always have good intentions and manage to create interesting frameworks for their stories, they have lacked sharpness, precision, and perhaps even the talent to execute their clear ambitions. In the latter case in particular, I seem to be alone in my opinion, but most people broadly agree with this assessment. Let me just say that with Cronos: The New Dawn, which, unlike Silent Hill 2 Remake, is their very own original creation, all that changes.

Cronos: The New Dawn is an original sci-fi tale about the so-called "Travellers", who are awakened one at a time and sent to the Polish city of New Dawn in 1981 during the Cold War, when the Iron Curtain was at its thickest and communism's grip on all levels of society was at its strongest. But this world is destroyed, dystopian, and abandoned. Something has happened, reality has collapsed, and the only things that now live and breathe here are monsters, which our Travellers call "Orphans". Hungry, ferocious, mindless monsters that use human bodies to "merge", to grow, to fuse together into creatures that are gruesome to say the least.

What we Travellers are actually doing in New Dawn, what relationship this reality break has with the virus that created the Orphans, and how big these Travellers really are, well, that's the central hook that holds your attention from the first characteristic frame to the end credits rolling across the screen, and what a story it is. For obvious reasons, I don't want to give too much away, but both the mythology surrounding the Travellers, the Orphans, and the world that has now completely fallen apart are so rich in identity and narrative character that the game can easily stand up to the absolute heavyweights of the genre. Relatively quickly, a strong, identifiable connection is formed to what our character calls "The Vocation", and Mandalorian-like concepts of honour and idioms emphasise how seriously they take their duties - "such is our calling", they say.

The survival horror genre, to which Cronos: The New Dawn certainly belongs, survives almost exclusively on ambiance, narrative, and the setting that you, as the player, are asked to explore, map out, and... well, survive. This world is filled to the brim with distinctive features, and they are explored and unpacked at a calm but consistent pace, without ever running the risk of overexposure or clumsy delivery. There is a sophistication here that Bloober has not previously mastered, but whether it's the areas you explore, the way your Traveller describes what they experience, or the more direct plot structure, this should be a study in solid horror storytelling going forward.

And it gets even better. Cronos: The New Dawn is relatively simple from a gameplay perspective, and even the giants of the genre are put together in the same way, so that's fine. Your Traveller has a single weapon with different distinct modes, there is an inventory system that draws a lot of inspiration from the Resident Evil series, as managing the limited space you have is crucial, and then there are ongoing ways in which you can spend resources to upgrade your suit, your weapons, and other tools. There is a deliberate weight to everything, from the way our Traveller's heavy metal boots echo against the ground as they walk, to the way you aim your Terminator-like gun at a ferocious Orphan and pull the trigger. All feedback, all sound, all design must serve the weight, and that means there is no arcade-like dexterity, but it also means that the game is so mechanically grounded that you feel a strong connection to your character and everything they do. It's a definitive reminder that the number of separate mechanics and quick controls, you know, the ones that always have this "more is better" attitude, don't always serve all design philosophies. In Cronos, you shoot, you reload, you collect resources, and you use the handful of tools you have, and each of the moments produced through this loop enhances the quality of the experience. Some would call it simplistic, I would call it intentional.

As you move through this fragmented world in search of answers, you encounter a number of Orphan types. There aren't too many different types, but the "game" you play with yourself to conserve the few resources you have means that you don't really notice the small variation of enemies that actually exists, a bit like in Dead Space Remake, for example, which also disguised a limited gallery behind the strategy the player sets for themselves. In Cronos, you are literally "ammo starved"; you really live from combat scenario to combat scenario, and this is partly due to the game's special "merge" mechanic. For every enemy you kill, you create an opening, an opportunity for other Orphans to use their bodies to make themselves stronger. If you let them, they will use the half-dead tissue to become bigger, stronger, and thus require more ammunition to take down, so you must constantly make sure to burn off the Orphans, which in itself requires resources. It's really balanced, slightly hair-splitting, and at times I was completely giving up because the game simply didn't give me enough ammunition to get by - but I managed just fine, and that's probably the whole point.

There really aren't many complaints here, there really aren't. I would say that, almost as is tradition, there can be a slightly unstable frame rate on the PS5, especially when Cronos' levels open up a bit, but other than that, the game looks absolutely brilliant and sounds even better. In addition, some may feel that the game drags on too long without exposing the game to a more direct plot, but I felt completely hooked from start to finish. Despite this, I could objectively see that some sections could have used a few breaks with a little more drama.

Overall, however, this is definitely a triumph for a studio that has taken some well-deserved knocks in the past, but which really shines here. Whereas Silent Hill 2 Remake was a comeback for many, it's ultimately not something Bloober has created itself. But Cronos is completely original, and there is no metaphor that adequately demonstrates how big a difference I feel there is between the two projects. Let's just say that Cronos is Bloober's masterpiece, and the proof I needed to really cheer them on going forward.

Such is our calling...