Cronos: The New Dawn is a bold new sci-fi horror from Polish developer Bloober Team. It proudly wears its influences on its sleeve, while standing out on its own with a brazen visual style.
In a way, it can lack originality – especially where gameplay is concerned – but what it does, it does really well. As fans of the likes of Dead Space and The Evil Within, we couldn’t get enough of this twisted sci-fi mystery.
The world is in ruin, all thanks to a calamitous event called ‘The Change’. Buildings are fractured, chunks of land float around aimlessly, and it’s all coated in an oppressive layer of fog. What’s worse is that, as you delve deeper into the leftovers of its neighbourhoods — styled after the real Nowa Huta region in Poland — mutated abominations fester.
You play as The Traveller, a time-jumping figure tasked with heading back to 1980s Poland to collect the essence of key figures. Whether this is to save the humans of Earth or not is a little up in the air, as the mysterious Collective’s intentions are ominous at best.
The story was our first big surprise with Cronos. It’s the kind of narrative that isn’t afraid to leave you with more questions than answers. The central story flirts with ideas of where the disease came from, how The Change happened, and what your predecessor had to do with it all.
These questions (and answers) are told through distinct locations, whether those are an apartment complex or a steelworks factory. Letters and audio tapes fill in some of the blanks, with intermittent cutscenes doing the rest of the work.
We love how our protagonist, known only as ND-3576, is played, with discordant dialogue and small flickers of humanity through her delivery. ND-3576 is almost funny at times, despite the crushing world that surrounds her.
While it did admittedly take us a moment to settle into the groove of the game’s narrative, one thing you’ll immediately gel with is its visuals. If Cronos is scored on its visual design alone, it would get full marks. This claustrophobic world is filled with brutalist architecture, phenomenal lighting, horrifying creature design, and highly detailed environments.
The aesthetic carries on through strong cinematography, and while levels can be a bit samey towards the end, there’s always some new visual aspect to enjoy. And topping it all off is a phenomenal score that pulsates between tense soundscapes, synthy tracks, and even ethereally unhinged choir work. It merges together to create a visual and auditory delight.
How much of that influences the gameplay experience, however? Well, the gameplay in Cronos is likely the most familiar aspect of the game. The guns, the level design itself, and even features like a stomp are all pulled from other games within the genre. You’ve likely played something like Cronos in that regard, even if everything it does is still to a high standard.
There are some little pockets of unique magic, though, like the design of the creature nests, which are lined with the mutated remains of the fallen. Paranoia sets in as the gurgling sound design lets you know an enemy is nearby, but it’s hard to decipher at times what is the environment and what is an enemy. It’s a deliberate design choice that keeps us on the edge of our seat.
Then there’s the body scanner indicator, a little coloured marker on your guns that indicate which bodies are alive and waiting to pounce, and which are truly dead. It’s a small thing, but it massively amps immersion as you walk through hallways littered with mutated corpses.
Then there are the more out there areas of the game, as you use gravity boots to jump across various platforms. It’s trippy and always delivers some of the best visuals in the game, as do segments that see environments change in an instant, constantly keeping you on your toes.
Another particularly tense inclusion is the merge mechanic, which sees enemies try to combine their power with foes you’ve beaten. If they merge, enemies become bigger, stronger, and much more difficult to kill. You can burn bodies if you have a fuel torch on you, but even still, it’s a great way to amp up the tension, especially since enemies are so aggressive.
Enemy variety is quite strong, as you get regular enemies, chargers, big brutes, multi-legged acid spewers that scale walls and ceilings, and then a tougher, combined version of enemies too.
What disappoints slightly is the combat. Gunplay is solid enough, and it certainly spices up in the latter parts of the game as new equipment and weapons are discovered. However, we couldn’t help but feel like it’s missing something like the dismemberment from Dead Space. The merge feature is nice, but overall combat lacks that dynamic feel.
We don’t want that coming off like combat is bad, however, because it certainly isn’t. There are some fights across its campaign, especially regarding bosses, that are a lot of fun, especially when you can let loose with your weapons.
Between combat encounters, Cronos will see you explore fairly linear spaces, with a couple of offshoot optional areas. It’s in these optional areas you’ll often find an abundance of Energy and Core currency, ammo, pieces of lore, and even weapon variants. Sort of like a Resident Evil, you’ll hunt down keys, passcodes, and random knick-knacks to unlock doors, or there will be the occasional puzzle.
Energy and Cores are used to upgrade your character. Energy deals with weapon upgrades, improving damage, stability, clip size and so on, whereas Cores upgrade inventory space, health, and gadgets.
There’s a nice flow of currency and upgrades, so across the roughly 16 hours it takes to complete the game, you’ll always feel like you’re making meaningful progress with your character. It’ll likely entice players back for the new game plus mode and harder difficulty unlocked once you’ve completed the game.
No matter how upgraded your character is, however, there’s always a good power balance. Inventory space is limited, so you need to choose your weapons, ammo, gadgets, and healing supplies wisely. And once your inventory is full, you need to delete or use something to clear the space — you can’t just drop it and come back for it later.
It might feel restrictive for some, but we personally enjoyed managing our inventory, figuring out which items would serve us best and whether items we found along the way were really worth taking up the space. It means when combat encounters come around, we’re looking for ways to deal with enemies efficiently.
We played the game on PS5 Pro, where there’s a quality and performance mode, targeting 30 and 60 frames-per-second respectively. The game looks stunning as we’ve mentioned, but there are often frame rate stutters as you enter new areas. We’re not Digital Foundry, so we didn’t have counters out, but the frame rate did feel like it was aiming for 60 rather than locked at it.
Additionally, DualSense haptics are a little underwhelming. The thuds of gunshots are appropriately chunky, but adaptive trigger implementation is minimal, and some aspects are missing any form of haptics. It’s a shame after Bloober’s excellent DualSense work with its last project, Silent Hill 2.
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