Over the past several years, developer Bloober Team has established itself as one of the biggest horror game studios out there. From modest outings like The Blair Witch Project, Layers of Fear, and The Medium, Bloober Team certainly had the potential to create something special.
Then last year, Bloober Team released the Silent Hill 2 remake, in a partnership with Konami, and exceeded expectations. It successfully brought the horror game classic into the modern age, expanding on certain aspects while remaining true to the original's vision. As a result, some attributed the remake's success to how excellent the original Silent Hill 2 was rather than Bloober Team's talent as a studio.
Bloober Team's next horror game, Cronos: The New Dawn, is a wholly original horror-adventure IP that aims to prove those detractors wrong, demonstrating that the studio does indeed have the sauce to create something on the same level of reverence as Silent Hill.
What's the verdict? Well, Cronos: The New Dawn certainly wears its inspirations on its sleeves. The Dead Space and Resident Evil influences are obvious, and The Bloober Team crafted a unique post-apocalyptic world with intriguing lore. Though its biggest pitfall is that there are a bit too many combat sequences to the point where it diminishes its horror atmosphere.
Cronos: The New Dawn takes place at some point in the future in Poland. As the Traveler, your job is to explore the surrounding wasteland, find temporal anomalies, and go back and forth to the 1980s to uncover the secret behind “The Change,” a cataclysmic event that turned humans into monsters called Orphans. The setup isn't anything too special, as we've seen similar ones in Resident Evil and Dead Space, where you figure out the origins of a disaster. However, what makes Cronos: The New Dawn stand out is its well-told story through the temporal anomalies.
Essentially, the Traveler has “targets” that it needs to extract life essences from in the past, as they no longer exist in the present time. They're significant individuals who contain valuable information about The Change and how to possibly find a cure. While I was initially confused about the story, the plot twists kept me engaged—I was surprised at how much I empathized with the Traveler, especially towards the end.
As the game progresses, the Traveler starts to hesitate about the extraction process and whether it actually achieves anything. This humanizes the Traveler and reveals a caring personality hidden underneath their faceless domed helmet. Along with the bevy of collectibles, including audio recordings and notes, I enjoyed learning more about how humans lived with and reacted to the disease before the Traveler came about.
The gameplay is where Cronos draws its inspiration the most. It's your typical third-person survival horror with scarce ammo to build a sense of dread. You never know when you may run out of bullets to take on upcoming enemies. However, the big twist here is that Orphans can absorb dead ones you've already taken down and morph into an even more threatening monster.
This forces you to deliberately think about how you take down Orphans. You can't kill them while they're close to other Orphans, otherwise, nearby ones will simply absorb the corpses while you're dealing with another right in front of you. You'd be surprised at how many times you get caught off guard when a giant Orphan appears and you quickly realize you left it alone to successfully merge with a dead one. This more strategic approach makes each combat encounter feel like a puzzle and helps Cronos stand out against its contemporaries.
My biggest complaint is that there are too many forced combat encounters, disrupting the game's pacing. As I progressed through the game, I became sick of rooms being locked down and having to fight my way out before continuing. Every once in a while is fine, but there were times that I'd face a mini-boss only to be required to fight off another group of Orphans shortly after with little reprieve. These encounters build tension, but after a while, I felt like I was playing a more action-oriented horror adventure like Resident Evil 4 rather than an ambient horror one. I wasn't scared of Orphans anymore, I was starting to become annoyed.
I also wish we had a few more close-combat options. Punching Orphans does almost nothing, and with how combat-heavy Cronos is, having a dodge button like in the Resident Evil 3 remake would've been appreciated to escape being cornered. This was especially troublesome as the camera had a habit of getting in too close if I was surrounded by Orphans, making it difficult for me to see around tight corridors.
In terms of upgrades and character progression, Cronos does a mostly good job with them. You're incentivized to explore every nook and cranny for ammo and money, but on occasion, you'll find cores to help enhance your suit. They include increasing your inventory space and the number of torches you can carry. The only surefire way to get rid of Orphans permanently is to burn them, making torches vital so that others can't absorb the corpses. With all these suit enhancements, along with the money I spent on upgrading the firepower and clip size of my guns, gameplay progression felt natural and well-paced.
Another form of gameplay progression is that the “essences” extracted by the Traveler also give them passive buffs. You can only have three equipped at a time, so there's a real sense of trade-off. For example, one essence lets you deal more damage against burning enemies while another reduces the amount of materials needed to fabricate items like ammo. The latter felt more immediately impactful than the former, making some essences feel a bit useless compared to others. Even so, it was a clever way to integrate the story's lore into a tangible gameplay mechanic.
Cronos: The New Dawn's rich worldbuilding makes its setting captivating to explore, and the time-traveling story is more coherent than expected. Despite being a bit too action-heavy and as a result not as atmospherically scary as it could've been, Cronos takes the best aspects of its influences to become Bloober Team's best original game so far.
