Cronos: The New Dawn is an excellent survival horror game, offering legitimately tough battles, scary monsters, and some intense resource management. Its retro futuristic 1980s Poland setting creates a combination of brutalist architecture and function over fashion tech that creates a unique setting. The narrative mystery delivers on exciting twists and revelations, although the questions I wanted answered by the end were not the questions Cronos: The New Dawn wanted to answer.
Cronos: The New Dawn
Developer: Bloober Team
Price: $60
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (reviewed)
The publisher provided a PC code for this review
You kick off as the Traveler, the latest in a lineage of fixers for the Collective, a mysterious future entity responsible for time-travel. You quickly learn your purpose here is to find and collect the essence of people from before The Change, a viral disease that turned people into fleshy monsters, while also unleashing an anomaly on the area that has distorted gravity and more. Cronos: The New Dawn doles out information to you slowly, constantly providing new pieces of information that answer one question but create two more.
As you navigate, you will explore the apocalyptic Nowa Huta, the specific area where the incident occurred, discovering the flesh monsters. The enemies function like zombies, and even fit cleanly into archetypes you might expect–the big one, poison, ranged, etc.–but where it puts a twist on that is via merging. Whenever you kill an enemy, their body remains on the ground unless burned by fire. A living enemy can approach the body and absorb it, gaining health and their powers, meaning you might be facing a big poison enemy if you aren’t careful. You can burn bodies, but the limited inventory means constantly weighing whether it’s worth it or not.
The combat in Cronos: The New Dawn is its best quality, constantly pushing just how difficult it can be without reaching a point of frustration. It also makes the bold choice to not have a dodge option, something common in survival horror games, and is often an easy out from getting hit. Without the dodge, you have to be far more cautious about the distance between you and your foes. You can melee, but it’s weak and doesn’t consistently stun enemies, making it a last resort. On top of this, most weapons need to be charged to deal maximum damage, so you need to make space as much as possible, something that can be challenging in the tight combat arenas and areas.
Cronos: The New Dawn is a Challenging Survival Horror That Rewards Caution
The inventory system is incredibly limited, with only a handful of slots to start. Even by the end, I only had 11 or so, making it tough to carry everything, especially as you find more weapons. I found myself needing to consider the trade-offs, like would I prefer to have this partial stack of pistol ammo or a healing item. I could also do satisfying things, like placing a mine down, picking up ammo, loading it into my empty gun, and picking my mine back up to work within the limits. I did find myself backtracking to the safe rooms often to access storage as someone who loves to pick up everything, but even that playstyle was supported, with some extra effort on my part.
The boss fights are pretty sparing, but each one offers a unique enemy with certain ways to defeat them. These arenas were typically filled with more resources, too, so while coming in underprepared absolutely makes these fights harder, it doesn’t make them impossible, which is important with how low your resources can get in certain sections. The boss fights also often have special tricks to make them a bit easier, which are relayed via audio files and text in the environment, really rewarding and engaging with notes.
Cronos: The New Dawn isn’t heavy on puzzles, but there are often optional areas that require you to remember every locked door you see, but because these were infrequent and always contained a meaningful reward, I was excited when I got a key to a room I saw three hallways back, even if it meant a lot of down time walking back and forth. There are a few more involved puzzles, but even those were never overly difficult to understand, and once you had the necessary items, you could eventually solve it.
The environments in Cronos: The New Dawn often tread through the sort of places you would expect, abandoned hospitals, apartments, the steel works, and more. But there are so many small choices being made that give them a particular feel. The brutalist architecture makes even apartment flats feel like a prison, but the world ended near Christmas, so trees with lights on them make the insides feel more like homes, creating a nice contrast. It doesn’t often mix in colors either, instead with a heavy grey, brown, and red color palette, which makes the small touches really stand out. The biggest flaw in navigation is that Cronos: The New Dawn can often feel linear in its design, with even interconnected spaces feeling more like a circuit than a building where you can freely explore. This makes areas feel much smaller than they appear visually, not in a stressful horror sense, but more like an explorer who hasn’t managed to actually go that far.
The narrative of Cronos: The New Dawn is quite compelling, especially as you learn more not just about the disaster that happened but about yourself and your agency. As you might expect, not everything is exactly what it seems, but there are some questions that I was really hoping to get answered that weren’t by the time credits rolled, but the conclusion is still satisfying and certainly wraps up the direct story. Some of the performances of the side characters can feel far too animated and over-the-top compared to the tone of the rest of the game, but it never fully feels out of place, just a tad odd.
One element that feels underbaked is the Essences, which you primarily collect as part of the main story. However, there are optional ones as well that provide small buffs. You can only hold three and have to delete one to make room for a new one, forcing these tough choices, but it doesn’t feel consequential enough for the emphasis placed on it. Holding these Essences also impacts your character’s mental state, with hallucinations and voices coming from them, but this results in one-note scares in the form of hallucinations appearing and disappearing quickly in a way that feels a little trite compared to other, more thoughtful systems in Cronos: The New Dawn.
The Final Word
Cronos: The New Dawn is a great survival horror game, utilizing its tough and grueling combat to complement the grueling and unforgiving atmosphere of Eastern Europe in the 1980s. It pushes the staples of the genre, like inventory management, to their extremes, without feeling overly difficult or unfair. The narrative won’t blow you away, and it doesn’t answer some of the more compelling questions its sci-fi story sets up, but you always want to learn more and find the next piece of information. It’s not quite transcendent in the way some recent survival horror games have been, but it’s a great time and absolutely worth diving into.
MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
