Fresh off delivering a superb psychological horror experience with 2024’s Silent Hill 2 remake, Bloober Team has turned its attention to creating a snarling spiritual successor to the Dead Space series with Cronos: The New Dawn. Following up Silent Hill 2 was always going to be a difficult task, though, and while Cronos is certainly an enjoyable and creepy affair, it’s hard not to feel slightly disappointed that it doesn’t leave quite the same impression.
Set in the ruined, futuristic hellscape of a plague-ravaged Polish city, the game offers a fascinating and ominous setting for its grisly action. Unfortunately, its somewhat uninspired combat doesn’t do enough to separate it from the necromorph-slaying series that clearly influenced it. Cronos still provides a solid dose of eerie, mutant-killing survival-horror action, but calling it a new dawn for the genre would be a stretch.
We play as the Traveler, an investigator exploring the ruined city of New Dawn after her partner disappears. Most survivors have become bloodthirsty mutants, with the exception of the city’s strangely friendly stray cats. The Traveler can also use time rifts to revisit the past, harvest the essence of residents before the plague takes them, and question them for clues. The Traveler herself is a helmeted, near-silent figure reminiscent of a more ruthless Mandalorian. As she collects more essences, however, her mental state begins to deteriorate, leading to disturbing hallucinations that blur the line between reality and nightmare.
While Cronos uses familiar survival-horror locations like crumbling apartments and eerie hospitals, its warped, dreamlike architecture gives each area a distinct feel. Unfortunately, the game is weighed down by repetitive filler, from restoring power to crawling through grotesque biomass-filled corridors. These sequences quickly become predictable, especially when the same wall-dwelling enemies repeatedly ambush you. Although Cronos maintains a dark and unsettling atmosphere. There are plenty of jump scares, but few genuinely frightening moments. Still, its environmental storytelling, blood-soaked locations, scattered notes, and audio logs create a compelling world that feels both lived-in and disturbingly lifeless.
Throughout the journey, you can find different gun variants by following the story or exploring locked areas. However, most are only minor variations of the pistol, shotgun, and assault rifle, offering different firing styles rather than meaningful power upgrades. A powerful railgun is also available, but limited inventory space makes it difficult to carry.
Oddly, each weapon variant takes up its own inventory slot, despite the Traveler’s gun seemingly transforming between types, making the system feel unnecessarily restrictive.
More importantly, Cronos wears its Dead Space influences openly, from blood-written messages and familiar animations to zero-gravity sections. Unfortunately, its combat doesn’t match the creativity of Dead Space. While that series encourages strategic use of stasis and telekinesis, Cronos mostly boils down to shooting enemies in the head, taking out their legs, or blowing up nearby barrels. The result is functional but rarely encourages experimentation.
It therefore has an interesting feature called “Time Oddities.” This time-manipulation ability lets you reverse the paths of orb-like “oddities,” creating environmental puzzles that require you to restore parts of the world to their previous state. You might rewind a collapsed bridge to create a path across a gap, restore a destroyed tunnel to open up a new route, or reverse the movement of objects to clear obstacles in your way. The puzzles aren’t particularly difficult, but there’s something satisfying about watching a ruined environment briefly return to how it once was before allowing you to progress. It’s a clever idea that fits nicely with the game’s time-travel theme, although it never becomes particularly complex. Unfortunately, the mechanic has very little impact on combat beyond occasionally restoring explosive barrels during boss fights. It would have been much more interesting if time manipulation could also be used creatively against enemies, giving you more ways to approach encounters.
My favourite feature in this game by a mile are the gravity boots. They allow you to walk across walls and ceilings, but the most interesting sections have you jumping between floating platforms. Each platform becomes your new surface, letting you leap to the next one while the camera remains level even though the Traveler herself may be standing at a strange angle. That disconnect between the character’s orientation and the camera creates a wonderfully disorienting effect and makes these sections some of the game’s most memorable moments.
Cronos: The New Dawn is a fun, intriguing sci-fi survival horror-shooter, with lots of fun exploring, but its lack creativity in regards to the combat system prevents it from being seen as anything other than an inspiration from Dead Space. The visuals are still stunning and the gravityboots are the best part, but that’s it. It’s good enough for one playthrough, but that’s really it. A second playthrough, which unlocks a 3rd ending is usually rushed through just to see a slightly different outcome, if you choose the 3rd option at the very end, but the gameplay itself isn’t affected at all.
