It’s clear that Bloober Team knows that they need to capitalize on this moment. Last year, they did the impossible and silenced doubters by remaking Silent Hill 2 to near universal acclaim. Now, they’re releasing an original title called Cronos: The New Dawn, and they’re promoting the hell out of it with frequent interviews and trailers, including one at Gamescom that was preceded by an onstage appearance of their main character. More people than ever know their studio now, so Cronos is pulling out all the stops to make a large scale game that combines elements of Dead Space, The Thing, and 12 Monkeys into something that still manages to incorporate their unique cultural perspective. But is the game good enough to meet this moment for them?

Right off the bat, you’re dropped into the story without much context. You play a Traveler who has just been awakened to replace her predecessor who has died in the line of duty. Already clad in a massive space suit, you’re being released from some sort of strange pod and given a calibration test reminiscent of the Blade Runner 2049 Baseline Test, asking you to choose options while doing word association or Rorschach Tests. Upon completion of this examination, you’re given the objective of locating the body of your predecessor so you can continue with your Calling, and that’s about all you get.

The world you begin exploring is a bleak landscape of urban decay teeming with horrific, fleshy mutants. You slowly find out through a combination of notes and audio messages that you’re in a version of Poland that was ravaged by a mysterious event in the 1980s known as the Change, turning people into creatures called Orphans. The Traveler works for The Collective, trying to find holes in time that allow them to the past in hopes of finding specific people from before the Change and collect their Essence, which is basically their soul. There are a lot of proper nouns thrown your way off the bat, but they create a sense of mystery that drives you through the game.

All this exposition is received with a cold and robotic attitude from the Traveler who blindly follows her orders, making the vague direction you’re given feel even stranger and more suspect. As she collects essences from the past and incorporates them into her suit, it begins affecting her psyche, leading to surreal moments and clever character development. It’s a clever hook that provides a unique way to interact with characters that are trapped in your own mind, allowing her cold demeanor to gradually thaw throughout the 16 to 20 hour campaign.

Various NPCs add depth through little short stories discovered throughout the narrative, providing different perspectives on the strange and horrible world you’re exploring. In my notes, I wrote down several quotes from these characters that I thought were particularly interesting or insightful, which is something I don’t feel like I did in their previous original game, The Medium. The story loses a little bit of focus at the end as it tries to throw in some late twists that make the story more about personal stakes than the larger apocalypse, but it comes together enough by the end to make the narrative a success.

While the story kept me interested throughout, the real draw of the game was the gameplay. It’s classic action-survival horror, building on the foundation of Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space, with several wrinkles that make it stand out from the crowd. There aren’t many puzzles throughout that go further than searching for and collecting keys or codes to unlock new areas, and the one actual Silent Hill-style puzzle near the end ends up feeling a bit silly and out of place. The level design keeps you from getting lost, even without a map, unlocking fun shortcuts that allow you to loop back to your traditional Resident Evil-style safe room, which in the fiction are set up by previous Travelers that preceded you, where you can save and deposit items.

The real shining star of the gameplay is the thrilling combat that pushes your resource management skills with very smart tactical decisions it forces you to make in the heat of the moment. You’re provided with an arsenal of weapons that expands throughout the game, including sci-fi takes on classic handguns, shotguns, rifles, etc, and crucially each of them can be charged for a more powerful shot. Since ammo is fairly scarce, you’re incentivized to take the time to wait for the charged shot, but it’s risky to do when things are getting hectic. With Orphans bearing down on you, you need to quickly figure out if you want to take the extra second or two to conserve precious bullets, or if a quick flurry of shots is a better bet to control the crowd.

The best wrinkle on the combat is one that cleverly combines narrative theming and mechanical complexity. The plague that affects the world is one that causes people to not only mutate into horrible fleshy monsters, but also gives them the desire to merge with each other. This means when you kill an Orphan, another monster could come by and merge with its corpse to become vastly stronger. Burning their bodies will prevent this, but the flame-based resources are some of the most limited, so every kill gives you a choice. Headshots have a chance to stagger an enemy that’s in the process of merging with a corpse, but is it worth the risk of possibly missing the shot? I’ve desperately used my flamethrower fuel early in a fight, only to scramble to deal with my lack of fire later in the fight as things got worse. These kinds of risk-reward decisions are the ones I love to make, combining twitch shooting skill with smart strategic choices.

Even though the visual design of the Orphans isn’t anything we haven’t seen before, they are well-rendered versions of classic morphing flesh monsters a la The Thing or Dead Space. Importantly, they have enough variations that are visually distinct enough that you can tell what tactics you’re going to need at a glance. I feel like this is something I always harp on in more actiony horror games, and Cronos delivers on variety in a way that keeps you on your toes. You’ve got quicker weak ones, hulking tough ones, wall crawling variants, ones that have armor that need to be shot in specific weak points, and even some that will explode and leave acid for a brief period of time. It’s pretty thrilling when they mix them up, forcing you to prioritize your targets in whatever way you think is best to deal with them.

My favorite enemy variant is one that they smartly deploy when they need to slow down the pace. Fleshy biomass grows all over the walls, adding a unique visual flair to the urban decay, and these walls sometimes hide stationary enemies that will shoot out tentacles and grab you. While that may sound annoying and cheap, the game gives you a gun attachment that allows you to see a visual indicator of an enemy’s health, providing a way to tell which bodies in the wall are just corpses and which ones are going to grab you. These enemies make a distinct noise when they’re around, and it always put me on edge as I was carefully scanning ahead to make sure I wasn’t ambushed.

To make combat even more challenging, this is a classic survival horror game in the resource management sense as well. Cronos only gives you a small amount of inventory slots, making planning key to success. There truly aren’t a ton of puzzle items that you need to be carrying with you at all times, so most of your inventory will be dedicated to guns and ammo, but even that’s not the easiest decision. Two charges of your flamethrower can take up the same amount as several shotgun rounds, so which is more valuable to you in the moment? A clever little wrinkle to this you find early on is a bolt cutter that can give you access to chained up doors that are often full of resources, but bringing the bolt cutter with you is a huge burden on your strained inventory, especially for just the chance of finding a bonus room.

In addition to your inventory, you’ll also be collecting resources that can be used to craft items. These don’t count towards your inventory space, but do have limits themselves, preventing you from hoarding them for so long that you never actually end up using them. I generally don’t like crafting in games, but there’s only two resources so it never feels overwhelming. Coming across another scrap of metal at the exact moment you need to craft more shotgun shells always feels so satisfying, and the choices you make between crafting ammo or health kits truly end up feeling life or death.

There are some upgrades you can purchase as you progress, and while they don’t feel particularly innovative, they are useful in the long run. Being able to buy more inventory slots or having gun charge faster were at the top of my priority list, with other things like more health or faster reload speed also helping out. This does help you stay in line with the difficulty curve, as the intensity of the encounters ramps up as you go.

Bloober Team has been clear in interviews that they want Cronos to be challenging, and all these combat elements deliver in a way that feels tough, but fair. While there were some encounters that I had to try several times, including many of the fun and challenging boss fights, I was never frustrated. I found myself saying “this time I think I got it” rather than “I can’t believe I have to do that all over again,” which is a good sign that they’ve hit a sweet spot. Finishing a huge arena battle by killing an enemy with your last bullet was a common occurrence, but there was always some time afterwards for me to resupply before getting thrown back into the fire.

Exploration is also spiced up by a couple unique gimmicks that change the way you interact with the landscape. In the world of Cronos, there are several places, generally around the tears you are trying to use to travel through time, where the rules of reality are starting to break down. Very often you’ll find buildings that look like they are in the middle of being destroyed, with debris floating ominously in the air. Sometimes there are strands of energy that connect these anomalies, and you can use a feature of your weapon to revert the area into a previous state, making pathways and connections that weren’t there before. One of my favorite uses of this ability was using it to rewind explosive barrels to reuse them in battle, making your knowledge of their placement around the arenas valuable to your ability to set up traps for groups of Orphans.

There are also areas where previous Travelers have set up special surfaces that you can navigate with gravity boots, allowing you to walk on walls and ceilings as you launch yourself from one surface to another. Both of these features add a nice complexity to the visual design of areas, even if they aren’t sources of actual challenge. There were a couple encounters where you were fighting enemies that were on different planes than you, with you walking on the wall perpendicular to the floor they occupied, and I wish it was something the game did more to vary up the encounters in more unique ways.

Level design remains strong throughout, with spaces that feel good to navigate, but early areas feel a little bit same-y visually. The game starts with lots of city streets and apartment complexes that are overtaken with gore and equipped with rusting future tech, and it isn’t until later that we start getting more thematically interesting areas that change it up a bit. All the areas do provide lore notes that tell the tales of those that lived and died there, making the spaces feel more alive while fleshing out the narrative. One standout bit of environmental storytelling was a house that had notes from a sculptor that told a wonderfully creepy tale that you slowly uncovered through both notes and set dressing.

As with many of Bloober Team’s other games, the sound design in this stands out, creating an ominous atmosphere throughout. Orphans have wonderfully weird squelching noises that herald their appearance, and the Traveler herself makes great stomping sounds to give weight to her massive suit. The retrofuturistic technology you utilize makes great noises as it whirls away, helping break up the soundscape in a unique way. The score features some nice synthy tracks that add to the mood, and the safe room music is a wonderful addition to the pantheon of comforting tunes for places to relax among the horrors.

While the narrative of the game was satisfying in the end, I just wish the game was a little more clear about what it was trying to say with its story. Maybe I’m not familiar enough with the cultural context of the 1980s Poland depicted in the game, but it always felt like it was on the verge of making a thematic point but never quite got there. There are plenty of great moments of questioning authority figures that clearly don’t have the public’s best interest in mind, but I wish that part of it felt more unique and resonant. I can see some parallels between your organization being called the Collective, the Orphan’s desire to merge, and the Communist party that ruled over Poland during this time, but these similarities never really synthesize into a coherent thesis. It ended up feeling like a missing piece that would have elevated the story from good to great.

If you would have asked me to predict Bloober Team’s next original project after playing The Medium, I never would have seen this coming, but they stepped up and crafted a game more mechanically complex and narratively ambitious than any of their other original titles. It’s definitely a passion project for them, combining several influences into something that manages to still feel like their own vision. Its combination of Eastern European architecture, clunky retrofuturistic technology, and gory creatures make for a unique visual style, even if it’s constructed of familiar components. The tense gameplay requires you to both properly prepare for encounters and think tactically on your feet, making for one of the most satisfying challenges in the action-horror genre. While I’m excited that they will be remaking the original Silent Hill as their next project, after Cronos, I’m even more interested in whatever new original ideas they have for us next.

4.5 skulls out of 5

Cronos: The New Dawn is available now digitally on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series, and the Nintendo Switch 2.

It will be available physically for PlayStation 5 & Nintendo Switch 2.