Creepy

A few hours into playing Cronos: The New Dawn, while I was creeping around a desolate and nightmarish world filled with dilapidated buildings and creepy, fleshy monsters, I heard a cat meow from behind a locked door. Later, after killing some nasty horrors and solving a puzzle, I returned with bolt cutters and freed the cat. In exchange, it granted me a useful item. All future cats I found in Cronos did the same. It was good to have an army of cats as allies in this strange, hellish world. Also good: Cronos: The New Dawn, the latest horror game from Bloober Team.

Last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake from Bloober Team proved that the studio, which has sometimes been criticized for making sloppy, bad horror games, could knock it out of the park if given the chance. But remaking one of the greatest scary games of all time into something that’s also scary and good, while impressive, arguably isn’t as hard as creating something unique and fresh that is also memorable and creepy in its own right.

So I was both excited and nervous about Cronos. Could Bloober deliver a worthy follow-up to the Silent Hill 2 remake that was also a game wholly of its own creation? Well, the answer is mostly yes. While Cronos isn’t as good as Silent Hill 2 (but like, what is?), it is still a fantastically nasty third-person horror game that is a perfect post-apocalyptic, sci-fi survival experience that fans of Resident Evil 4 will feel right at home with.

Cronos: The New Dawn is a third-person horror game that places you in the big, lumbering boots of The Traveler. This strange character is a time traveler of sorts with advanced weaponry and tech. Her mission, or “vocation,” is seemingly to fight back against a dangerous, unnatural virus that turns people into sickly, decaying monsters that only want to kill you and merge their flesh together with other monsters and corpses. Doing so lets them grow stronger, and you’ll want to burn bodies to stop that from happening. At some point in the ’80s, as seen during sections of the game in which you go back in time briefly, this horrible virus spread across the planet and destroyed everything. Now you and your fellow Travelers work tirelessly to stop it, contain it, and learn more about it. Or maybe, you all are to blame…

The narrative Cronos weaves is weird and kept me guessing for most of my time playing it. Sadly, I wasn’t able to finish the game and had to restart it due to some technical issues involving the game’s PS5 build (don’t worry, this won’t happen to you), but from what I was able to play (and later re-play), Cronos tells an odd story that isn’t like that in any horror game I’ve played in recent memory. It doesn’t always work and it can sometimes feel like you go long stretches without the narrative moving forward, but I mostly enjoyed peeling back another bloody layer of flesh from this disgusting onion.

The real meat of Cronos is found outside of the cutscenes and dialogue. Most of the game is spent creeping around horrible places with limited ammo, health items, and other resources, trying desperately not to die to some nasty flesh-ghoul in the dark. Combat in Cronos is tough at times, especially if you let any of the monsters merge with dead monsters or other corpses. Bigger enemies easily made me burn through most of my ammo and sometimes proved tougher than the actual boss fights. Thankfully, you can use the environment to your advantage; there are many oil tanks and red barrels dotted around the wasteland, which can be very useful for thinning out the herds of enemies the game sometimes throws at you.

I do expect some will be put off by how much combat is in Cronos and how hard it can be, especially if you aren’t hoarding resources like a crazed survivalist who has spent too many weeks listening to Joe Rogan podcasts. I liked the tough-as-nails encounters, especially as I started to upgrade my suit and guns and could put up a better fight, but your mileage may vary.

©Bloober Team

Between these fights and scrapping for supplies, you occasionally solve environmental puzzles by using a strange energy tether tool that can let you manipulate time by either rewinding or fast-forwarding specific areas of the map through the timeline. So a set of collapsed stairs can be rewound to when they were whole again, or a fallen piece of flooring can be brought back to its original location and raised like an elevator in the process. It’s a neat trick that looks cool, but it sometimes felt like the designers forgot it was a part of Cronos, and I’d go a long time between these time shenanigans. Still, I enjoyed messing with the flow of time, and being able to rewind it to bring back a red barrel and use it again against flesh monsters was fun.

What I didn’t enjoy were the technical issues I encountered playing Cronos. While things greatly improved after Bloober Team sent me a new build of the game running on PS5, I still encountered performance spikes, weird animation bugs, broken subtitles, and some classic Bloober Team jank. The quality of character dialogue also varies wildly. Sometimes folks you encounter sound like real people, with great performances supporting excellent writing, and other times you might think you’re watching a cheesy Mystery Science Theater 3000 horror movie, just without the bots and Joel riffing over the top of the bad acting and clunky dialogue. Thankfully, the game is mostly the Traveler talking to herself and the cats she finds while recording and documenting everything.

I’m excited to return to Cronos: The New Dawn and finish it, as the large chunk of the game I played, while at times rough, was an earnest and dedicated attempt by Bloober to create something new and creepy. Not every part of Cronos succeeds at what Bloober set out to do, but most of it does, and often in a way that sets it apart from other recent horror games. This might not be as good as the Silent Hill 2 remake, but those craving a new third-person survival horror game that is more shooty-shooty, like RE4 or Dead Space, will want to check out Cronos when it launches on September 5 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2 and PC.

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