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Coming off the Silent Hill 2 remake, the biggest question I had for Bloober Team was whether the studio had fully reversed course. Once a developer of middling or worse horror games, Silent Hill 2 was a revelation. But it was also the beneficiary of a tremendously helpful blueprint: The game it remade was a masterpiece to begin with. Could the team make similar magic with a game entirely of its own creation?

Cronos: The New Dawn tells me it can. While it doesn’t achieve the incredible heights of the Silent Hill 2 remake, Cronos earns its own name in the genre with an intense sci-fi horror story that will do well to satisfy anyone’s horror fix, provided they can stomach its sometimes brutal enemy encounters.

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Now Playing: Cronos: The New Dawn Review

Cronos: The New Dawn looks and feels like the middle ground between Resident Evil and Dead Space. Played in third-person and starring a character who moves with a noticeable heft that keeps them feeling vulnerable, it’s a game that at no point gets easy in its 16- to 20-hour story. All the hallmarks of a classic survival-horror game are here, from its long list of different enemy types that demand specific tactics, to a serious commitment to managing a very limited inventory, and especially to the feeling of routinely limping to the next safe room, where the signature music becomes the soundtrack to your brief moments of respite before you trek back out into the untold horrors that await you.

Cronos is set mostly in the future, decades after a pandemic referred to as The Change has left most of the world in shambles. Mutated monsters called orphans roam the abandoned lands of Poland, which fell before the Iron Curtain did in this alternate history tale. As the Traveler, you’ll move through time, extracting the consciousnesses of key figures who might help you work out how The Change occurred and how to fix things.

The story’s impact is stunted by the main character’s attire, which looks like an all-metal blend of a spacesuit and a diving suit, completely obscuring her face at all times. This, coupled with her cold, almost robotic delivery, made it hard for the game to emotionally resonate with me, though, like most good stories, the inverted triangle shrinks from big-picture problems down to an interpersonal level. It does, by the end, achieve something closer to emotional weight.

Still, while the narrative specifics sometimes miss their mark, the setting helped keep me invested. I love a good time-travel story, and Cronos’ saga combines Cronenbergian body horror with mental mazes akin to Netflix’s Dark. I found myself obsessing over all of the optional notes and audio logs, hoping to stay on top of the twisting, deliberately convoluted plot. Cronos starts with a good sense of intrigue, and though I didn’t feel attached to any characters by the end, I was invested in the grand scheme of things. It’s also a good example of the difference between story and lore: While its beat-by-beat narrative is merely fine, its world-building is much more interesting and had me eager to learn more about the way the world succumbed to its sickness.

The worldbuilding of Cronos is intriguing, though the characters themselves don’t often do well to support its intended emotional weight.

One of Cronos’s coolest visual touches is the glove-like machine The Traveler uses to extract the minds of people from the past. Long, wiry, metal, almost Freddy Krueger-like prods unfold from The Traveler’s knuckles and dig into people’s skulls–and she’s the good guy of the story. It’s an unforgettable, uncomfortable sight and reminds me that even when Bloober Team’s past games didn’t often have memorable gameplay, they weren’t short on horrific sights.

Bloober Team swore to me several times across multiple interviews that the game isn’t at all inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic, which really strains credulity early on when so many of the loose notes you’ll find refer to things like social distancing, lockdowns, and crackpot conspiracies around vaccines. The studio told me at Summer Game Fest that any allusions to the real-life pandemic were subconscious at best. I don’t see how, but nonetheless, taking my own experience with the pandemic into this game heightened the intrigue. Our timeline didn’t lead to mutated monsters, but I found it interesting to witness the Polish team grapple with a pandemic depicted as something like what I lived through–at least early on–set to the backdrop of its nation’s Soviet era, exploring how communism would’ve led to different outcomes, even before you throw in the creatures made of multiple heads and many tentacles.

Where Cronos really shines is in its combat. The Traveler is equipped with a number of guns, but nearly all of them are better used with charged-up shots, meaning the second or two between charging a shot and hitting an enemy can be very tense. Monsters don’t stand still while you line up your shots, and like many great horror games, this is not a power fantasy. Missed shots are stressful because they waste ammo and allow the monsters to persist unabated, but such shots can be hard to avoid given the sway of your weapons and their charging times, combined with the sometimes complex enemy movement patterns. Even after many upgrades to my guns, I never became a killing machine. Most of my greatest combat achievements came in the form of creatively using gas canisters, exploding a small horde of enemies at once, thus saving a lot of bullets for my next struggle.

Like in the team’s remake of Silent Hill 2, even fighting just two of Cronos’ grotesque enemies at once can be a test of endurance, aim, and wit. A great feature of Cronos is that bullets can penetrate multiple enemies, so sometimes I’d kite multiple “orphans” into a line, then send a searing shot through their deformed, mushy torsos all at once. Featuring sci-fi versions of firearms like pistols, shotguns, SMGs, and eventually even a rocket launcher–all meant to be carried in a severely restricted inventory space that can be upgraded over time–Cronos takes some obvious cues from Resident Evil. Thankfully, like in Capcom’s series, you’ll rarely have more than just enough ammo to eke out a victory in any encounter.

Combat is tense at all times. Cronos doesn’t relent.

What ties all of this together is the game’s “merge system.” The mutants can absorb the bodies of their fallen, creating compounded creatures that double- or triple-up on their different abilities. For example, if I killed an enemy that was able to spit acid at me and I didn’t burn its body away, another enemy may approach it and consume it, with an animation that looks like guts and tendrils ensnaring the dead, resulting in a bigger, tougher monster standing before me. In one sequence, I’d regrettably allowed a monster to merge many times over, and it became this towering beast the likes of which I never saw again, partly because I tried my hardest never to allow such a hellish thing to come to fruition once more. It’s for this reason that combat demanded I pay close attention, not only to staying alive, but when and where to kill enemies. Ideally, I’d huddle a few corpses near each other, so when I popped my flamethrower, its area-of-effect blast would engulf many would-be merged bodies at once.

That’s if the best-case can be achieved, though. This is a horror game, so I often couldn’t do this. Sometimes I was forced to accept some merged enemies, which then meant dedicating even more of my ammo to downing them–merged enemies don’t just gain new abilities, they also benefit from a harder exterior, creating something like armor for themselves. Because of all of this, combat is difficult from the beginning all the way through to the final boss. It levels well alongside your upgrades, matching your ever-improving combat prowess with its own upward trajectory of tougher, more numerous enemies.

While I want and expect some difficulty in a survival-horror game, Cronos does include a few notable difficulty spikes that had me replaying moments several times over. After a while, these would get frustrating, often because they felt like they demanded perfection, especially as it relates to preventing merges. If too many enemies merged, I simply didn’t always have enough ammo to kill them, and the game’s Dead Space-like melee attacks are much too weak to rely on–not to mention that virtually every enemy in the game is considerably more harmful when fought up close. Keeping my distance and resorting to firearms was key, but if all my chambers were emptied and enemies still roamed, it was likely I’d need to force my own death and try to kite and burn them more efficiently next time.

On two occasions, I even resorted to totally respeccing all my gun upgrades, forcing all my attention onto just two guns. This might sound like a clever workaround, but it felt more like I was brute-forcing my way past a difficulty spike that was best not to have been there in the first place.

Thankfully, these moments don’t color most of the experience. Combat is unforgiving, but mostly not unfair. Boss battles are very tough too, and I ended just about all of them in the “blinking red screen” phase of my health bar. These are achievements in a horror game. I ought to feel tested consistently, and Cronos’ way of lining all its optional paths with both more rewards and more monster encounters quickly taught me that no savvy scavenger hunt for a few spare bullets or health kits would go unpunished. Though this formula became predictable over time–the game almost never gave me an optional path free of hazards–I didn’t find it frustrating. I was glad to find a challenge around every corner.

Finding stray cats is a fun and very rewarding side quest during the 16- to 20-hour horror story.

Like a lot of horror games, I find Cronos to be tense, but not scary. I admit some of that is probably due to decades of desensitization as a massive horror fan, but some things do still unnerve me, and Cronos doesn’t really hit in that way. Some of the enemies and hazards caused me to move slowly through its world in a way I greatly appreciated. Sometimes, one wrong step would do me harm, like enemies crashing through walls and knocking me over if I wasn’t careful. But mostly, its scare language is one of throwing more monsters at you, not leaving you to worry about when the next one might appear.

Cronos tries toying with atmospheric soundscapes akin to what Bloober Team seemed to learn from working on the GOAT of horror atmosphere, but it doesn’t enjoy similar accomplishments–not that they would be easy for anyone to achieve. In this case, I feel that’s because Cronos’ world is much more aggressive overall than Silent Hill 2’s, and doesn’t leave space for things to just breathe as often. Sometimes, the quiet is the horror, but as mentioned, Cronos is more akin to Resident Evil or Dead Space than the series this studio has already helped revive. It’s survival-horror for sure, but it leans a bit more toward action than some of the genre’s titans. Thankfully, a great soundtrack full of synth-heavy songs suits the world very well. It gives the game a sense of character that it sometimes lacks when judged on the merits of the actual people in its story.

There are aspects of Cronos the team would be wise to improve upon with its next horror game. Particularly, knowing when not to challenge me with combat, but instead leaving me with a guttural sense of dread, could go a long way to marking future projects from Bloober Team as being on the level of its landmark remake project. Still, that’s not to say what the team has done here is less than great in its own right. Cronos: The New Dawn is Bloober Team cementing itself as not just a studio obsessed with horror–it’s been that for over a decade already. This is Bloober Team becoming a trusted voice in horror.

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