Cronos: The New Dawn Review – Polished Polish Sci-Fi Horror

Following the success of their Silent Hill 2 remake, Bloober Team gained significant trust and confidence from the gaming community. While their previous titles, like The Medium or the Blair Witch, were divisive, the Silent Hill 2 remake was universally accepted as a great game. Cronos: The New Dawn development began in 2021 and was not a result of last year’s Silent Hill remake succeeding in placing Bloober Team on the radar. 

However, it is the first game to launch after that, making it an important project in the developer’s portfolio. Cronos: The New Dawn aims to start a new series, a sci-fi horror story of time travel and mystery that will surely intrigue fans of games like Dead Space. But in such a busy period with dozens of AAA titles coming our way, is it worth your time?

TL;DR

Cronos: The New Dawn is a competent and well-designed sci-fi horror shooter. While its gameplay is what you’d come to expect from a third-person game, its story and atmosphere are its biggest strengths, making it worth the 15-18 hours of your time.

Story – A Socialist Post-Apocalypse

Cronos: The New Dawn is a unique game in its story. It starts with a mysterious woman waking up in a futuristic suit of armour. She has just travelled back in time to 20th-century Poland, on a mission to recover certain artefacts. 

She is a Traveller, the game’s version of time-travellers who are uniquely capable of manipulating space and time around them. And in the first minutes of Cronos: The New Dawn, you’ll realise that the past you just travelled to isn’t welcoming at all. 

It’s a post-apocalyptic nightmare with remnants of socialist propaganda in the form of posters, announcements, flyers, and graffiti. All of it points to the society crumbling under a mysterious virus that wiped out everyone and resulted in the monsters that now roam the ruins of ‘The New Dawn’, a utopian city meant to be the beacon of hope and prosperity. 

Cronos: The New Dawn’s biggest draw is its story, and we won’t go into any more detail here. Suffice it to say that if you love games like the original BioShock or Resident Evil 4 for their atmosphere and worldbuilding, you’ll love this one as well.

An Authentic Slavic Atmosphere

The one thing you’ll quickly notice about the game relates to its environmental storytelling. Every sign, poster, or graffiti you come across is written in Polish. Bloober Team decided to fully embrace their roots and provide players with an authentic experience.

After all, the game takes place in Poland, so graffiti written in English wouldn’t make logical sense. As a compromise, the game features intuitive subtitles that pop up every time you point toward writing in the environment. 

This ensures you’re never lost about what anything means, at least not any more than you’re supposed to be. Cronos: The New Dawn’s world is brutal and unforgiving, and you’re trying to piece together the puzzle of what actually happened in the past. 

Paired with a mostly silent protagonist that rarely speaks, the game is a true breath of fresh air in an industry where the main character never stops talking just to fill the silence. The game trusts you to find your way through the environment and intuitively solve its environmental puzzles and storytelling.

Gameplay – Third-Person Action with a Few Twists

Cronos: The New Dawn’s gameplay is predictable but competently designed. If you ever played games like Alan Wake 2 or the aforementioned Dead Space, you’ll be right at home. The game shares a lot of DNA with Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 in terms of movement, and you’ll recognise James’s body language in your main character from time to time. 

That’s not a bad thing, as Bloober Team really nailed the third-person movement and shooting formula in their Silent Hill 2 remake, so why not reuse what already worked? You’ll move through linear levels with a bit of backtracking and fight various mutated creatures on the way to your objective. 

That objective will always be communicated by your character, who seemingly knows what the mission is, but you don’t. This provides another layer of mystery to Cronos: The New Dawn, as your character isn’t surprised by anything that’s happening around them. This makes them confident and calculated, which is unusual for a horror game, but it’s another fresh twist Bloober Team managed to integrate into the story.

A True Survival Horror Journey

Even though you play as an armoured time-traveller, this is still a survival horror game. Ammo, supplies, and credits are preciously sparse and limited in Cronos: The New Dawn. You’ll always have to rely on scrounging the last bits and pieces of your supplies just to make it through the next area. 

This is not a knock against the game, and it’s actually one of its strengths. Just like with its story, it trusts the player to plan and manage their supplies. The game features rudimentary crafting and upgrade systems, which also ensure you can improve your equipment from time to time. 

But with resources being so limited, you’ll rarely have enough credits and upgrade materials to buy exactly what you need. Paired with the game’s limited inventory system, Cronos: The New Dawn is a game that combines the best elements of classic survival horror with modern gameplay systems.

Manipulating your Environment

Just like every great survival horror game, Cronos: The New Dawn features environmental puzzles. However, they’re on the lighter side and don’t require you to read through notes, diaries, or various messages to find solutions. 

Instead, you’ll collect items to use to unlock doors, power up generators, or clear your way forward in some way. They’re not revolutionary, but they’re very intuitive, and you’ll never get lost in terms of what you need to do next. As a time traveller, you can also manipulate your environment in creative ways by rewinding time in certain areas. 

This lets you restore destroyed staircases, hallways, or entire rooms so that you can explore them. Again, these elements are integrated into the whole experience very organically, and it never feels out of place in this sci-fi world.

Visuals – A Dark, Oppressive World Powered by UE5

The past several years have taught us that games that use Unreal Engine 5 struggle with performance. Cronos: The New Dawn is an exception to that rule and runs surprisingly well. 

We tested the game on the base PlayStation 5, and the game ran at 60 FPS in Performance mode and 30 FPS in Quality mode. While much better than most UE5 games in terms of performance, the game still struggles to maintain its target framerate. It would occasionally drop and stutter, but to a very minor extent. 

It has to do with the game’s linear nature, as open-world games have a lot more to render and handle in the background. This is to the game’s benefit, as 95% of the time, you’ll enjoy a rock-solid framerate and very fast loading times. Given the genre, you’ll unfortunately spend a lot of time in pitch-black environments with barely any light source to speak of. 

This can make enjoying the graphics a bit tough since you’ll only ever see what’s directly in front of you. In rare moments where Cronos: The New Dawn shines a light on its environments, you’ll really get a sense of the brutalist art direction and oppressive world that Bloober Team managed to build here.

Audio – Brilliant Minimalist Sound Design

Following the same logic as the game’s story, the sound design is eerily minimalist and really adds to its atmosphere. You’ll often find yourself in complete quiet with only the gentle background noise of your environment to keep you company. Your character’s voice is covered in a synthesised layer that hides what she really sounds like as well. 

This places an additional barrier between yourself and the world you’re exploring, as you truly feel like you don’t belong there. In terms of Cronos: The New Dawn’s soundtrack, it borrows heavily from sci-fi classics like Blade Runner, with electronic and synth elements annunciating its atmosphere. However, the music is used sparingly and never breaks immersion, allowing you to enjoy the game’s world without it ever feeling unnatural. 

A general lack of sounds and music would otherwise be considered a negative. However, Bloober Team used their resources in smart and creative ways, and despite the game’s lower-than-average budget, it manages to succeed where most big-budget games don’t.

Conclusion – Should You Play Cronos: The New Dawn?

This is a love letter to everyone who enjoys playing survival horror games. No, it doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before in terms of gameplay. But its narrative and worldbuilding make the game worth your time. It’s also not the longest game in the world, clocking in at around 15 hours for your first playthrough. 

This means you can easily make your way through its story and tackle any achievements or trophies if you’re that type of player. We’re very excited to see what Bloober Team has in store for the original Silent Hill remake now that we’ve seen Cronos: The New Dawn. 

By combining the best elements of their Silent Hill 2 remake with this game’s atmosphere and gameplay, they could have something special on their hands. The game is now available on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

Huge thanks to Bandai Namco EU for sponsoring our review.