Cronos: The New Dawn Review (PS5) – Have Space Suit, Will Travel

Hot off the success of Silent Hill 2 and their sudden emergence onto the AAA scene, Bloober Team are making a big bloody splash with Cronos: The New Dawn. Unapologetic in its inspirations and looking to prove itself in a market full of classics, does Cronos have what it takes?

It’s a science fiction survival horror taking the best of Dead Space and Silent Hill and sort of combining the two. Cronos has a desolate future setting in a postapocalyptic Krakow in Poland, with faceless spherical helmeted Travellers shooting back through time to extract individuals before they died in a past pandemic-like calamity. It’s got the body horror and shambling merging shrieking creatures of The Thing or other John Carpenter-type movies.

Merge that all together and it stands out from the crowd. You aren’t likely to forget that strange otherworldly helmet, the communist iconography, the merging and the Silent Hill fog in a hurry. It’s got all the ingredients for success. But is Cronos: The New Dawn worth going back in time for, especially when there’s like no ammo there? Let’s get into it.

Astral Travelling

A faceless spherical helmeted Traveller with the serial number ND-3576 awakens in a pod, we assume having travelled back in time from a high-technology future. Their mission is to track down the last Traveller who came before, and complete their mission, which was to find a certain individual to be extracted from the past. ND-3576 very quickly finds the previous Traveller dead, and must complete their task. Which is all made harder by the time period being 1980s Krakow in the aftermath of a pandemic that created not just shambling zombie-like Orphans for you to deal with, but time anomalies and tears in the very fabric of space. Cronos throws temporal, corporeal and gravitational issues at the player one after another.

The plot revolves around piecing together what actually happened in the calamity that caused all this, and who was ultimately responsible. Your extraction targets are people who the Collective (your bosses?) feel will make a difference to the future somehow if you can extract them before they died in the past, and they’ve all got plenty to say to help you solve this mystery.

One of the coolest ideas comes after you extract your first target. You see, rather than their body, each target’s ‘essence’ is what’s actually extracted, and it equates to their personality. Only here, Traveller ND-3576 takes it into themselves. You gain their schizophrenia or more useful traits (hearing voices like Senua) and gameplay-wise, you gain a passive upgrade for each one you find, such as increased energy.

It’s a heady mixing pot of influences, and moment to moment, it plays the missions and tasks relatively straight and seems to hold together. Only when looked at from on high does it struggle to tell a coherent story, and only if you start to tease at the threads of the plot a little too much. Does the Collective’s extraction idea even make sense? Didn’t these people die, so how do we know they’ll make any difference in the future? It is just a kind of Hail Mary? And worst of all, is the Collective really there, or are you just carrying out old orders for no one?

Baptism Of Fire

Cronos: The New Dawn can be a crisp and beautiful game. The Traveller’s suit, the enemies you’re fighting, and much of the science fiction tech and recreated Communist architecture from the Krakow Steelworks is very believable and rendered impeccably. It keeps this manageable by having all the kinds of single-player adventure hidden loading ideas you can imagine – squeezing through gaps, dense Silent Hill-like fog, and artificially enclosed areas – but it’s all very in keeping with the genre, and just like the Silent Hill 2 remake, very accepted mechanics at this point.

What I was not a fan of however, was other NPCs, mainly your extraction targets or others that get in the way. There was something over the top and unreal about them. The scenes during extraction were deliberately angled and strange, but there were too many cuts in the cutscenes, too many angles, every extraction scene was kind of painful to watch. And they didn’t quite look right, like their heads were too big. Everything looked like it was sort of a fisheye lens but not, or sort of a contra zoom but not. The sound often seemed to cut out, and I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to.

Not Playing With A Full Charge

Can’t have a survival horror without something to survive, and in Cronos it’s Orphans; grotesquely mutated humanoids that used to be workers in the steelworks, most with one horrid tentacle arm they use to whack with, and I assume to merge with. And that’s the big unique part here – Dead Space had cutting off limbs, Cronos has the Merge.

If you’ve somehow got to this point without having seen any trailers, or know what the merge is, I’ll explain. You take out one enemy and their body doesn’t disappear, it sticks around, clogging up the level. Then the next Orphan shambles over and if you let them, they merge with the corpse – tentacles come out all over both, and they absorb each other. The end result is the still upright enemy gets stronger, spikier, plus more health, and in the worst-case possible, absorbs the powers of the corpse. That’s a real problem if the corpse was a poison shooter, for example, you’ve now got a worse poison shooter on your hands.

Charged Pistols At Dawn

There are a few variations of lumbering Orphans to contend with, but not many, and they boil down to melee with a few different naked body types, big ogre melee, ranged poison shooter, and scuttle across walls poison shooter. Each type has its merged variety that gets much spikier and more difficult to deal with, and then there are bosses. Thankfully, not many bosses, as Cronos: The New Dawn generally prefers to throw groups of enemies at you.

The bosses that do attack you are like a creature from the end of a Resident Evil game, dozens of merged bodies all stuck together like it’s the human centipede, only they can attach anywhere, and then using any old body part to mash you. They all look like the Thing at the end of the movie. 

All this merging means combat is fast and frenetic, and stressful. You’re constantly looking for red canisters to blow up, and for an enemy not attacking you, but going for a corpse to merge with. Then you’ve got to go deal with them. You can stop a merge – a nice shotgun shot or some fire will put them off – but you’ve got to be hyperaware of the enemies around you.

The Road Less Travelled

And then we come to what you’ve got to survive with – you’re measly collection of weapons, your absolute pittance of ammunition, and an inventory limit for the whole game that makes a Resident Evil starter attaché case look spacious. Resources are incredibly thin, and always come in waves. Build up enough to feel comfortable, and you know there’s a group room or a boss coming. Usually, even if you blow every last bullet on a fight, the next few rooms will resupply you, but it can be hard won. It’s far on the survival side of the genre. You want to be thrifty with the ammo use, so burn the bodies of the dead so that you don’t have to deal with merged variants, scorch the earth, preserve ammunition wherever possible, and use charged shots only.

A mechanic I really enjoyed (except when it meant I got hit while charging) was to charge every shot and get a double-powered round. I mean, with ammo this scarce, every bullet counts, and if you are firing off with half the power you could have had, if you were a second more patient and careful, well, then you are a fool.

The whole system is fun and has its own identity, which was appreciated. However, the merging and the ammo scarcity have what feel like unintended consequences. Having resource ingredients be the same for crafting both ammo and torch fuel, meant that because I had to use them for ammo, I was not able to make torch fuel. I could also only store two torch bursts maximum. I found a possibly unintended workaround.

Whenever there was a saferoom in easy reach, let’s say 3-4 rooms away, or a minutes run from a fight, I would burn every body as I crept forward, and then go back to the dispenser in the saferoom, get another torch fuel, and repeat the process, often 4-5 times to clear a room. I don’t have the ammo to fight the merged enemies, so I have to burn. But I don’t have the resources to make torch fuel, so I have to do this run back and forth thing to progress. Was it Bloober’s intention to create a gameplay loop that was such a far shout from fun?

Don’t Let The Bodies Hit The Floor

When Cronos: The New Dawn decides to serve you a little refrain of music, usually in a moody atmospheric traversal between fight areas, you better be grateful, because they are about as scarce as the ammunition. There is a wonderful soundtrack in there, a real affecting homage to John Carpenter and his synth style, but it feels like there wasn’t a huge amount of music written for the game, and they had to be sparing with it. The safe room and a few others were nice pieces, and I wish there had been more.

Foley and voice work are both great, atmospheric and unique, and full of unhinged sounds. The Traveller voiceover starts wonderfully at odds with her situation, like it’s all fine, she’s got a duty to do, and then as things start to spiral out of her control and her experience, you can hear the worry and doubt really creep into the performance. My vocoder would warble after this many merged fights.

My issues with sound came from the actual application of it in the game. It cuts out oddly, it’s strangely directional, and there were quite a few cutscenes where I lost sound completely. I will also mention once again my dislike of the style used through the NPC confrontations, and the sound issues and crazed performances only exacerbated this.

Resources Insufficient

I’m not usually one to comment very heavily on the performance modes or quality mode or framerates etc. I can often barely tell the difference, and so it won’t affect the score I give. However, when I really can tell the difference, I feel the need to state it. Cronos stuttered to the point of unwatchability right on its launch menu in Quality mode. When switched to Performance mode, all became smooth again. I don’t know if this will be patched, but a warning that at launch, that mode may not work as expected.

During the two weeks I played before launch I did experience a fair number of glitches and bugs; I had major sound drop off during cutscenes; someone played a piano and there was no sound; I lost dialogue that the subtitles showed but I couldn’t hear; one door that opened onto an abyss of unloaded infinity and revealed the back of other parts of the level, and a single crash back to the PlayStation home screen. While these are annoying, they didn’t ruin the experience, and I’m sure they’ll be patched before long – again, they won’t affect the score we give.

Traveller’s Log…

Cronos: The New Dawn is not a perfect game and there are a few issues that hold it back. While elements of the story are captivating and effective at propelling the missions forward, there are reams and reams of it where almost nothing happens. There’s just not enough story to support the nearly 20 hours of game when you are simply left with the screams for hours at a time. And while I enjoyed the vast majority of those hours, I felt the combat fall into unintended pitfalls on too many occasions. Sections where, instead of fun, I felt I was just systemically clearing bodies from an old factory.

None of these issues so affected me that I stopped enjoying the setting, the time travel, the survival horror, or just the fun gameplay. Charging guns while a zombie runs at you is pure horrific adrenaline, and I loved it. The music, when it appeared, was fantastic, and the Traveller, her suit and helmet, the whole aesthetic is next-level memorable. I think I just wanted to love it more than I eventually did.

It is wonderful to see Bloober Team blossom so suddenly and so confidently out of psychological horror that I didn’t get along with, into this assured survival horror era. With Silent Hill 2 such a surprise success, and now with Cronos proving it was no fluke, we still have Silent Hill 1 on the horizon. Who knows what else the future holds for them? If it’s anything like as good as Cronos: The New Dawn, we are in for a treat.

Cronos: The New Dawn is available 5th September on PlayStation 5 (review platform), Xbox Series S|X and PC via Steam.

Developer: Bloober Team
Publisher: Bloober Team

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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