Cronos: The New Dawn

Bloober Team follows its Silent Hill 2 remake with an original horror story that is tense throughout, though sometimes too punishing.

Cronos: The New Dawn is Bloober Team's best original game yet. An immersive romp through a suffocating portrayal of 80s Poland, where your journey is far from what it first seems.

The scariest part of Cronos: The New Dawn is probably the frustrating combat, and while it boasts a selection of surprisingly cool puzzles, they're not enough to save the experience.

Extremely limited inventory slots sometimes make these battles feel like I'm holding my breath underwater.

Cronos: The New Dawn has an excellent, thoughtful premise that feels dark and dangerous, but does a poor job of executing on its promising sci-fi ideas. A questionable religion born from trying to save the world in the face of a rampaging disease with clear parallels to the global pandemic we all recently experienced is great fodder for a story, but I was left shrugging my shoulders by the end. Thankfully, the gameplay, though familiar, offered plenty to pull me through the approximately 12-hour experience to see the end.

Cronos is a perfectly acceptable survival horror that looks astonishing at times and has an engaging plot (albeit a very confusing one) to ensure players reach the end. That said, there isn't a lot here that hasn't been seen in other survival games before it, and the combination of annoying enemy AI and no real difficulty settings mean some players will have a frustrating time of things.

Cronos: The New Dawn is a brilliant addition to the survival horror genre. In a lot of ways it's derivative, especially when it comes to how it plays and how it feels. However, Bloober has injected enough charm, curiosities, and weirdness into it to make it not only its own thing, but something almost endearing. With impeccable visuals, an entrancing score, and a captivatingly dark time-travelling mystery, Cronos: The New Dawn is a delectable piece of sci-fi horror.

Although Cronos: The New Dawn doesn't quite reach the heights of Bloober Team's excellent Silent Hill 2 remake, it's nevertheless the result of a studio that has levelled up significantly from the days of Layers of Fear and Blair Witch. It's a celebration of survival horror, paying homage to all the genre greats effectively, although failing to do anything truly original.That said, the setting and story really help elevate the experience. This is a solid Switch 2 version (assuming a rather unpleasant bug gets fixed soon), and there's real potential here for Cronos to become a central pillar of the genre going forward, should Bloober choose to expand upon it in the future.

Cronos: The New Dawn isn’t my favorite horror title I’ve played, but as far as original ideas go, it’s up there as one that will stay with me for how well its gameplay and narrative work off of each other.

With its by-the-books survival horror experience, its first few hours feeling more frustrating than fun due to clunky combat and average enemy design, Cronos: The Dawn seemed to be nothing more than an unremarkable survival horror heavily inspired by the Dead Space series. Push past the around two hours mark, however, and the game blossoms into one of Bloober Team's best titles to date, thanks to its quirky mechanics, solid level design, unique setting, and mystery-filled story.