Cronos: The New Dawn review

I love a good horror game, even if my frayed nerves don't. And not just any jumpscare-filled adventure, but a properly terrifying experience that'll send shivers down my spine and keep me awake at night for weeks to come.

So I was looking forward to jumping headfirst into Bloober Team's new survival horror game Cronos: The New Dawn and seeking out its grotesque zombie-like oddities, vile medical horrors, and some confusing and tension-filled time travel horror.

Unfortunately, the kind of horror I was hoping for did not await me in Cronos. I often find that survival horror delivers weaker frights. Monsters just don't seem that scary when I'm piled high with guns, ammo, and every single explosive I can get my hands on. So in this respect, Cronos started on the back foot.

Cronos' monsters are of the kind that just kind of amble around or hugely telegraph their big swings or sprints. You can also usually hear the zombies (which are called Orphans) before you see them. Couple this with just how frustrating it can be to deal with waves of Orphans, and these enemies lose almost all of their fear factor. My first reaction to seeing an Orphan walk towards me shouldn't be a groan.

But there's no escaping these zombies. Cronos sees you traverse the abandoned district of Nowa Huta, years after a zombie outbreak in the steelworks spread like wildfire and engulfed the city. Now, all that's left is decaying infrastructure, tons of Orphans, and some time anomalies that are slowly breaking down what's left of the city.

At times, you travel back in time to the moments surrounding the initial outbreak to gather intel from people who witnessed it all. But as this is just post-outbreak, there'll still be some Orphans lurking around.

What can make these encounters frustrating, however, are the game's checkpoints. Cronos auto-saves so often that sometimes it can mire you in impossible situations. I ran into several instances where I got killed just after a checkpoint and then respawned right where I died. With my health just as low as before, this meant I'd die to one hit again when I came back, trapping me in an endless loop of falling to the same enemy over and over. The only way forward is to reload to an earlier point and go at it again completely fresh. You'd better hope you remembered to make regular manual saves.

In a game that otherwise stresses the importance of restraint and holding on to your items, some of the Orphans can be a massive drain on resources. In one fight against a particularly huge Orphan, I went through every shred of ammo on me, plus everything that was lying around the boss room, and still didn't manage to take it down—and I even threw some punches and kicks in there for good measure.

It wasn't until my third attempt that I decided to go back to a safe room and spend all my resources on making yet more bullets and mini-explosives known as pyres. This eventually took it down, but it set me back to square one after I had worked so hard to scrimp and save resources together over the preceding hours.

The issues are worsened by seriously stingy resource spawns. Too often, the game doesn't give you what you need—particularly bullets or healing—instead handing over something you either already have too much of or just don't have a use for. I swear, if I pick up even one more batch of energy token miles out from an upgrade room when I'm down to my last two bullets with almost no health left, I'm going to scream.

Combat in Cronos feels grating at times. I felt like I was almost always either cheesing my way through packs of Orphans by the skin of my teeth in an effort to save precious resources or forced to spend everything I had to take just one big guy down. But then, sometimes I found myself blasting through enemies with ease without having to use too much ammo at all—the difficulty level of encounters just didn't seem consistent enough for me to ever get a read on the situation at hand.

I found Chronos' story similarly muddled, and it takes its sweet time to get going. For the first eight hours or so, all the game seems to be is yet another take on the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic. I don't know if it's because I had a rather nasty time over those few years or whether it's just that the subject has been completely overdone at this point, but I really have no patience left for tales about being placed under a restrictive lockdown, barred from social gatherings, and kept in the dark.

When the time travel elements finally reveal themselves, they offer a far more interesting side to the story. The ending, which I won't spoil here, didn't necessarily catch me by surprise (the foreshadowing is a little too heavy for that), but it explores some genuinely interesting ideas.

I just wish Cronos got to that stuff faster, so we could spend more time exploring the implications of those revelations, instead of getting bogged down with the hundredth conveniently placed letter talking about how there's no school tomorrow because of a lockdown, or person A feeling bad for abandoning person B. Notes and journal entries already feel like a tired storytelling trope at this point, and Cronos massively overuses them to tell very predictable stories.

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In amongst all that, however, there are moments of beauty, and I'm not just talking about the fantastic setting of Nowa Huta and the incredible apocalyptic scenery of the destroyed district marred by zombies and anomalies. Where Cronos gets truly engaging is in the puzzles you need to solve to progress through its ruined world.

There are temporal disturbances scattered throughout the map that you can interact with using an extension added to each of your guns. Aiming and firing at them will see parts of the map rewound through time into previous forms. You can use this to rebuild bridges, restore a destroyed roof so you can climb onto it, or move broken chunks of floating earth that have been ripped apart due to time anomalies to and from other large areas of land. It may seem small, but it's a welcome respite from the fights.

Then there's the gravity boots, which you pick up about halfway through the game. These are so much fun to use, allowing you to walk on designated paths up walls and on ceilings while jumping across huge craters from one launch pad to another. Navigating these areas is so intuitive that it really becomes second nature, despite the unusual movement.

But it's not just about traversal—these short moments of solving puzzles also gave me enough room to truly take in the world around me. I found myself sitting back at times and just enjoying seeing the landscape of Nowa Huta from a new perspective. I loved it all so much that it had me wishing Cronos was a survival puzzle game rather than survival horror.

But these puzzles can only take the game so far. I wish I could say that I had a better time with Cronos, but the highs just weren't high enough, or occurred often enough, to weigh out the gruellingly frustrating lows. It wasn't the horror game I'd hoped it would be, as it just wasn't that scary, in part due to frustrating fights and odd resource management. If you do decide to give Cronos a go, I'd just recommend taking your time with it, stepping away when it all gets a bit much, and try to pet the cats as often as you can—it helps.

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