I've seen it all when it comes to survival horror, but how does Bloober Team's Cronos: The New Dawn fare against the powerhouses of the genre?
Working for the enigmatic Collective, you awake with the title of Traveler. Many have come before you, paving the path for you to take. The desolate landscape is plagued with Orphans; the grotesque abominations that humanity has become. Traversing across the wasteland, the Traveler must extract Essences to find their next target, and in turn learn how the Change came to happen.
The end of the world is shrouded in mystery
Captured in its impressive worldbuilding and environments, 1980s Poland is captivating across all timelines as the landscape twists and bends to the will of the Change and Collective. A dense fog greets you, almost as if the snow-covered ground is the ashes of civilization, which now houses monstrosities.
The note-collecting, paired with the environment of messages sprawled in old blood, leftover explosive containers, and spare resources, makes the setting even more entrancing. You can see what is left of humanity by the decrepit architecture, caused by the devastation of war and strange anomalies you can manipulate with your gravity-bending technology.
Questions arise very early on as to what we're doing here, who we are, what the Collective is, and where the Change came from. These remain throughout the story, some slowly ticked off as we (alongside the Traveler) learn bits and pieces the further back we go. I often wondered if we were playing as the good guys, as Essence extraction appeared to be doing more harm than good.
A world demanding to be explored
While Cronos isn't particularly scary, the environments look great, the gameplay is well-paced, and the polished level design is streamlined from start to finish. Even though you can refer to the compass and objective markers if you ever get stuck, I rarely had to use this, which I see as a strength of Cronos' overall design.
Its greatest strength, however, is the sound design. The soundtrack is haunting at times (but very underused), and I long for more moments where the OST commands the space, sparking fear when I'd grown accustomed to its horror. The enemy variety is decent, and each type has a distinct audio cue to help you identify and prepare for what's around the corner. The sound design is particularly effective at creating tension and slowing down the pace of play so you're not rushing through it.
From comic books and audio recordings, to weapons you can upgrade and cats you can pet, I welcomed collectible hunting in Cronos. But these ideas aren't particularly new, and everything feels like a reference to something we've seen before (i.e., déjà vu cats from The Matrix and The Thing's assimilated creations).
While the puzzles were straightforward, Cronos gets confused within its combat.
A callback to the very best of survival horror
Cronos often borders on being a copy, rather than an original. The safe room and inventory management are quintessential Resident Evil (even the theme sounds like Mass Effect 2's galaxy map), meanwhile, the combat and stomping animations are exactly like Dead Space.
Outside of this, I loved how every bullet counts. There's a strategy in which fights to take; running is a viable option, but it's not always available. Holding onto your resources and upgrading inventory space, weapon damage, crafting healing items and ammunition are all classic survival horror components that work really well here.
There's fairness in each fight as Orphans merge with another to grow stronger, becoming vulnerable in the merging phase. You then have to think about where to shoot, when to burn bodies, and what resources to use because you don't know when the enemies will stop spawning in. While movement can feel clunky at times, there's a slow but much-needed unlimited sprint.
Somehow, Cronos isn't much of a challenge
I found myself flying through bosses like they were nothing. You can learn very quickly how to deal with each enemy, what weapons to use and how many bullets it takes to kill each variant. Most of the challenge is gone within a few hours of playing, and is worsened by the sin of reusing mini-bosses. Surprisingly, Cronos' conflict areas with waves of enemies felt more challenging than any boss fight.
A good survival horror that sadly lacks originality
Cronos already wasn't doing anything new in the genre. There's so much time spent building this mystery up that it easily became the main reason I wanted to keep playing. I wanted to understand what was happening, but any answers given just left me with more questions. I anticipated the reveal, which left me very underwhelmed, as I didn't want the narrative to be heading down such a predictable path. The final boss was uninspiring and only took me two attempts to beat. I was left feeling unfulfilled and disappointed, even though the narrative had me totally engrossed from the minute our Traveler awakened.
While Cronos may fall short with its boss fights and lack of overall challenge, its worldbuilding, mystery, level design, and balanced upgrade system make it an easy survival horror to invest in. Unfortunately, it ultimately takes too many ideas from other survival horror games and fails to create something of its own.
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