When I’d finished my first five battles in Cronos with not a single piece of ammo remaining, I knew I was in for a heck of a time. But I also hadn’t realized how long it had been since a survival horror game truly tested my management capabilities — and it turns out that’s exactly what I wanted.
Cronos is a brand-new take on the survival horror genre from Bloober Team, the studio behind Silent Hill 2 remake, Observer, The Medium, and more. Over the years, I’ve had an up and down relationship with the studio’s games, loving some and really bouncing off others — but I can pretty confidently say this is Bloober’s best game yet.
Absolutely dripping in goopy atmosphere, Cronos is a game that embraces the “survival” part of survival horror in every way, crafting a fantastically demanding combat system that’s woven through a compelling world filled with mystery. The minute-to-minute gameplay in Cronos is one of the finest horror experiences I’ve had in years, only let down by the wheels completely coming off the story in the third act. Cronos comes dangerously close to being a new horror classic, but even for its faults, it’s a tension-ridden experience well worth taking.
Spooky Vibes
By far one of the most compelling elements of Cronos is its mystery-laden story, which draws on real-world locations and events. The story takes place almost entirely in Krakow, Poland — specifically, a district known as Nowa Huta, which has a fascinating and rich history. Built in 1949 at a kind of Stalinist utopian city, it was meant to house workers from the massive steelworks plant, and heavily promoted communist ideals. That history is actually vital to Cronos, because the game so consistently references it — and often plays with the themes of communist society, worker uprisings, control of information, and mandated quarantines.
Cronos follows an enigmatic space-suit-wearing character known as the Traveler, working for a mysterious organization called The Collective. You descend into an apocalyptic version of Nowa Huta, where the residents have all transformed into grotesque creatures called Orphans. Your goal is to figure out what happened in the 1980s with an event known as the Change, and travel back in time to pivotal moments to extract survivors that might help you change the future.
While the main story of Cronos doesn’t quite deliver on its engaging premise, what I love more than anything about this game is its sense of both time and place. Bloober Team does a fantastic job of recreating 1980s-era Poland, letting you see it from both the proper time period and far in the future when it’s fallen to ruin — like a twisted time capsule. There’s so much care and detail put into every aspect of the world, from both environmental storytelling and dozens of little notes and documents you can find lying around the world.
While exploring the Steelworks plant, you can discover a subplot about worker discontent and the uprising that occurred as the communist authority struggled to cope with the rise of an outbreak. At the hospital, you can learn about a doctor trying to figure out why people’s bodies are merging and transforming, desperate in his duty as a doctor to ease others’ suffering. These little subplots and stories run throughout all of Cronos, adding tremendous flavor and heart to the experience. And it’s especially effective when juxtaposed against the genuinely eerie and horrifying atmosphere of the world itself.
Bloober Team has done an impeccable job of making Crono’s world feel horrific — a vision of life ripped apart and abandoned. Dazzling Christmas trees are still lit in blown-out apartment buildings, menu lists the specials at an upper-class Italian restaurant. But in these remnants of life, the grotesque Orphans now roam, threatening to rip you to pieces at every opportunity.
As you explore more of the city, you meet another member of The Collective known as The Warden, and the pieces of what’s really happening come together. Unfortunately, the main narrative is the one thing that really doesn’t work for me in Cronos. What starts as an atmospheric horror mystery loses almost all of its steam — devolving into a time travel plot that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but also loses most of that thematic flavor of the game’s setting and communist society. A genuinely baffling final boss battle highlights the strange left turn the game makes in its final act. This is especially baffling because the rest of Cronos’ gameplay, outside of that final battle, is genuinely phenomenal.
Every Nook and Cranny
Cronos is most easily comparable to something like Resident Evil or Dead Space — a sci-fi third-person shooter that heavily emphasizes resource management, and like I said before, I mean heavily. It’s a mostly linear experience with some degree of backtracking and extra exploration to find additional secrets or resources.
But Cronos still wildly succeeds by pairing its oppressive atmosphere with adrenaline-laden battles that genuinely put you to the test. The Orphans you fight feel a lot like Dead Space’s Necromorphs, in how they’re mutated forms of humans with oddly long limbs or organs in the wrong place. Hitting those limbs, or the head, is essential to taking Orphans down — but as you get further in the game, certain enemies will have rock-like hardened limbs that you can’t damage, meaning you need to pinpoint open fleshy spots with your shots. Enemies can also merge with the corpses of their fallen allies, meaning you need to burn the ones you take out, or quickly eliminate the ones currently alive, to stop yourself from getting overwhelmed.
You gain access to a number of different weapons in Cronos, a pistol, shotgun, SMG, etc., and each one has a Metroid-like charge shot for damage. I quickly found that the charge show was absolutely essential, because of the limited ammo. And when I say Cronos has limited ammo, I really mean it, almost to a comedic level. Almost every single battle across the game’s sixteen-hour runtime had me expend all of my ammo, flamethrower charges, and anything else I had. Even when I prepped ahead of time and thought I was more than ready, I’d still use almost everything. Ammo is extremely limited at every turn, whether you’re finding it in the environment or using the game’s crafting system to make more.
Cronos is an extremely demanding game. If you’re like me and enjoy the chest-grasping tension of always feeling like you’re running out of items, you’ll love it. But that might not be for everyone. At the same time, I never felt like Cronos was being unfair. The game manages to brilliantly straddle the line between challenge and frustration, making each and every battle truly feel like a struggle to survive. It also helps that the game’s shooting simply feels good, right on par with the likes of Dead Space. Scattered throughout the story are some genuinely intense and well-designed boss battles, which again makes that lackluster final boss fight even more of a head-scratcher.
A New Blueprint
Cronos is a strong reminder of how important the survival element of the genre can be, and how so many games have seemingly lost that half. I absolutely adore the decrepit little world that Bloober has built here, and just wish the game could have stuck the landing better in support of it. Cronos comes within a razor’s edge of being a new horror classic, but even with its missteps, its world and panic-inducing combat is something well worth experiencing. A snafu in the review process meant I had access to the wrong build of the game for a while, but it’s proof of how much I enjoyed Cronos that I was willing to play through it another whole time in the review process.
More than anything, it feels like post-Silent Hill 2 Bloober Team has really found its footing. Cronos is absolutely a step in the right direction, and I can’t wait to see what the studio does next to keep on building from here.
8/10
Cronos: The New Dawn launches on September 5 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.
INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.
