Cronos: The New Dawn - A Masterclass In Horror (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- Sep 19
- 10 min read
Cronos: The New Dawn
Released: September 5th, 2025
Developer: Bloober Team
Publisher: Bloober Team
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Switch 2, Xbox X/S
In hindsight, it was inevitable that Bloober Team would wade into the realm of post-Covid quarantine horror. The studio made a name for itself relentlessly mining trauma for Big Scaries, so of course it would get around to the collective misery that was this decade’s season opener.
Here’s the thing though, and I say this as someone who has never been especially forgiving to Bloober, possibly their harshest critic - they actually did great this time around. Not just when it comes to the script, but in terms of gameplay as well.
Cronos: The New Dawn is a fucking good horror game.
Cronos asks what would happen if a Mysterio cosplayer put a vagina on their helmet and explored the ruins of Poland ages after it fell to a nightmarish pandemic. The answer is Dead Space with a side order of time traveling socialism.
Very much an old school survival horror in many ways, it’s a slow burn affair focusing on atmosphere, intimidating combat, and obligatory inventory management. While the look and feel is pure Dead Space, the structure is often akin to early Resident Evil. It takes a while to get going but the blended elements make for a heavy, methodical, engrossingly moody game.
The protagonist is a Traveler called The Traveler who works on behalf of a collective called The Collective. It’s all very dispassionate and clinical, with a protagonist who is almost robotic in her mannerisms and approach to the mission. A Traveler’s sole purpose is to pick up a mission from the point at which the last one failed.
“Such is our calling” is their only ethos. They literally live to serve, and the current service entails picking through the meaty shit heap of a ruined world to procure an “essence” - the consciousness of a human extracted from the past and “saved” for the Collective’s needs.
Much of the story has to be picked up via context at first, as the Traveler is entirely goal-oriented and on her own - basically, she’s not going to stop and have a chat to fill you in. Its opening hours suffer a little for combining a slow narrative start with an unfeeling protagonist, giving a player very little to relate to until things get more intriguing.
Plenty of documents and logs exist to tide you over, detailing how people fell to a mysterious body horror disease. The descriptions of quarantine life and people’s fear of sickness hit pretty close to home only five years removed from the lockdowns of 2020, but they’re pretty well written. The backstory details carry some interesting subplots of their own.
Cronos gets a bunch of bonus points for atmosphere. A sense of isolation and dread is artfully crafted as you explore places that feel well and truly dead. When it comes to portraying desolation, this is some top stuff. Speaking of effective portrayals, the masses of glowing flesh you soon encounter leave no ambiguity when it comes to the disease’s ghastly effects.
It all kicks off once freaks known as Orphans stagger off the set of The Thing to provide a primary antagonist. They’re pretty effective in their role of keeping you afraid, crawling out of flesh nests amidst the meat moss. Most of the meat contains nothing, which only builds anticipation, and same goes for the monster corpses strewn about - only some of them get up, just enough to keep you worried.
There’s an impressive show of restraint when it comes to jump scares and monster popouts, especially for a studio that usually loves such things far too much. Bloober’s nailed it on this one, holding exactly the right amount in reserve and picking its moments of surprise astutely.
Dead Orphans can still be a threat - the live ones will consume bodies and evolve if allowed to do so. Seeing a monster wrap its tendrils around a corpse is terrifying thanks to how well Cronos presents it as a worst case scenario. Naturally, any successful mergers make Orphans way tougher to fight.
The Traveler has a radial fire blast to destroy bodies before they’re consumed. Any Orphans nearby will burn, stop merging, and act stunned if caught in the flames as well. The fuel it requires is distributed freely near save points, but you can only carry enough for one use at first and you also need it to incinerate fleshy instances, so it can’t be banked upon.
On rare occasions, the upfront horror is traded out for some weirdo mindscrew moments. The infrequency of these moments does a lot for them, turning potentially hackneyed fakeouts and hallucinatory spots into more memorable surprises. They serve a solid narrative purpose in the end, too.
As noted, Cronos is very Dead Space in its presentation and playstyle. The tight camera perspective, chunky movement, heavy stomp attack, and many aesthetic touches all evoke Visceral’s classic series without trying to hide it. It certainly does a better job as a spiritual successor than any of the other attempts out there.
Combat is typical third-person shooting fare when it comes to mechanics, but the scarce ammo and modest fire rate keeps up an effective survival horror vibe. There’s no dodging, you’re expected to keep repositioning yourself - this is fine in theory as it’s suitable for the game’s general pace, but if you’re fighting in one of the many tight spaces, you can feel taken advantage of.
The Traveler’s gun transforms a’la Control’s Service Weapon, starting off as a pistol before gaining a shotgun form and etcetera. They’re not designed for “gunplay” so much as carefully aiming and charging up shots to maximize damage. Even when you get an automatic fire mode, you soon find specific use cases for which it’s best reserved.
Due to both the dearth of ammo and highly restrictive carrying capacity, every shot counts. Charging a shot is crucial to conservation, but the long reach of Orphan attacks makes the wait dangerous even at a distance. During bigger setpiece fights it’s sometimes annoying and sometimes properly scary. The aggressive weapon sway is often the main reason for it being the former.
Combat is fine on its own merits but doesn’t elevate itself much above that bar. It’s like shooting Necromorphs without the frantic feel or cool limb shredding stuff. You point, you charge, you shoot, and sometimes you do that against big things or groups of smaller things, but your approach tends to stay the same. That’s not to say it isn’t tense, because it is, but fighting’s mechanically rote.
Boss battles are few and far between, which is a good thing. The first boss is especially unlikable, emphasizing the negative aspects of resource constraints, tight environments, and limited agility. The others are better but sometimes tedious, and I felt the very last one kinda took the piss for a game without a dodge roll. I’ll say one thing though - they all know how to make an entrance!
While Cronos isn’t one of those SOMA cases where it’d be better with zero combat, I have to say the moments between fights is much better than when they happen. Clunking through the wreckage of civilization is proper spooky, and the constant fear of a fight is preyed upon so well throughout. In this regard, combat is a means to an end - you need it for a tangible threat, but the threat is the best part.
Cronos really knows how to fuck with a player. It almost never unfairly tricks you but it’s fantastic at using misdirection, drawing your eye toward threats or pickups and away from the danger hiding in plain sight. Maybe two or three times I felt like an ambush was a bit cheap, but the Orphan that dropped from the ceiling had me looking up for hours without it ever happening again, which is when I knew it’d gotten into my head.
A good game knows when to punish you for mindlessly grabbing free items, and when to let you simply have them - a great game knows how to make this so unpredictable that even if it’s a freebie, you’re left waiting anxiously for the catch. Cronos is very good at cruel generosity, best exemplified with the life scanner gun attachment.
After several hours of cautious corpse watching, you’re given a scanner that shows the health status of whatever it’s aimed at. This means you can tell when an Orphan’s playing dead, but it’s somehow scarier to point a gun at a motionless body and see that green light flicker. It’s waiting for you to make a move, because another dreaded fight is here and you have to start it.
Even worse, you know a game predicated on fear isn’t going to just hand out something that’ll take the teeth out of its bite. That’s when you start anticipating the other ways you might get upskittled.
Not long after getting the scanner, you’re put in a dark environment where the walls are covered in flesh, within which hide trap-like Orphans that blend right in. Hooray, the thing you thought would empower you has become a desperate lifeline that you’re anxiously pointing at every square inch of vertical surfaces. What a tremendous way to subvert player tools without trivializing or disabling them.
That aforementioned need for efficiency is a huge part of the experience in both its story and gameplay. Your starting inventory space is some OG Chris Redfield shit and even crafting materials max out at less than a handful. Everything about the game is built to hammer home the importance of getting a lot from a little.
Where Signalis attempted it in such a way that it led to constant backtracking, Cronos is generally decent about giving opportunities to free up slots. Limited space for materials encourages regular crafting, and limited space for items means crafting is better than carrying a lot of stuff. It’s nicely balanced, and a Resi-style item container is present in safe zones as well.
That said, there can still be moments of backy-forthy. One particular area had me running up and down the same flight of stairs many times to grab one fuel canister at a time so I could burn away a series of flesh walls and make progress. Sometimes you will end up with a full bag but need space for a plot item, at which point you’ll have to trudge back to a safe zone or waste something.
Honestly though, Cronos does the restrictive inventory schtick better than most, even laying a thematic foundation that justifies it.
One aspect of exploration I don’t much care for is the timey wimey puzzling. Sometimes you’ll find broken bits of architecture floating around that you’ll need to “rewind” to fix. It’s like the rebuilding gimmick from Red Faction: Armageddon, to pull a random reference, but far more scripted and straightforward. They’re rarely challenging, mostly existing for thematic flavor, and I could take or leave them.
An exception are explosive barrels that can be rewound each time they’re triggered. While their practical use is welcome in a fight, it’s their mere presence I appreciate, building that dread by signaling that shit is about to go down.
Later segments involve some gravity boots that let you walk up special walls and fly between landing pads in another nod to Visceral’s work. While they’re no more clever than the rewinding bits, I like them much more, mostly because they’re well presented. The way the camera swings behind you when walking between horizontal and vertical surfaces is incredibly pleasing for reasons I can’t explain.
I only grew more fond of Cronos as I got further into it, and I can’t believe this is the studio that gave us Silent Hill Spammequins less than a year ago. Between then and now, Bloober seems to have rapidly matured in every way - evocative writing, solid gameplay, smartly used horror tropes, well earned scares, all of it expertly woven together. They even stuck the landing, with an ending that didn’t leave a sour taste in my mouth.
Whatever happened to make this game such a step up, long may it continue.
By the halfway mark, much of New Dawn’s “quarantine horror” subsides, giving way to a lot of existential sci-fi without sacrificing scariness. A character named the Warden throws a spanner into the story’s works by dint of some provocative musings. A simple scene in which he and the Traveler discuss triviality as the difference between surviving and living elevates the entire game, as far as I’m concerned.
The Traveler herself becomes more likable not because she really develops much (for most of it), but because she’s a stoic constant in a world of fluctuating fuckery. It helps that she has moments of very dry fun, particularly when petting one of the cats you can find while exploring. Machine-like as they are, Travelers are suckers for kitties, and that one little detail adds a lot to them.
Being such a high stress game, playing for too long in one go can be grueling. It’s also a far longer game than I anticipated, and that’s not entirely to its benefit. There’s more than one section packed with those wall Orphans, and the impact lessens with each one, becoming outright tiresome in the final act. While the pace of the campaign isn’t bad, it would’ve greatly benefitted from a trim.
I’ve name dropped a lot of horror in this review, and it’s kind of hard not to. Cronos is derivative in many ways, wearing the fact on its sleeve, but it’s pulling from some of the best media, takes only what it needs, and does it really well. Despite how heavily influenced by Dead Space it is, New Dawn manages to stand as its own thing in the end.
Same goes for its aesthetic choices. Our protagonist echoes Isaac Clarke and Bloober clearly ordered the John Carpenter Special when it came to her enemies, but both still leave their own impressions. I love the Traveler’s domed helmet aesthetic even more than Clarke’s Rig suits, and the Orphans really quite unsettling in their obscene grotesquery.
A soundtrack characterized by synth and low drones only adds to a sense of genre familiarity, deftly hitting an 80s horror vibe. While we’re at it, I’ll add that the voice acting is great as well - the deadpan Traveler and eccentric Warden play off each other well, and those few human characters we hear from do great at communicating fear and panic.
Cronos: The New Dawn is far and away the best work Bloober Team’s put out and a splendid survival horror game in its own right. What starts as a post-pandemic Dead Space cover version becomes its own brand of scary that conditions paranoia into its players with undeniable expertise. There's a great script to go with the A-grade psychological puppeteering, and the whole package deserves to be seen as a genre classic.
I am truly impressed.
9/10
