Fresh from serving up a smalltown, psychological scare-a-thon in the form of 2024’s superb Silent Hill 2 remake, developer Bloober Team has since focussed its energy on birthing a snarling, spiritual successor to the Dead Space series in the form of Cronos: The New Dawn. Silent Hill 2 is a tough act to follow, though, so even though Cronos is a respectable creep show it’s hard not to be a little disappointed it didn’t knock my socks off in the same way. This survival-horror shooter takes place amidst the ruined, futuristic hellscape of a plague-riddled Polish city, a fascinating and foreboding expanse to set its slaughter in, but its fairly uninspired combat doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from the necromorph-dismembering series it clearly draws so much inspiration from. Cronos still manages to deliver a solid slab of spooky mutant-slaying action, but a new dawn for survival horror it most certainly is not.
We step into the space suit of the Traveler, an investigator searching the desolate ruins of the city of New Dawn after her comrade goes missing. It quickly becomes clear that almost every remaining local – aside from the curious abundance of friendly stray cats – is a hostile mutant out for blood rather than conversation. Thankfully, the Traveler has an interesting trick up her sleeve: the ability to temporarily travel back through rifts in time in order to harvest the essence of New Dawn residents before they succumbed to the plague and interrogate them for clues about the fate of her fellow Traveler. It proves to be a compelling mystery presented in a fairly novel way, one that seems to take as much inspiration from Netflix’s Dark as it does Alone in the Dark.
The Traveler herself is a bit like a slightly more murderous Mandalorian: she’s short on words, never takes off her helmet, and signs off on each communication with the same solemn mantra – in this instance, “Such is our calling” in place of “This is the way.” However, despite her initial lack of personality I found myself growing more and more interested in her plight, since each essence she harvests seems to have adverse effects on her mental state. This manifests in an increasingly unsettling state of psychosis (not unlike that suffered by Dead Space’s Isaac Clarke) that injects nightmarish hallucinations into the already-volatile world around her.
Although many of Cronos’ haunted houses are straight out of the survival-horror playbook, from decaying apartment blocks to the obligatory menacing hospital, each area feels distinct and dreamlike thanks to hauntingly fractured architecture that seems trapped in some sort of limbo between time and space. However, connecting these interesting major areas is a noticeable amount of padding that adds unnecessary bloat to its 14-hour runtime. Even the Traveler herself gave voice to my exasperation the second time I had to put story progress on hold for upwards of an hour in order to gradually bring a trainline power generator back online, and I lost count of the times I had to slowly inch my way through boil-covered corridors of biomass that felt like squeezing through Satan’s lower intestines. It certainly looks and sounds revolting, but it’s the sort of thing that becomes mundane pretty quickly, and the tortured torsos waiting in the walls to ambush you in these areas only grow easier to anticipate over time.
In fact, although Cronos’ atmosphere is consistently moody and sinister, it never quite intensifies into the full-on frightfests that developer Bloober Team itself so expertly conjured up in last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake. Sure, there are plenty of cheap jump scares from monsters crashing through walls like they’re the Ghoul-Aid Man, but nothing terrifying enough to compel me to nervously turn on an extra light and check the shadows behind my couch midway through each play session. That said, there is some creepy environmental storytelling to be found here, from bloodstained interrogation rooms to hallways lined with the severed limbs and scattered shields of riot police. In tandem with the many interesting notes and audio recordings that give welcome context to how its society crumbled, Cronos consistently presents an intriguing world that feels at once both lived in and plagued by death.
Fighting Orphan Power Ragers
Cronos’ bloodsmeared hallways might look like they were decorated by a butcher, but the monsters stalking within them have clearly been inspired by a carpenter. Specifically, John Carpenter. The iconic horror director’s influence has reared its disturbingly ugly head in a survival-horror adventure once again, and Cronos is filled to the pus-oozing gills with twisted freaks that look like wax figures that have been left out in the sun too long. These mutated humans – known as “orphans” – come in a handful of forms, from stretched-out fiends with whipping tentacles for arms to towering, tank-like toughs that absorb multiple shotgun blasts before they drop, to the spider-like messes of body parts that scurry erratically along walls and ceilings, making it a challenge to keep them in your ironsights. Later, almost every enemy type is reintroduced in acid-spitting forms, putting greater emphasis on the importance of staying mobile.
Your main weapon to dispatch them with is a fairly rudimentary yet reliable pistol that can fire either standard shots or charged-up blasts, should you opt to deal extra damage on delay at the risk of leaving yourself open to a lunging attack. Extra ammunition can be crafted on the fly using chemicals and scrap scoured from the environment, but there’s clearly some intelligent balancing going on behind the scenes to only ever present just the right amount of resources to make you feel like you’ve barely got enough to survive rather than ever having the luxury of a surplus. That kept my paranoia levels at a consistent peak and meant that I stayed switched on as I entered each new hallway of horrors.
Over the course of the journey gun mods can be found, both as part of the main story’s path and also by sniffing out secrets behind locked doors, but for the most part these are fairly subtle variations on the same pistol, shotgun, and assault rifle types. One shotgun variant can fire high-powered charged-up blasts, while the double-barreled version can fire two blasts in quick succession, for example. It doesn’t seem to make a drastic difference one way or the other in terms of power, so it’s more a matter of letting you fight how you want to rather than upgrading from one to the next.
I did manage to get my hands on a high-powered railgun of sorts, but I mostly kept it locked up in the safe house storage chest because I could never make enough room in my inventory to be able to carry it. Speaking of which, it strikes me as odd that despite the fact the Traveler’s gun appears to shapeshift between weapon types while held in her hand, not unlike the all-in-one firearm found in Remedy’s Control, each gun variant takes up its own individual slot in her heavily restricted inventory space. How does that make sense? It would be like using an entire cutlery drawer to hold a single Swiss Army Knife.
At any rate, the bigger problem here is that because Cronos wears its Dead Space influence so plainly on its sleeve – from the messages written in blood on the walls, to the Isaac Clarke-style fashion the Traveler stomps through item crates, to the zero-gravity stretches that have you zipping between drifting chunks of terra firma – it practically begs for comparisons to that seminal survival-horror classic (and its excellent 2023 remake). Unfortunately, going toe to toe it comes up shorter than a zombie after a shotgun round to the head. Where the combat in Dead Space is wonderfully dynamic, enhancing the already-flexible gunplay with stasis powers to slow the charge of fast-moving monsters and telekinesis to turn their own detachable limbs into projectiles, Cronos is disappointingly one-note by comparison. You can shoot the legs out of certain enemy types to trip them up if you want, but generally your best option is almost always to aim for the head or a conveniently placed explosive barrel. It never really inspires much more improvisation or creative killing than that.
There’s no telekinesis, but there is the ability to target orb-like “oddities” found in the world and reverse their trajectories through space and time, introducing some light environmental puzzle solving in between enemy encounters that challenge you to rewind collapsed bridges and tunnels to clear the path forward. But this time-manipulating ability sadly has no application for elevating the fairly stock-standard combat, aside from occasionally allowing you to rebuild explosive barrels for repeat blasts during boss fights. It would have been interesting if you could perhaps reassemble one of the suicide-bombing acid monsters and set them as some sort of time bomb to trip up other attackers, or rewind one of the rushing ghouls back a few steps to buy yourself the breathing space to chamber your next shotgun round, but sadly you can’t do anything of the sort.
Instead, Cronos’ main combat idea is that some of its enemies will attempt to absorb the power of any corpses found in their vicinity, evolving them into stronger mutations that deal greater damage and withstand more of your limited ammunition should you fail to disrupt them in the process. This again, is not too far removed from the Infector necromorphs in Dead Space that reanimated human corpses if you didn’t kill them quick enough, and although it did create some added urgency to prioritise specific foes anytime the telltale swirl of corpse-sapping tentacles sprouted out of them, it never really made a huge difference to my general approach to each encounter.
Initially, Cronos encourages you to use single-use flamethrower bursts to burn any carcasses you come across lest they become energy-dispensing ATMs for the other orphans still standing, but I typically used the scrap parts required to craft flamethrower rounds for shotgun shells instead and never really ran into any major hurdles as a result. (The post-game stats screen indicates that I allowed just 20 enemies to merge with fallen foes, which is a pretty small percentage of the sizable number of disfigured demons I dispatched over the course of the campaign.)
However, I did enjoy Cronos’ half a dozen or so boss fights. Although in practise they rarely require much more strategic complexity than to shoot the standard three glowing weak spots, they’re each nonetheless intimidating in size and the arenas you face them in are intensely claustrophobic, from the swirling mass of blackened tendrils that assembles into a towering golem to stalk you through a ruptured apartment, to the disgusting conjoined twins that crash through the walls of the steelworks’ basement. Each climactic clash had me desperately scrambling for ammo and panicking over each pistol shot, sometimes just barely making it through with my heart monitor redlining and only a couple of rounds left in the chamber. The handful of moments like these prove that Cronos is capable of creating survival horror at its stressful best, at least in short bursts.
Harvester of Sorrow
Aside from the corpse-merging mechanic mentioned earlier, the only other notable point of difference that Cronos’ combat presents is the essence system. As the Traveler harvests the essence of specific story characters and other fallen comrades you find along the way, they each give you an attribute buff, like increasing the damage you deal to enemies that are on fire, or reducing the amount of resources required to craft ammo and medkits. In a system reminiscent of the equipable status effects typically found in roguelikes such as Dead Cells, you can only have three of these essences active at once, and you can only add a new one by sacrificing one of your existing buffs – once it’s gone, it’s gone for good. That presented me with some interesting choices to shape my character with, even though it wasn’t always totally clear how much benefit I was getting. In one extreme case, the description of an essence was just a random string of numbers and letters like a suggested password from Google Chrome – I equipped it out of curiosity, but I have no idea what effect it had or indeed if it had any effect at all.
Elsewhere there are a few too many unwanted nasties that creep into the campaign on PlayStation 5, and I’m not talking about the tortured ghouls with second jaws for necks that stalk you at every turn. Oftentimes I’d have to stomp an item crate repeatedly before my hits would register, which became annoying particularly during the many horde mode-style arena fights when enemies were swarming from all angles. At other times I’d waste precious pistol rounds because the gas canister or explosive barrel just failed to rupture at first shot, which is not ideal when ammunition is at such a premium.
Most egregious, though, were the handful of times that the Traveler would get stuck on scenery. At one point, after surviving a particularly brutish late-game boss, I was heading back to save my game at the nearest safehouse when I got trapped in a room full of infinitely respawning acid bombers because the Traveler just straight-up refused to walk through a wide-open exit. That forced me to reload my save and fight that same boss all over again, which was more deflating than a punctured spacesuit.
