Cronos: The New Dawn PC Review
Summary: Cronos: The New Dawn is an exception survival horror title that puts significant emphasis on building atmosphere and tension.
4.5
Tense!
The survival horror renaissance of recent years continues to go from strength to strength for a genre that publishers declared dead a decade ago. We’ve had nothing but amazing game after amazing game.
Bloober Team, architects of 2024’s fantastic Silent Hill 2 remake, have returned with a new game in a completely new IP: Cronos: The New Dawn.
Once again, Bloober has gone for a familiar gameplay setup. A third person, over-the-shoulder camera, a staple of survival horror at this point, just as pre-rendered backgrounds, fixed cameras, and tank controls were in times gone by. It works as well as it does in any other game like this. If you got on with it, the Resident Evil Remakes, Silent Hill 2, and Dead Space, then you’ll get on fine with it here.
I don’t mention Dead Space idly, as it’s probably the game that Cronos: The New Dawn most closely resembles. The grim, dark, and foreboding tone, a constant sense of claustrophobia, and liberal use of body horror are all present and accounted for here. Set in 1980s Poland after a cataclysmic event has taken place, the player inhabits the power armour of the Traveller. A member of the mysterious Collective as they seek to complete their mission to locate and extract key figures from the area’s past. It’s a story that starts relatively slowly and sedately, but within a few hours takes a dark turn that legitimately caught me off guard at the time and had me hooked for the rest of the game.
Cronos: The New Dawn places massive emphasis on the survival aspect of survival horror. Despite there not being a huge number of enemies around at any given time, ammo is relatively scarce, and even when it is available, inventory space is at a premium, meaning genuinely difficult decisions need to be made about what to carry. Most areas of the game are small and narrow, further emphasising the claustrophobic atmosphere that the game makes effective use of. It walks a fine line between the action of the Resident Evil series and the tension and subtleties of Silent Hill.
When enemies are around, malformed and disfigured former-human abominations, this tension is ramped up to eleven. In their most basic form, they’re not too difficult to dispatch; a few charged shots from your starting pistol will take them down. What makes things interesting is the enemy’s ability to merge. Should a live one come across a corpse, it will quickly absorb it, becoming larger and more powerful in the process. This can happen multiple times, leading to some monstrous foes that become almost impossible to take down efficiently.
The main weakness of enemies, both living and dead, is fire. Early on, an upgrade is uncovered that bestows the Traveller with the ability to release a wave of fire in a small area around her. This removes defeated enemies completely, preventing any merging from taking place, and if an enemy that was in the process of merging is caught in the blast, then the merging is halted. It’s incredibly effective at creating tension, as even the dead can lead to your downfall later.
One of Cronos: The New Dawns’ greatest strengths is its approach to sound design. It’s a very quiet game, but seldom silent. Everything from the wind howling around buildings, the creaking of ruined buildings, and the distant moaning of something that doesn’t sound very pleasant. What little music that exists is nothing short of phenomenal. Low drones with futuristic clangs and electronic whirring backed by deep, unearthly bass, closer to ambiance than music in many ways, and I absolutely adored it.
Aside from the audio, the presentation of Cronos: The New Dawn in general is fantastic. It’s a beautiful game that really pushes the limits of modern hardware, and this being on Unreal Engine 5, you’ll need a beefy machine to get the most of it. With that said, it scales relatively well while still looking decent. The texture work and lighting all really sell the devastated, post-apocalyptic vision of 1980s Poland. It doesn’t suffer from some of the downsides that tend to come with UE5 these days. Primarily, there’s some traversal stutter when crossing the invisible boundaries of new areas, which may be more noticeable to players with more reasonable hardware.
Steam Deck
For a UE5 title, Cronos: The New Dawn holds up surprisingly well on Steam Deck. It locks to 30fps easily, albeit on low settings, so the visuals take a bit of a hit, but it’s a very playable game, nonetheless. It’s clear that Bloober has made some effort to get this running on lower-end, portable hardware, and as such, the Steam Deck is a perfectly acceptable way to play the game.
Final Thoughts?
With Cronos: The New Dawn, Bloober Team has cemented itself as a premier developer of survival horror games. Any lingering doubts after the release of 2024’s Silent Hill 2 have been laid to rest.
It’s a tense, well written, beautiful horror game that I absolutely adored. The interesting story is engaging from start to finish, and the gameplay is a perfect blend of action horror and exploration that manages to not fall back on tropes of the genre like jump scares.
Cronos: The New Dawn is absolutely worth your time.
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