Bloober Team has always been synonymous with horror, from their earliest days with Layers of Fear through to the high profile Silent Hill 2 remake. It has, however, been nearly 5 years since their last original title, the somewhat divisive The Medium, so the pressure on Cronos: The New Dawn to deliver is heightened. Can the Polish developers follow up on the success of their work on Konami’s legendary series in a story of their own devising? To do so, Cronos takes clear influences from the usual survival horror mainstays of Silent Hill and Resident Evil but there is also a large slice of Dead Space, from character design to gameplay mechanics.
Cronos features a complicated narrative full of time travel and dimensional travel, but it all boils down to a story of betrayal, grief, and coping with the effects of a pandemic. Post Covid-19 any story that revolves around communities locked down to prevent the spread of disease will take on a greater resonance for players and this is certainly the case here. Notes and environmental cues abound that tell a tale of a scared population torn between self preservation and communal survival. The disease here is a mysterious affliction that turns victims into monstrous ghouls that merge with each other to create even greater threats.
Dead Space is the most obvious influence here graphically, with the main protagonist, enigmatically named The Traveller, wearing an exosuit that recalls Isaac Clarke (and Bioshock’s Big Daddy to a lesser extent). The Traveller feels similarly chunky too, with deliberate movement rather than agility being the name of the game. Environments are largely dark and depressing, with effective mood lighting and signposting alongside some gnarly body horror aspects. Many areas are covered in a biomass that oozes and throbs as you move past it, whilst others are desolate and windswept. These environments are contrasted with occasional serene moments where you travel back to the town of New Dawn before the epidemic and are faced with scenes of everyday normality.
Exploring the world of New Dawn follows the familiar pattern of finding keys, unlocking shortcuts and solving environmental puzzles. The latter does feature the new addition of a power that can manipulate timespace anomalies to change the environment for your benefit. This is mostly used to reveal hidden paths (sometimes requiring you to take detours to find an angle where the anomaly is visible) or to access secret areas filled with loot but later game boss fights also use this mechanic to great effect. The progression is quite strictly linear, which feels appropriate for survival horror and means that there is little backtracking.
Alongside your anomaly manipulation power, you have a basic melee attack which is mostly used to destroy item boxes or as a last resort when ammo is low, and an adaptable sidearm which can take various forms to mimic the standard horror arsenal. It starts as a basic handgun that can be charged for extra damage, but you find shotgun, automatic, and even a powerful arbalest as you make your way through the horrors of New Dawn. Somewhat annoyingly, however, these different forms take up extra spaces in your limited inventory so I found myself sticking to the initial handgun and shotgun throughout. I appreciate that this is a convention of the genre, but some games have taken to separating the inventory from your weapons and I think this enables you to try out a greater range of weapons, aiding in a feel of gameplay variety. Upgrading weapons is a slow process too and whilst this is undone for a small cost your current guns are usually more effective than the ones you find.
Combat is a deliberate and intense affair. Many enemies take multiple shots to go down, with fully charging being essential. If you allow enemies to merge they become even more powerful, eventually being impervious to bullets and requiring you to use fire and explosive barrels to damage them. My first playthrough resulted in me being hunted by a merged enemy when I had no ammo to damage it and necessitated a reload as I came to terms with this mechanic. Setting fire to corpses prevents merging, but you also have limited torch ammo so you need to be strategic as to when to use it.
You are not entirely alone in your quest though as you are preceded by a host of former operatives who leave clues, tools, and pathways for you to find. Fairly early on you’ll also meet The Warden, a fellow traveller who plays an increasingly important role in the story of Cronos. Alan Turkington brings a welcome degree of mystery and gravitas to this role in his vocal performance. You’ll also find survivors, some of whom are targets for retrieval as you are sent to recover their ‘essence’ in order to learn how to prevent the tragic disease from happening. The moral ambiguities around this process are a key part of the larger tale being told and it is far from a simple hero’s story.
Perhaps most importantly, however, are the ten cats that are scattered throughout the game. Finding these furry friends almost always requires venturing off the main path or solving optional puzzles, but the rewards for doing so are worth it. Most obvious are extra currency or upgrade materials but, once rescued, these feline companions also congregate in your main base and provide a welcome level of life to the desolated environment. Other upgrades can be found through absorbing the aforementioned ‘essence’ with each providing different buffs. There are various achievement that rely on you maintaining specific essences throughout but an initial playthrough will see you swapping each out as you progress with only three being able to be stored at once.