Cronos: The New Dawn | Review

Jesse 'Doncabesa' Norris September 3, 2025Last Updated: August 30, 2025

0 1,269 5 minutes read

Bloober Team is on a roll. After last year’s smash hit Silent Hill 2 Remake, they have Cronos: The New Dawn, and it’s even better. I’ve spent roughly 15 hours or so total with the game, beating it once and starting up a new game +. This trippy, surreal survival-horror title is one of the best I’ve played in the genre.

Welcome, Traveler

You are a traveler, awakened to try and save the best of humanity in the past, to preserve it in this new, terrible future. Information is rarely given freely in Cronos. Instead, you must poke every nook and cranny. There are notes, posters, and recordings in each zone that let you piece together what has happened in this time-travel-filled universe. The game begins with a test. You are a newly awoken traveler, a meat sack inside a suit, only there to carry forward the progress made by your predecessor.

What is that progress? Who are you? Who are your predecessors? The game dishes out these answers slowly across its 10-to-15-hour runtime. No spoilers, as always, but I found the Twin Peaks/Stranger Things/Sci-Fi Horror vibes to be the best Bloober Team has ever devised. Every ounce of Cronos is dark, mysterious, and incredibly cool. Some of the English VO is a bit cheesy, and oddly, for a game set in Poland by Polish developers, there is no Polish voiceover.

Cronos is deceptively dense. The variety of locales is low, with the game taking place decades after civilization fell, alongside dives into the past at the start of the outbreak that took it all down. “The Change” turns humans into monsters who can merge and become far more terrifying and difficult challenges. Through many combat encounters and light puzzles, you’ll search for clues as to the origins of the disease, who your outfit, “The Collective” is, and what your role in this story is meant to be.

Deliberate

Cronos: The New Dawn can be a difficult game. Your character is slow, bulky, with low agility. You will be tasked with killing hundreds of infected in a world where ammo is precious. Throughout your quest, you will have access to a powerful charge pistol, burst pistol, shotgun, SMG, & railgun versions of your weapon. Alas, inventory space is light, and you’ll have to scrounge the environment for resources.

While you can straight up find ammunition, suit repair kits, and more, the main currency is simply titled ‘energy’. With energy, you can use the save station store to upgrade your guns and buy resources like bullets, heals, and more. Those save stations typically have a few important items like Cores, which are needed to upgrade your suit itself. Cronos demands exploration, while knowing how difficult it will be to remain stocked up while doing it.

Your traveler can only hold a small amount of ammunition for each weapon type to start, and each weapon attachment occupies a precious inventory slot. By the end, I could hold 10 rounds in my charge pistol and 15 more in one slot of my inventory. Carrying all four weapons is the type of luxury you’ll only be able to afford in new game +, as long as you find the necessary Cores.

Every part of the game, from movement during combat to exploration, requires deliberate choices. The Changed, those infected whom you will fight, have obvious and mostly slow-hitting attacks. While you have no dodge maneuvers, you can sprint for however long you want. Using rooms to your advantage, especially as they tend to be full of explosive and fuel-filled canisters, is key to staying alive.

Alongside your weaponry, you have flame canisters and proximity mines that can set enemies and corpses ablaze. The fire will stun living enemies, dealing heavy damage, and cause corpses to disappear. That becomes key over time as enemies will absorb the dead around them, becoming far more powerful if not stopped with a headshot mid-transformation.

Your aim is atrocious early on. Saving up energy to lower the weapon sway should be first on most players’ lists. I played the game on PC as Xbox code was not ready before launch. Using both a controller and mouse & keyboard, it was damned hard to hit enemies from any more than 5 feet away until I had a few upgrades under my belt.

Numerous yellow X-marked boxes litter the environment. While you could waste ammo on them, the Traveler can both punch and stomp. While most of these containers have energy in them, during more hectic boss fights, they are a great source of ammo and health packs. Those melee moves will come in useful early on in the game, when ammo is so scarce that you’ll find yourself wailing away on monsters trying to stay alive.

There are other movement and combat mechanics to the game, though they come in the back half of the story, and I feel are best left to be discovered. Just know that Cronos smartly changes things up, even joking about how repetitive some of the jump scare fights can get, before giving you a nice long breather into a puzzle or story section. That story, while it wasn’t perfect, I ended up loving it.

The New Dawn

I’m not great at exploration in games like this. I tend to mainline too often and miss out on context. Thankfully, I got what I believe to be most of the picture in this one. You wake up, have a purpose, and almost immediately realize nothing is how it should be. This desolate future, bereft of life outside of helpful cats, is full of contradictions that lead you to question it all.

I thought I knew where it was going, and boy, I did not. While I wasn’t the biggest fan of a few of the revelations, I did grow to appreciate them more as the backstory was filled out. At certain points during the game, you’ll have choices to make, so don’t put that controller down during major cutscenes. Going through again and seeing minor changes was interesting in my New Game+. Some collectibles give you different passive bonuses; outside of that, they felt underutilized (trying not to be too spoilery).

The interesting premise is backed up with mostly solid writing. Some of the past humans you’ll come across feel one-note, while others get a proper fleshing out as multi-dimensional characters. Your traveler in particular goes through a lot, though even there, I would have appreciated having a little bit more influence over her decisions in the latter half.

Graphically, at least on my PC, the game looks great. Running in UE5, I do worry about performance on consoles. Whenever a game isn’t available before launch, the most I can say is keep an eye out for Xbox/PS5-related coverage before making a purchase. While it ran great on my 5800x/7900xtx combo, I have no idea how it will be on a console. On that PC, though? Boy, is it pretty.

While the base architecture can be a bit same-y, the quality and lighting make everything pop. Some of the trippy sequences, especially ones that involve gravity, are jaw-dropping. All of it is elevated by an excellent soundtrack that is parts Blade Runner, The Division, Stranger Things, and a beautiful Opera. The OST adds so much to the overall vibes, perfectly capturing the haunted weirdness that the game’s story is going for.

Wrapping Things Up

Cronos: The New Dawn is excellent. Gorgeous graphics, smartly deliberate gameplay, an intriguing story, and incredible music create a new IP that is easily Bloober Team’s best.