Cronos: The New Dawn Review – Chilling Story Lost in Clunky Design

Cronos: The New Dawn Review

Cronos: The New Dawn is the newest survival horror game developed by Bloober Team, whose cred recently skyrocketed after developing the Silent Hill 2 remake. Before Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team was known for AA, good but not great, survival horror games like Layers of Fear, Observer, Blair Witch, and The Medium. Cronos: The New Dawn is their first game post-Silent Hill 2, and the world is curious! It was announced at the July 31 2025 Nintendo Direct. This made the game look like a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive, but it’s actually also available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. It’s been just over a month since Cronos: The New Dawn’s announcement, and its release is already upon us! Read-on to find out if it’s a must-play for survival horror fans.

Cronos: The New Dawn opens with a phenomenal cutscene of black and white clips of buildings exploding, ashes falling from the sky, people in gas masks, etc. The player character, known as the Traveler, is woken in a small room, already in a spacesuit. They are forced into taking some psychological tests in the form of multiple-choice questions about Rorschach ink blot images. A system voice tells the Traveler to find “The Predecessor”, and the player takes over.

Strong Opening

When the Traveler exits their pod, they find themselves in an alien looking world. There are odd-shaped structures around them, and blue fog everywhere. Because of the cryptic cold opening, and the fact that the Traveler is in a spacesuit, I thought I was in for a Dead Space-like horror experience.  The first piece of environmental evidence the player gets showing they are actually on Earth is a playground with makeshift wooden crosses in the ground.

A lot of the story is given through notes, signs, and voice memos. The first sign the player comes across is written in Polish. The game translates all text into English. This first note is a list of authoritarian rules and warnings for citizens. It commands people report suspicious behavior from neighbors. As the player walks through their first dilapidated building, they see warnings written across the walls that read “You will know them by their eyes” and “do not enter”. Of course, the game compass shows the character needs to break the boards to enter the “do not enter” room.

Driving Narrative

These notes give stories about what happened to the people living in this area of Poland when things went wrong. They’re extremely well-written, and the voice memos are well-scripted and acted. They tell the story of an outbreak that infects people, turning their eyes red. The ruling power of the time is constantly telling people to think of the whole and not themselves. People tried to prevent a pandemic and failed. These are relevant themes in a post-Covid world. I loved Cronos: The New Dawn’s story. I don’t want to give away anything more, but the narrative is one of Cronos: The New Dawn’s greatest strengths.

Another of Cronos: The New Dawn’s strengths is its atmosphere. The game can be absolutely terrifying. The graphics are gorgeous and the environments are incredibly detailed. Every now and then the player comes across some really strange and creative visuals. Cronos: The New Dawn has occasional smatterings of synth music, but most of the score is atmospheric sounds. There are noises that come from the distance that keep the player on edge at all times. The sound design in Cronos: The New Dawn is a masterclass on par with the Silent Hill 2 remake.

Resident Evil 4-Style Gameplay

Cronos: The New Dawn’s gameplay is Resident Evil 4-style over the shoulder third person survival horror. The player starts the game with a handgun. Hold L2 to aim, and press R2 to fire. Holding R2 builds up a charge shot that fires automatically when fully charged. R1 performs a melee punch, and R2, without holding L2, performs a downward stomp. Melee attacks are much weaker than gunshots, but help if a character’s low on ammo, or needs to destroy environmental obstructions. Square reloads ammo, and triangle uses a health item.

There are always story-revealing notes to find in new environments. There are also precious ammo and health items that dot the land. Materials are scattered everywhere, although sparsely, which can be used to craft ammo or health items. It’s not a complex system. For example, just use 3 chemicals to create 5 ammo by selecting the option in the pause menu. There are manual save points as well. Cronos: The New Dawn has an autosave feature. Sometimes it’s not very generous, but sometimes it will put you right before a particularly tricky moment.

Searching for Keys

A lot of progression through Cronos: The New Dawn’s environments involves finding a locked door, then searching the area for a key, or a code. I’m fine with these kinds of puzzles in theory, but in Cronos: The New Dawn, I found them often battling with the game’s horror elements. I’m a pretty meticulous room comber, and there were too many times that I found myself just unable to find the right prompt in order to progress. It wasn’t that I couldn’t figure out a puzzle, I just didn’t see a prompt to pick up an item, or didn’t realize a door was openable until the fifth search.

Cronos: The New Dawn’s compass gives some direction, but a map would have really helped to organize difficult searches. There was a moment maybe 20 minutes into the game, where the fuse I needed was in a room I had to jump down into, and I didn’t see the prompt. I had looked at that ledge many times, but thought it was looking over the room I’d just come from. The area had a lot of dark rooms and a lot of rubble, and an X button prompt wasn’t popping up that I hadn’t already tired. And, unfortunately, there were a lot of times situations like this arose for me. The frustration in these moments destroyed any immersion I had in the game’s horror. It’s difficult to be scared when you just can’t seem to find the thing you’re looking for, and you’re combing over the same rooms repeatedly.

When to Fight

The other area where Cronos: The New Dawn struggles is its combat. There are patches of biomass smeared over environments made up of fused bodies, pulsing muscles, and tentacles. Horrible tentacle monsters can appear from the mass. The first time the player encounters one of these monsters it’s too powerful to deal with. The player has to just run away. In this first combat situation I aimed, and shot the monster and died. I tried again, and again and the monster didn’t seem to react at all to my charged headshots. I tried a couple more times to figure out how to heal and reload. And after the 4^th or 5^th death I realized I should probably just run away from this thing.

Running away from threats in survival horror games is a common mechanic. But Cronos: The New Dawn starts the player off with a gun and a full clip. It seemed weird that this gun I’d been carrying for so long was immediately useless. The second enemy I encountered was easily beaten by charged headshots. After the second enemy I found a note that suggested the player should run from some encounters. I think the devs got this sequence backwards. Maybe let the player fight a weaker enemy first to show how combat basics work, then teach them that some should be avoided? Or maybe don’t give the gun until after the first monster? Or give the warning to run before the first unwinnable encounter? Because of that first encounter where I died repeated times trying to figure out what the game wanted, my immersion was broken again.

Few Combat Mechanics

The combat is overly simple in Cronos: The New Dawn. I get the idea of an underpowered player character in a survival horror game. The devs want the player to feel like every enemy is a threat. They don’t want the player to become a killing machine. But all the Traveler can do is aim and slowly run. There’s no dodge mechanic, or even a quick turnaround. There is a unique mechanic where smaller near dead enemies can merge together to create an unkillable result. Then the game becomes a little more interesting where the player is immolating bodies to halt the merge from happening. But that’s a small idea in otherwise very simple combat that should mostly be avoided.

Cronos: The New Dawn has great horror elements. It has a strong story about the dangers of a pandemic. The world is visually gorgeous and interesting to explore. The problem with the game is its gameplay often gets in the way of its horror. The player aims, shoots, slowly lumbers around, searches for keys, and reads notes. It’s survival horror 101. Very basic gameplay. Cronos: The New Dawn works great as a visual horror feast. It plays mechanically solid, but can get also get so frustrating that it breaks its horror experience. All in all, Cronos: The New Dawn’s strengths, but it above the average survival horror game. Any fans of the genre looking for more should definitely give it a try. The game matches the quality of Bloober Team’s pre-Silent Hill 2 efforts, but, unfortunately, they’re still going to be looking to create a masterpiece amongst their original IPs.

***PS5 code provided by the publisher***