Time twists and terror never felt so real
By Paul Hunter
Cronos: The New Dawn is the most confident survival horror game from Bloober Team yet. It mixes deadly combat, haunting environments, strange time-rifts, and scarce resources all in a bleak Eastern European setting. You take on the role of the Traveler, moving between ruined present-day zones and memories of 1980s Poland to extract human essences that change abilities and narrative outcomes.
The package is classic survival horror—third-person view, tight tunnels, and big concrete structures—but it layers in neat systems. Workstations save progress and let you spend Energy and Cores to upgrade guns, suit bits, and inventory. The enemies are gross in all the right ways and can merge if you don’t burn their remains, so torch fuel matters as much as ammo.
The world is driven by visual mood and a score that keeps the hairs on your neck active. You’ll hunt keys, read logs, and backtrack to optional rooms that hide useful gear. I liked how upgrades felt earned and how each key location had its own unique horrors to contend with.
So, should you step through those rifts and try to piece together how a terrifying 'sickness' destroyed humanity? Let's find out!
I got pulled into Cronos: The New Dawn for its story more than anything else. It centres on the 'Change', a horrific event that broke cities, warped the land, and left people and records scattered like clues. As the Traveler, your task is straightforward: jump into time rifts to find key people that matter and extract their essences, and by doing so hopefully uncovering the mystery behind humanity's demise.
While there are cutscenes, you don’t get handed a ton of exposition. Instead you find bits of life—notes, tapes—that slowly map out what happened. I liked the mystery: It felt like piecing together the past, little by little.
Essences give you buffs, but more than that they shape how scenes play out and alter the conclusion you might reach. Choosing which essences to carry felt meaningful because you could see small differences in dialogue and gameplay. For example, if an essence has a memory of the location you're currently in, you might get sudden flashbacks from that person's eyes.
The pacing is patient. The story doesn’t rush; it hands out fragments at a pace that kept me curious. Sure, a few plot threads ask you to fill in blanks, but that ambiguity felt intentional rather than lazy. This is a strange, fragmented world filled with buried memories begging to be uncovered. If you enjoy digging through ruins and collecting hints, you’ll find the narrative one of the game’s best parts.
Intense combat sits at the core of Cronos: The New Dawn’s loop, and it’s designed to make you think before shooting. Enemies can fuse back together unless you burn them, so torch fuel becomes part of your toolkit. I found myself rationing flame as carefully as bullets.
There’s a clear cast of antagonists: lanky humanoids, spitters, stampeding chargers, hulking brutes, and wall-crawlers that make ceilings feel unsafe. Each type requires a different approach. At times I used the environment to my advantage, setting up barrels or leading foes into a chokepoint. One boss was beatable only after I learned to kite it through a line of explosives and use an time-loop beam to replenish them for a second blast—gritty but satisfying.
There is no dodge or strafe move, so you need to think carefully to avoid getting overwhelmed by a boss or mob of mutated freaks. Your inventory space is also extremely limited, and ammo is limited too, so every bullet counts in battle.
Safe zones offer a nice reprieve from the intensity of combat. They’re where you spend Energy on weapon buffs and Cores on inventory or suit upgrades. Early on I prioritised inventory so I could carry extra items, resources and torch fuel, and that choice paid off later when I had enough ammo space to take out some of the bigger and tankier bosses encounters.
Exploration is crucial for combat readiness. Optional areas hide Energy, Cores, and new weapon essential for progression. Inventory management adds some frustration, sure, but it keeps choices meaningful—do you take another medkit or more ammo?
All in all, the gameplay is satisfying and rewards careful play. When upgrades, environment, and resource planning line up, fights feel earned and tense in a good way. The game does feature NG+ and it's the type of game I see myself replaying serveral times through, much like classics including Dead Space or Resident Evil.
Gruesome visuals and haunting audio are the backbone of Cronos: The New Dawn’s mood. Concrete monoliths and cramped service tunnels press in on you, and the lighting does most of the storytelling—thin beams reveal rust, torn posters, and slick stains while broad shadows hide what’s waiting. The palette favours muted metal and scorched tones with sudden red highlights that signal alarm or violence.
Creature design deserves special mention. Enemies twist in ways that look wrong but believable: gooey limbs that spasm, wall-crawlers that cling and slide, and bulky brutes that collapse with a heavy, physical thud. When foes merge the result reads as genuinely more dangerous—the fused forms feel heavier and more violent. Small UI touches, like the body-scanner marker on your gun, which lets you see the health of enemies, make hallways of corpses readable at a glance and keep tension from turning into guesswork.
Sound pulls the scene together. Ambient layers—distant alarms, pipe creaks, animalised breathing—create a three-dimensional sound field that helps you sense threats before they appear. The score mixes synth pulses with choir-like swells that punctuate key beats. At times the music sits low under effects, which keeps moments raw rather than cinematic, but the overall audio design constantly keeps you on edge.
On PS5 Pro you face a practical choice between modes. Performance mode smooths frame pacing and steadies aiming during hectic fights, while quality mode sharpens detail at the cost of occasional stutters when racing through big areas. DualSense feedback lands with solid gun oomph, yet adaptive-trigger implementation and broader haptic nuance are used sparingly, which felt like a missed chance after Bloober’s previous work on Silent Hill 2 remake.
The game’s cinematography, creature art, and layered 3D audio create a world that is ugly, tense, and convincingly dangerous—exactly the kind of place you’ll both dread and want to keep exploring.
Final Score: 9/10 - Amazing
Developer: Bloober Team
Publisher: Bloober Team
Genre: Survival Horror
Modes: Single-player
A key was provided by the publisher.
By Paul Hunter
Cronos: The New Dawn is the most confident survival horror game from Bloober Team yet. It mixes deadly combat, haunting environments, strange time-rifts, and scarce resources all in a bleak Eastern European setting. You take on the role of the Traveler, moving between ruined present-day zones and memories of 1980s Poland to extract human essences that change abilities and narrative outcomes.
The package is classic survival horror—third-person view, tight tunnels, and big concrete structures—but it layers in neat systems. Workstations save progress and let you spend Energy and Cores to upgrade guns, suit bits, and inventory. The enemies are gross in all the right ways and can merge if you don’t burn their remains, so torch fuel matters as much as ammo.
The world is driven by visual mood and a score that keeps the hairs on your neck active. You’ll hunt keys, read logs, and backtrack to optional rooms that hide useful gear. I liked how upgrades felt earned and how each key location had its own unique horrors to contend with.
So, should you step through those rifts and try to piece together how a terrifying 'sickness' destroyed humanity? Let's find out!
I got pulled into Cronos: The New Dawn for its story more than anything else. It centres on the 'Change', a horrific event that broke cities, warped the land, and left people and records scattered like clues. As the Traveler, your task is straightforward: jump into time rifts to find key people that matter and extract their essences, and by doing so hopefully uncovering the mystery behind humanity's demise.
While there are cutscenes, you don’t get handed a ton of exposition. Instead you find bits of life—notes, tapes—that slowly map out what happened. I liked the mystery: It felt like piecing together the past, little by little.
Essences give you buffs, but more than that they shape how scenes play out and alter the conclusion you might reach. Choosing which essences to carry felt meaningful because you could see small differences in dialogue and gameplay. For example, if an essence has a memory of the location you're currently in, you might get sudden flashbacks from that person's eyes.
The pacing is patient. The story doesn’t rush; it hands out fragments at a pace that kept me curious. Sure, a few plot threads ask you to fill in blanks, but that ambiguity felt intentional rather than lazy. This is a strange, fragmented world filled with buried memories begging to be uncovered. If you enjoy digging through ruins and collecting hints, you’ll find the narrative one of the game’s best parts.
Intense combat sits at the core of Cronos: The New Dawn’s loop, and it’s designed to make you think before shooting. Enemies can fuse back together unless you burn them, so torch fuel becomes part of your toolkit. I found myself rationing flame as carefully as bullets.
There’s a clear cast of antagonists: lanky humanoids, spitters, stampeding chargers, hulking brutes, and wall-crawlers that make ceilings feel unsafe. Each type requires a different approach. At times I used the environment to my advantage, setting up barrels or leading foes into a chokepoint. One boss was beatable only after I learned to kite it through a line of explosives and use an time-loop beam to replenish them for a second blast—gritty but satisfying.
There is no dodge or strafe move, so you need to think carefully to avoid getting overwhelmed by a boss or mob of mutated freaks. Your inventory space is also extremely limited, and ammo is limited too, so every bullet counts in battle.
Safe zones offer a nice reprieve from the intensity of combat. They’re where you spend Energy on weapon buffs and Cores on inventory or suit upgrades. Early on I prioritised inventory so I could carry extra items, resources and torch fuel, and that choice paid off later when I had enough ammo space to take out some of the bigger and tankier bosses encounters.
Exploration is crucial for combat readiness. Optional areas hide Energy, Cores, and new weapon essential for progression. Inventory management adds some frustration, sure, but it keeps choices meaningful—do you take another medkit or more ammo?
All in all, the gameplay is satisfying and rewards careful play. When upgrades, environment, and resource planning line up, fights feel earned and tense in a good way. The game does feature NG+ and it's the type of game I see myself replaying serveral times through, much like classics including Dead Space or Resident Evil.
Gruesome visuals and haunting audio are the backbone of Cronos: The New Dawn’s mood. Concrete monoliths and cramped service tunnels press in on you, and the lighting does most of the storytelling—thin beams reveal rust, torn posters, and slick stains while broad shadows hide what’s waiting. The palette favours muted metal and scorched tones with sudden red highlights that signal alarm or violence.
Creature design deserves special mention. Enemies twist in ways that look wrong but believable: gooey limbs that spasm, wall-crawlers that cling and slide, and bulky brutes that collapse with a heavy, physical thud. When foes merge the result reads as genuinely more dangerous—the fused forms feel heavier and more violent. Small UI touches, like the body-scanner marker on your gun, which lets you see the health of enemies, make hallways of corpses readable at a glance and keep tension from turning into guesswork.
Sound pulls the scene together. Ambient layers—distant alarms, pipe creaks, animalised breathing—create a three-dimensional sound field that helps you sense threats before they appear. The score mixes synth pulses with choir-like swells that punctuate key beats. At times the music sits low under effects, which keeps moments raw rather than cinematic, but the overall audio design constantly keeps you on edge.
On PS5 Pro you face a practical choice between modes. Performance mode smooths frame pacing and steadies aiming during hectic fights, while quality mode sharpens detail at the cost of occasional stutters when racing through big areas. DualSense feedback lands with solid gun oomph, yet adaptive-trigger implementation and broader haptic nuance are used sparingly, which felt like a missed chance after Bloober’s previous work on Silent Hill 2 remake.
The game’s cinematography, creature art, and layered 3D audio create a world that is ugly, tense, and convincingly dangerous—exactly the kind of place you’ll both dread and want to keep exploring.
The Verdict
If you love horror that creeps up on you, Cronos is going to stick. The visuals are grim in all the right ways, the creatures are properly unsettling, and the sound design keeps your nerves tuned. Rather than constant jump scares, the game builds a slow-burn dread that pays off with tense, well-designed encounters and story beats that make you want to keep digging. It asks you to be patient and rewards that patience with some excellent moments and plenty of replay appeal. Honestly, it’s a smart, spectacular addition to the survival horror genre that deserves to blossom into a full-blown franchise.Final Score: 9/10 - Amazing
Cronos: The New Dawn details
Platform: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, PCDeveloper: Bloober Team
Publisher: Bloober Team
Genre: Survival Horror
Modes: Single-player
A key was provided by the publisher.