The “Double A” videogame space is where quality videogames designed with a passion are located in gaming these days. We’ve seen the likes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Split Fiction shine this year, and this momentum isn’t slowing down yet now Hell is Us, and Bloober Team’s Cronos: The New Dawn have turned up.
Inspired by horror videogame classics like Dead Space and Silent Hill, Cronos: The New Dawn welds together its forbears into an exciting survival horror, intertwining its intriguing world building and foreboding dread in a way that showcases the power of “Double A” videogames, and highlighting the sector’s potential for creating spellbinding videogame experiences.
Not often do horror games put the emphasis on saving others alongside saving the self, but in Cronos: The New Dawn this is exactly the predicament you find yourself in. You are The Traveller, and your entire directive is to work for an organization known as The Collective, and your job is to traverse a ravaged wasteland set in 1980s Poland, in order to prevent a cataclysmic event known as The Change from occurring. The Traveller must find time portals to send key personalities back to the past before the events of The Change, while also finding ways to eradicate the monstrosities known as Orphans.
Videogames tend to revel in their airs of secrecy, and Cronos: The New Dawn very much sketches along these lines. Who is The Traveller? What is The Change and why doesn’t it relate to a hobo sitting on a street corner? The sense of mystery is alluring, and of course you’ll find the answers as you play the game, but more upfront context would stave off the feeling of pretentiousness at least.
Thankfully, Cronos: The New Dawn does an impressive job of building context through its environmental storytelling. Search through rooms with desks, and you will find documents and letters from individuals detailing personal events in the lead-up to The Change. You’ll see various signs dotted around as well, which help to convey the dire and uncertain situation that The Change has wrought.
While it is no doubt impressive at drenching players in a cataclysmic atmosphere, Cronos keeps the helmet on The Traveller’s head for some reason, so you cannot relate to her at face value. We’ve seen Dead Space‘s Isaac Clarke’s face before and he’s a dullard engineer, but at least there are times where he takes his strobe-like helmet off so we can relate to him better and move the story along. It is understandable that The Traveller is a utilitarian figure who works for an organization who puts her to work by attempting to bring VIPs back to the past in an attempt to undo The Change like a typo error in Microsoft Word, but how can anybody relate to her if she keeps that huge dome on her head? She’s not a Bioshock entity nor a deep sea diver—so why she has to wear attire that’s eerily similar to a Big Daddy is absurd.
Much in the vein of Dead Space, a large amount of your time in Cronos will be spent traveling from Point A to Point B while finding keys to unlock rooms, fending off the orphan scourge, upgrading your equipment and work benches and saving your game at save stations. Progress is straightforward as you trudge forebodingly into each environment hoping you aren’t disadvantaged by a lack of ammo and health pick-up items.
Also like Dead Space, you can retrieve health and ammo from fallen enemies, and they can be incinerated by your flame tool, which actually doesn’t do that much as Orphans won’t rise again and attack you. You can improve weapons, ammo and health potential at an upgrade station, though these enhancements to your abilities are banal and won’t surprise you with anything unique or cool.
Orphan enemies are tentacle-like entities with eerie similarities to The Thing in John Carpenter’s The Thing. Their unpredictable tentacle lunging means you’ll need to fell them quickly before they deplete your health bar entirely, but popping off enough shots is enough to take them out without hassle—except when they pounce on you in groups, then you just gotta keep moving towards safety while trying to stave them off.
Orphans aren’t unique enemies, but they aren’t even orphans in the proper sense. They aren’t the size of parentless children, though they do have an ickiness about them as though they were pulled from a Silent Hill game. There’s no skill defeating them, which defeats the sense of dread they’re meant to give off—but they do crawl along the ground like scary monsters tend to do in many survival horror games. Also, it bears mentioning that there will be times where you’re trapped and will have no choice but to fight off orphans, but usually these encounters will provide you with what you need in order to eviscerate them all.
On the contrary, the boss fight are a meaty delight because they’re sizable and force The Traveller to utilize her arsenal as well as she can in order to devastate them with mighty firearm blasts. If only the inspiration given in these boss fights were spread through the entire game, then Cronos would’ve been great rather than an unfulfilling pastiche of better horror games.
You can’t mistake the atmosphere and sense of dread in Cronos as it is a bleak, immersive and outstanding-looking horror experience. There is a thirst for new IP that reminds us of the potential the games industry can have when there’s a unique vision at play. The misty and foggy landscapes evoke the uneasiness of The Traveller’s task and the sense of desolation all around. The smokiness and the dingy environments are dangerous and will definitely put you at unease in a manner akin to Resident Evil or the Alien film franchise.
Sound design is crisp and lives up to its triple A forbears as well. The sound of The Traveller’s boots as they make contact with the dirty surfaces is crisp and remarkably clear. Weapons sound devastating and lethal, matched by the malevolence The Traveller encounters throughout her dreary horror journey. The grossness of pests emerging from their nests can’t be understated either.
Conclusion
As much a victim of greater survival horror games as it is an oasis in a desert of unique survival horror experiences, Cronos: The New Dawn tries its best to evoke the atmosphere and dread that put the genre on the map. However, what lingers is the stench of a lack of effort, as there are various instances where you’ll be reminded of the greatness of the survival horror classics that came before, while you discover the myriad of ways Cronos falters in its attempts to shock and scare you. There are decent boss fights, excellent presentation, and decent weapons, but its workmanlike protagonist and weak conventional enemies keep this promising double A horror on a leash, when it really should’ve broken the chains and unleashed itself impressively upon every genre fan. Cronos is good enough, but it really should’ve been so much more.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
