The New Dawn Is So Much More Than A Sci-Fi Silent Hill

Cronos: The New Dawn is a survival horror game from Bloober Team that delivers more action-packed scares than ever before. It maintains a lot of the same storytelling DNA as previous titles from the team, such as The Medium, but with a more sci-fi slant, taking players through time itself as the Traveler, following an apocalyptic event called The Change. Players will manipulate time rifts and change the environment as they journey through a hostile, brutalist world filled with monsters that can merge with one another to become stronger.

I should begin this preview by saying I’m not typically a horror game player – my coverage generally falls more in the realm of Sims 4 fairies or cozy Animal Crossing builds. However, I do enjoy the concepts of horror, and every now and then I come across something so uniquely creepy I’m able to shove down my fears and enjoy the experience – even if I die endlessly. Cronos: The New Dawn was absolutely one of these instances for me, leaving me still thinking about my time in its world and with its monsters over a week later.

Combatting Cronos’ Combining Monsters

To Burn, Or Not To Burn, That Is The Question

The creatures of Cronos are called Orphans, and come in a few different horrifying flavors: some headless, long-limbed masses of flesh, others lucky enough to have a head are mostly gaping maws or adorned on every side with extra arms. It’s all a real tour de force of the disgusting, and I mean that in a very complimentary way. Of course, this only further compounds when monsters are able to merge, which I allowed an embarrassing number of times in my playthrough, taking on new skills and swelling in size.

In my defense, a lot of this merging was always inevitable. The game employs a Resident Evil-esque inventory and resource management system, limiting players to carrying only one flamethrower fuel at a time. This makes combat a bit like a fast-paced puzzle, especially when taking into account environmental factors: I could burn bodies immediately, or I could lure more monsters down the same hallway and shoot flammable canisters to interrupt their merging, using my few shotgun shells against any stragglers who remain.

Even smaller bits of combat felt strategically layered. Sometimes I’d get lucky, only encountering one or two monstrosities at a time that could easily be taken down, but because of the nature of the game, I could never be truly sure that it was it. Should I be sure to burn the bodies in case more Orphans lurch out in a few paces, or would that be a waste of fuel? Time rift manipulations, which do things like clear paths or form bridges when activated, also pose dilemmas – sometimes, moving forward also means awakening enemies.

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There are several ways players can slightly improve their chances, with various upgrades available at workstations sporadically placed around the world. The suit can be improved in terms of its integrity and inventory slots, and weapons can have features such as their clip size or enhanced power. However, depending on how enemies merge and what traits they absorb, players may have to use a combination of melee, guns, and flames to make it out alive.

The Story Of Cronos: The New Dawn

A Traveler Alone In A Brutalist World

The role of the Traveler is simple, at least in theory: take over for the previous Traveler, journeying through time rifts to extract the Essences of important people left behind in The Change. It’s clear there’s still a lot to learn about what happened to the world: I don’t know exactly what The Change was, what it has to do with the malformed masses of monsters, or why the Essences are important. By far, though, I was left with the most questions regarding the Traveler herself.

As a faceless entity within a metal suit, The Traveler was quite an enigma to me during my time with the game, and that’s very purposeful. My introduction to her was moments after she’d been awakened, slated to take over for the previous Traveler, where she was being given a word association test that she answered very robotically. During my interview with the Cronos team, they shared with me how they took a big risk with a main character who initially comes across as feeling very cold and detached.

Over time, she’s slated to undergo a big evolution, though the team has been mostly secretive about what that entails. “Make her cold and professional and then break her,” is how lead writer Grzegorz Like describes the Traveler’s journey. The game’s Steam page hints at the fact that the extraction of Essences from people gathered throughout the story will make the suit increasingly “haunted,” which likely contributes to this, but I suspect other factors are at play as well.

Inspired by 1980s Poland, the landscape is full of harsh, brutalist architecture that perfectly sets the tone. The world as a whole is filled with environmental storytelling: signs, graffiti, and other Polish postings are automatically translated, and there are many other things to find lying around, like diary entries and old recordings that give a window into the days leading up to what was – more or less – the end of the world. It’s simultaneously desolate and packed with little details that make walking through it feel like slowly unraveling a mystery.

Cronos: The New Dawn’s Horror Approach

Players Are Their Own Worst Enemy

The environments aren’t just full of lore – far from it. One of the most prevalent features is huge conglomerations of deformed monster bodies, sometimes complete with full walls of horrifying limbs and skin webbing, which the game refers to as Biomass. You never know when you pass by one of these grotesque lumps of flesh whether it will suddenly birth a monster or not – the game doesn’t overuse that element of surprise, but it was always in the back of my mind as a possibility.

This concept, in general, is one of the biggest pillars of Cronos’ scares, with game director Jacek Zięba saying, “We’re still leaning into more atmosphere and tone and overall dread. What happens in your mind and the fear of the unknown is most important.” In some of my first bits of exploration, walking through old apartments and offices, I saw shadows in other rooms that my mind made into monsters, only to reveal upon entry that they were simply mannequins.

In another instance, I was given a small glimpse of a monster through a window, but there was no way to attack it yet – I just had to continue exploring, knowing they were slowly closing in on me. It’s amazing how Cronos cultivates this overall oeuvre, between its slow swells of music, background noises of mysterious origins, squelchy walls of flesh, and an underlying sense of dread that comes from surroundings full of the remnants of a once-functioning society.

Cronos: The New Dawn Has Enraptured Me

A Narrative I’m Inclined To Follow Despite My Cowardice

Because of the sci-fi slant, Cronos is “less psychological and more philosophical horror” according to Zięba. This is a facet of the game I found very interesting, and after they later mentioned the Hedgehog’s Dilemma – a philosophical problem originally posited by Arthur Schopenhauer about how we hurt the ones we desire closest to us – I thought of how I’d found in-game notes lamenting about an inability to be with family during a deadly pandemic. Did humans’ instinct for intimacy also sow their downfall? Could it have even caused the masses of conjoined bodies?

I was left with more questions than answers after my hands-on, which is precisely the intent. There were small drip-feeds of lore everywhere, such as frequent mentions of the mysterious disease and how, regarding its victims, “you will know them by their eyes,” which made me want to continue exploring the world despite every fear-based instinct in my body telling me otherwise. I should mention that the world is not entirely bereft of mirth – one bright spot is the cats found throughout the game, which bring players gifts.

On a personal level, I find it incredibly refreshing for a sci-fi horror game to have a non-space setting. I also haven’t been able to get the image of some of the in-game monsters out of my mind – the way some of them slithered across the floor and absorbed another to become even more grotesque was truly haunting in the best way. Cronos: The New Dawn is so compelling that, against all my desire for self-preservation, I have no choice but to keep it in my sights ahead of its release later this year.

Cronos: The New Dawn

Systems

Released

2025

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ // Intense Violence, Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Strong Language

Developer(s)

Bloober Team

Publisher(s)

Bloober Team

Engine

Unreal Engine

Number of Players

1