Game Review: ‘Cronos: The New Dawn’
Polish games are getting more and more attention each year. Recently we’ve had The Alters, straight from 11 bit studios, which received plenty of positive feedback. Now, another Polish studio called Bloober Team, known for creating games like Blair Witch, the Silent Hill 2 remake, & Medium, gave us an entirely new game titled Cronos: The New Dawn. It is an original survival horror played in third person, focused on a single-player story. It’s set in the retro-futuristic wasteland streets of 1980s Poland.
What immediately sets it apart from other games this year is diving into the past to extract people before a catastrophe called the Change turns them into monsters. That premise does two things at once. The point of this game is simple. Fight for the future by changing the past. It’s not a game for easily frightened players. It’s a classical survival horror game with a sci-fi twist and a couple of fresh story twists.
[Note: While I am reviewing this game independently and honestly, it should be noted that it has been provided to me by Bloober Team for the purpose of this review. Warning: Light spoilers from Cronos: The New Dawn are below!]
The story of Cronos: The New Dawn is really scary, but worth checking out
In the game, the main character of the story is known as the Traveler, an operative working for an organization called the Collective in a timeline where the Change has already occurred. Humanity is destroyed, and there are only a few places that remain free of the pandemic. Traveler’s mission is to rescue people from the past, preventing important individuals from contracting an infection and repairing the past so that the future can survive. We travel through desolate parts of Poland and explore ruins to look for some sort of time rifts, discover late Cold War era artifacts, and try to find a way into the past.
We have to survive in the past long enough to achieve our objective, then return to a base. The tone of the story of Cronos isn’t generic. It’s placed in Nowa Huta, a district of my home city, Kraków, built under socialist ideals and dominated by a steelworks that once employed tens of thousands. It was meant to be a city-state similar to Brasilia, where each district is meant for something. For example, there were meant to be districts with only science buildings, districts with only food-related places, etc.
When it comes to the horror aspects of the game, the story feels a lot like a mix of Alan Wake games, Outlast, Silent Hill, The Last of Us, and Soma. Every time I played, I had a feeling like something could jump and scare me out of nowhere. The feeling of spending time in such a terrifying setting where everything is stylized to be scary is definitely worth mentioning. Experiencing and progressing throughout the great story must be worth the spine-chilling aspects of the game.
Gameplay is typical for horror survival games, but is unique in its own way
Cronos: The New Dawn’s gameplay is traditional for survival horror games. But it’s sometimes trying to be as challenging as it can be. Whenever you’re moving through tight interiors and open, terrifying spaces with limited ammo, weak melee options, and the constant fear that a fight you barely survived might not be over, or worse, something else might jump right out of the corner, it’s getting scary.
Orphans, a.k.a. our main monster, are drawn to dead corpses of other monsters we killed, so don’t leave corpses unattended and lying around. Because they will merge and become more powerful. It’s as if the gameplay is taken straight from Dead Space or Resident Evil. But instead of dismemberment or headshots, your main resource for preventing further catastrophe is fire. You have to collect flares, fuel, incendiary rounds, etc.
Guns are useful, but the selection of them is small, and they are mostly used to get upgrades to help you progress through the story. Pistols and shotguns do the heavy lifting. Melee attacks are an option, but they are very risky. The structure of the gameplay also matters in survival horror, and Cronos does everything possible to make sure there are no loose ends. Out in the field, every collectible matters. Fuel matters because it’s your post-fight insurance policy. Bullets matter because you cannot melee your way through enemies. Medical supplies matter because healing is important, restricted, and slow.
Enemy variety, from what’s been shown in early reveals, compared to what we’ve got, is satisfying. You’ll meet creatures that are more dangerous dead than “alive,” waiting in the shadows, waiting for you as walking magnets for corpses that want to merge with possible corpses lying around. That mechanic encourages players to think about what they do and make sure they don’t make mistakes. If you make a mistake, you will definitely pay a price for it. None of this is rocket science, but it does feel like a coherent ruleset of playing that will let you make sure you don’t get frustrated for not knowing how to escape from certain situations.
Another thing that makes Cronos: The New Dawn unique as a survival horror game is its visuals and performance, mixed with the scary atmosphere. Cronos is designed to look so realistic and believable that the overall aesthetics are always worth mentioning. If you think about it, it’s not about creating long, cinematic scenes and moments to add more weight to the story. No, it’s all about making the story depend on the gameplay and discovering everything by yourself, so you can be immersed deep enough that your blood pressure will skyrocket through the roof with each jump scare.
I also have to mention the technical aspects of this game. I was surprised when I didn’t experience any stuttering or bugs/glitches that would make me restart. This world is so detailed, big, and full of particles that I thought I wouldn’t have stable 60FPS. But it’s not bad at all.
Final thoughts on Cronos: The New Dawn
Cronos: The New Dawn isn’t trying to change the genre of survival horror games. It’s trying to make a place for itself among the classics and make a statement. On paper and in-game, it all makes sense. It encourages players to think, sometimes think fast, experience the brutality of this world, and feel paranoia that appears before and after every fight. You aren’t just going from puzzle to puzzle. You have your orders with clear stakes and human lives at stake. Setting all of this in Kraków gives me a lot of positive vibes, and I have to praise it. After all, it’s not always when you play a game that’s set in your city. Bloober Team did it once before with Medium.
The overall gameplay feels like a rough-edged, grown-up horror that is confident enough to take its place amongst other classic horror games worth playing. The option to upgrade and modify your guns, as well as some additional skills, adds some needed aspects to make this game sometimes easier. As an experience, this is definitely giving that scary, action-adventure, horror survival vibe. Cronos: The New Dawn could end up as one of the year’s surprises in the survival horror genre.
My rating for this game: 4/5
If you’ve been waiting for a horror game that can mix the scary vibes with survival elements and is set in a late Cold War period in Europe, play Cronos: The New Dawn. Releasing September 5, 2025 on Steam and other platforms.
Also check out: Game Review: The Alters, 11 Bit Studios’ Nightmarish Sci-fi Survival Game
