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Bloober Team, the Polish developer behind 2021’s hugely underrated psycho-thriller The Medium and last year’s excellent Silent Hill 2 remake, clearly understands that there is an established, almost comforting rhythm to survival horror games. It’s baffling, then, to see this latest game excel in so many areas while failing spectacularly on several of the genre’s most basic tenets.
You play an unnamed traveller, the latest of many, sent to gather information about a devastating outbreak that transformed the citizens of a town called New Dawn into the sort of misshapen monsters that have become the staple of sci-fi-adjacent survival horror: contorted of limb, long of fang, and ample of slobber. As you explore the stark, often beautifully devastated aftermath of the outbreak, you search for places where you can travel back through time to when all hell was breaking loose, extracting persons of interest who may shed light on the disaster. A slow-burn story is revealed through the usual assortment of voice notes, missives and grim environmental clues (often, as is de rigueur, daubed in blood on walls).
Sadly, this intriguing setup holds promise that Cronos never quite manages to keep, and by the end, through a series of baffling missteps, any sense of claustrophobic foreboding has been largely jettisoned in favour of profound, white-knuckled frustration. It led me to invent several exciting new compound swears to express my fury.
Superb sound design does a hugely effective job of making you aware that there are things out there in the darkness, waiting, hungry. It’s only really when you encounter them that the game’s problems begin. One of the first beasties comes at you in a cramped interior space, and within three hits you’re dead. To defend yourself, all you have is essentially a spud gun and an aiming arm that appears to have strawpedoed six pints of cheap scrumpy, as the reticle sways everywhere. Eventually, you realise how to cheese your way through this skirmish, until you reach the next, where you die. And repeat. Variations of this annoying danse macabre persist throughout the entire 14-hour campaign.
This frustration would be assuaged slightly if the game doled out enough ammunition and health-restoring items to make it feel as if you survived the last conflict by the skin of your teeth. But no. You will be sent into battle against a room lousy with monstrosities armed, with one hit’s worth of health, two bullets and no way to remedy the situation. Clear efforts to present a challenge soon start to give off the bloated cadaver-whiff of bad design.
None of this is helped by an inventory system that even the most dedicated survival horror enthusiast would call Scroogily stingy, meaning you sometimes have to drop the precious three bullets you have in order to carry a keycard to the next area, or waste time commuting between save points to retrieve things from your stash. This doesn’t create tension. All it creates is busywork.
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The most frustrating thing is that there is the kernel of something great here. Despite the time-travel conceit, Cronos: The New Dawn isn’t remotely original – you’ll swear you’ve skulked the darkened corridors of these very hospitals, factories and apartment blocks before – but it looks stunning in places, plays well once you’ve upgraded your weapons, and there are spooksome moments and satisfying puzzles peppered throughout. When everything clicks, it is the engrossing, icky body-horror creepshow you want it to be. But then it will throw you into another exhausting death room full of bullet-sponge ghouls, and you’ll soon be filled with irritation instead of dread.
