Cronos: The New Dawn feels like a combination of every other survival horror game I’ve played before it, which isn’t always a good thing

In the crudest terms possible, Cronos: The New Dawn is a survival horror game about going back in time to steal things from the past. I say this because its developers, Bloober Team also seem to have gone back in time and stolen almost every aspect of Cronos’ gameplay from past survival horror titles and more.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but, when there seems to be only one real glimmer of originality in here (and a great one at that), it does mean that I could never shake the ‘been there, don’t that’ feeling during a recent hands-on session with the first couple of hours of the game.

This over-familiarity isn’t always a negative though. Cronos is a dark, moody game with a deliciously creepy ambiance to it. This vibe is most comparable to that of Returnal and this is especially true for the player character, known as the Traveller, whose space suit-muffled voice sounds incredibly similar to Returnal’s Selene during the moments when they ponder out loud about their predicament.

The sound design is cracking too, with sci-fi bleeps, bloops and whirrs coming from otherworldly machinery, metallic creaks and crunches ringing out as you stomp through the world, monstrous squelches and screams erupting from the merging mutants, and all of this accompanied by an anxiety-inducing, heart beat-like pulse that plays out in the background.

This, combined with some beautifully haunting scenery that goes from dilapidated, crumbling apartment blocks and dusty shop interiors, frozen in time by an apocalypse, through to haunting caverns and canyons with walls made out of twisted mounds of human flesh and back again, gives the game a tone that’s almost as unique as the ever-so-slightly penis-y design of the Traveller’s helmet.

Colours-wise, it’s all fairly drab and muted, but this suits the hopeless, humanity-has-lost tone down to a tee. The only real problem I had with the visual design was that a large majority of the props were indestructible. Bottles, glass, boxes; unless it was specifically designed to be broken for gameplay purposes, everything stayed static. But I think that might just be a me problem because I do love smashing things.

Back to the Returnal comparisons quickly, one of the things that made the game so moreish to me was the underlying mystery behind the whole story. Where was Selene? Why was she there? What was she supposed to be doing? And why was her childhood house on an alien planet? This narrative got its claws into me; Cronos looks like it might have a story that’ll be just as compelling to dig into.

At the very start of the game, the Traveller wakes up inside something called a sarcophagus, and an onboard computer runs them through a Rorschach test, which you, the player, have to answer. Do you see a dog or do you see a devil? But what’s this test for? Do your answers have any effect on the actual gameplay? The first couple of hours doesn’t give you an answer to those questions. Instead, everything is kept quite mysterious and obscure.

You know you’re looking for something called a Predecessor, but why? What for and who are they? Well, after a while you find them, and they’re another Traveller just like you. Except not completely like you because they are dead. But who was this predecessor? Could they be a Returnal style, time travel clone? If they are, does this mean you’re the only piece of humanity left, and it’s up to you to rebuild the human race by trying to succeed where your past selves failed?

This Traveller has a different number on their suit to yours, 3500 compared to your 3576. Maybe they just label each suit with a different number and there’s a bunch of people queuing up to be Travellers somewhere in the distant apocalypse. Or maybe Travellers are some kind of mass-produced humanoid tool rather than real people? But then if that’s true, why is Traveller 3500 bleeding? If nothing else Cronis is excellent and throwing up questions I’m dying to know the answer to. Finding out the truth about who it is that’s behind the helmet will probably be the main driving force that pushes me through to the end of the game.

Combat in Cronos can be pretty tough, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that ammo is super scarce, and monsters take a lot of it to put down. There’s the classic trade-off option of a slow, Dead Space-style heavy melee swing with your fists, if you run out of bullets, but with the downside there being you standing to take a lot of damage it’s very much one for emergencies only. Instead, you’ll frequently find yourself in situations where you have to consider your ammo reserves versus the amount of creatures nearby. I lent on previous experience with survival horror games and pulled out the good-old-fashioned “run past enemies in order to conserve ammo”, which worked wonders because, unless you’re in a forced arena fight, you’ll often reach points where the monsters just stop following you.

Brilliant, I thought. Very clever, Ian, you escaped and saved ammo too, well done. But what I hadn’t factored into my plans was the Merging mechanic, which is probably Cronos’s only truly unique idea. It’s an awesome one though, and it finally made me feel some fear, thanks to suddenly having to deal with the unknown rather than just relying on survival horror muscle memory.

You see, if you down a monster in Cronos, their bodies will stay on the floor until you burn them to ash (alright, that burning part’s also a mechanic I’ve seen before, first in The Evil Within, but bear with me as the rest is new). You can do this using nearby explosive containers or a flame effect from your suit which, at first, is limited to one use only before you have to recharge it.

If you don’t burn the bodies, then there is a big chance that another monster will shamble along and merge with that dead flesh, evolving into a bigger, spikier and more vicious beast than it was before. This is something I realised to my detriment when I returned to a previously explored area a little later on, where most of the monsters that I had previously dodged had merged with the ones that I’d killed, effectively doubling the difficulty. The Merging mechanic basically rewrote the way I had to think about enemy encounters. All of a sudden I realised that running away wasn’t the safest option any more, and that knowledge terrified me.

As you might have gathered by now, Cronos is fairly shameless when it comes to borrowing the majority of its gameplay mechanics from other, well established survival horror games. Normally, this wouldn’t be too much of a bad thing, if kept in check – what game doesn’t lift at least a couple of successful design decisions from other sources? In Cronos however, it felt like I’d seen pretty much everything it had to offer before. There’s time manipulation puzzles, fuse puzzles, doors that are locked until you find a 3 digit code on a note somewhere and so on.

There’s the massive Dead Space influence that’s impossible to gloss over, too. From the big-booted body stomping and the twisted, once human enemies that have a distinct Necromorphy vibe to them, through to the wall mounted lockers that store health, ammo and crafting components. There’s even a gravity boot style jumping mechanic that we’ve seen in recent gameplay trailers but didn’t get to experience during our hands-on session.

Then there’s the similarity to the Resident Evil games. Cronos’ Resi-style safe rooms, for example, come complete with one of those magical item lockers for storing your unwanted items. Even the dilapidated interiors of the apartment complex we explored near the end of the demo felt like something ripped straight out of Bloober Team’s recent Silent Hill 2 remake.

And it’s not just visual similarities either. I could predict when enemy encounters and jump scares were about to happen, it was easy to spot when I’d wandered into an arena that was about to host a battle against multiple enemies and it was fairly obvious when I was moving through an area where monsters probably weren’t going to spawn at all. This obviously robbed Cronos of a lot of potential scares and tension, replacing them with a kind of blase approach to my exploration, something that only really lifted once the merging started kicking in.

Some things are only scary the first few times you experience them. The upside of that for Cronos: The New Dawn is that, if you’ve never played a horror game before, Cronos will probably be one of the most terrifying experiences of your life. But if you’re an avid fan of the horror game genre – or even just an occasional one – then equally, at least from what I’ve seen so far, without a few more fresh ideas Cronos might not feel like the most brilliant use of your time.

This preview is based on a press trip to Poland. Bloober Team provided flights and accomodation.