When I first picked up Cronos: The New Dawn, I was a little bit nervous. Developer Bloober Team’s work on the Silent Hill 2 remake was impeccable, but last time I played a Bloober Team game featuring an original storyline, it was The Medium — a beautiful, terrifying adventure that sadly had a terribly botched ending. Cronos: The New Dawn features multiple endings and starts off with an absolutely massive trigger warning, so I was anxious to see if the studio could pull off both the gameplay and the story. Thankfully, this time around, Bloober Team nailed it.
Cronos sees players step into the role of The Traveler, an enigmatic character who never shows her face. Donning a strange spacesuit-esque outfit called a Temporal Shell, The Traveler is an agent of The Collective, a mysterious futuristic organization that sends its time-traveling “employees” (if you can call them that) on missions to right wrongs and repair broken timelines. As The Traveler, you find yourself awakening on Christmas Eve in 1980s Poland. The town of New Dawn has been destroyed by an awful disease called The Change, and it’s your job to fix things as best you can. The Change starts with typical symptoms like a fever or cough, symptoms which then progress into blindness and paranoia, before eventually turning its victims into Orphans: horrific, twisted, mindless creatures that attack anything in their path, and can even merge with other dead bodies, becoming stronger (and deadier) in the process.
Cronos: The New Dawn has a fascinating story, but a great deal of it is told via collectible codex entries and audio logs. Some players understandably prefer to run through horror games, averse to scrutinizing the diary entries, letters, and other documents that pepper a game like this. I am not one of those players. I thoroughly enjoy mentally piecing a game’s story together using narrative breadcrumbs left behind by its developers, and absolutely loved doing so with Cronos.
Unfortunately, even as someone who loves lore and lives for this kind of figure-it-out-yourself storytelling, I have to admit that Cronos has a bit of a proper noun problem. You are The Traveler, an agent of The Collective who works to complete The Vocation. Though the game does explain itself (especially near the end), it can be frustrating trying to keep track of all these entities and concepts, especially because the game isn’t in any rush to explain them to you. Cronos’ story isn’t weak by any means, but its execution is sporadically head-scratching, especially in the first half of the game.
Although Cronos is intentionally mystifying at first, The Traveler certainly knows what she’s here for, and promptly sets out in search of her first target, a guy named Edward. Other Travelers (called Predecessors, yet another proper noun) have come before her, but have evidently failed and died in the process. When one Traveler dies, another is woken up to take their place. The goal is to obtain your target’s Essence (another proper noun, basically a soul, sort of) and allow them to join The Collective via a process called Ascension. It’s not entirely clear how any of this works, but most targets are none too pleased about the idea of Ascension, and it definitely feels like The Collective is some sort of Borg-adjacent hive-mind that strips humans of their individuality.
As your Traveler explores New Dawn, you begin to find evidence that the town was under quarantine due to The Change, and its residents were very unhappy about said quarantine. Codex entries feature citizen complaints about everything from toilet paper rationing to social distancing, and while I think most of us can certainly relate, it does seem a bit odd that people are complaining about being stuck in their houses when there are deadly, terrifying Orphans crawling through the streets. COVID was an invisible threat. By contrast, the Orphans are very visible, very ugly, and very likely to kill you in a horrific manner. It seems that many residents were denied information about the Orphans, which explains why so many folks were eager to leave their homes despite the threat of infection and death.
Speaking of Orphans, they are absolutely terrifying and definitely give off Necromorph vibes — in fact, the whole game feels a little Dead Space-y, but the story and 1980s Eastern European setting ensure the game never feels too derivative. The Traveler has a variety of weapons to choose from when it comes to handling Orphans, including a handgun, two shotguns, a sniper rifle, and a carbine. Most weapons must be found in the environment before they can be used, and it’s easy to miss some of them, which makes it essential to check out every nook and cranny. Once found, weapons can be upgraded when visiting the game’s safe rooms, which function a lot like the stashes in Resident Evil games (but aren’t actually safe, as enemies can enter them).
Worse still, even a defeated Orphan can pose a threat, “merging” with enemies you haven’t defeated yet to increase their danger level. While you can use fire to stop Orphans from merging, unfortunately, you will definitely encounter some pre-merged Orphans, which can feel a little bit unfair given the game’s emphasis on clearing bodies to ensure they can’t merge. Some Orphans also play dead, lying in wait among other corpses, but thankfully, there’s a light on your weapon that indicates which corpses still have life in them, and which ones are dead-dead.
As advertised, Cronos: The New Dawn‘s combat is extremely punishing. While you don’t typically go down in one hit, you’re certainly fragile, especially in the early hours. Bringing up the crafting menu does not pause the game, as it does in Resident Evil 7, so you’ll want to go into battle with as many healing items as possible, because crafting mid-battle is a great way to get killed. You’ll also need to spend time gathering an incendiary ingredient called Torch Fuel that prevents dead bodies from accumulating, and also stuns most enemies. Though at least you eventually gain access to a pair of boots that allow you to defy gravity and briefly float from platform to platform, making traversing the environment a bit easier (and a lot more fun). Generally speaking, running away is not an option, though there are at least two points in the game where running is a much better idea than trying to fight, subverting expectations established elsewhere in the game. But outside of those instances, it’s pretty clear that you’re meant to pulverize everything that crosses your path.
The Traveler has very limited inventory space, and although it can be expanded via upgrades, you’ll frequently find yourself struggling to decide what to bring with you and what to leave behind. Picking up a key may help you get into a locked room full of craftable items, but it may also prevent you from picking up sorely needed crafting materials on your way there. As cool as the game’s various weapons are, you’ll inevitably have to store some of them in your safe room stash if you want to have room for anything else.
But challenges aside, Cronos: The New Dawn remains a delight to look at — if a deeply unsettling one. Rotting viscera sprouts from the walls of the town’s apartment block, steelworks, hospital, and church, and the few parts of these buildings that aren’t overgrown with corrupted flesh are instead covered with graffiti — a sign of the growing tension between the town’s quarantined citizens and the authorities whose job it is to uphold that quarantine. Christmas trees lurk in lonely corners, lights blinking in the darkness. Snow falls silently from the night sky. It’s clear that nearly all of New Dawn’s residents have succumbed to The Change, and the few who remain unchanged are struggling with the mental and emotional effects of long-term isolation.
Oddly, cats seem to be immune to The Change, and you’ll find them in all sorts of strange places. Petting them will send them to your safe room, and curiously, The Traveler seems to have an inexplicable fondness for them, often making amusing comments like, “We will soon need a bigger cat room,” while petting them.
But outside of her interactions with stray felines, The Traveler comes off as a very clinical, detached person who has no time for sentimentality. This seems to be the general demeanor of all Travelers. She’s here to get her job done, and it’s clear from her speech and other mannerisms that Travelers are largely a utilitarian bunch. Despite the fact that she spends the entire game wearing a helmet that obscures her face, I still found myself fascinated by her, due in large part to voice actress Kelly Burke’s incredible, emotive performance. Cronos’ voice acting is the game’s greatest strength. The Traveler eventually stumbles across another Temporal-Shell-wearing character referred to as The Warden (voiced by Alan Turkington), and their shared scenes make for some of the game’s standout moments. Without giving away too much, The Warden’s outlook on life is very different from The Traveler’s. He seems to have somewhat broken away from the views of The Collective, and clearly has a fascination with and fondness for humanity that is rare among his kind. The Traveler notices this as well — Cronos happily grants opportunities to expand on this dichotomy through optional conversations.
I have a general rule about plot twists in most media: A plot twist isn’t good if you didn’t see it coming, it’s good if you should have seen it coming. Cronos: The New Dawn‘s storyline is a perfect example of this. Although the first half of the game can feel a bit slow in terms of plot, it all pays off in the latter half of the game, when the narrative pieces all come together in a forehead-slapping, “Oh, of course!” moment.
Player choice also plays a larger part in shaping Cronos’ narrative than I would have expected. Throughout the game, The Traveler is faced with various dialogue options, though it’s not always clear how much they affect the game’s outcome. What does affect the game’s outcome is a major choice players must make at the end of the final boss fight. Neither of these endings are obviously “good” or “bad,” but both of them feature their own post-credits cutscene to give you a bit more insight into the outcome of your choice. Based on statements from Bloober Team, the game features more than two endings, though I haven’t seen them myself.
Hours after finishing the game, I struggled to fall asleep. But it wasn’t the nightmare-inducing Orphans that were keeping me awake at night. It was the ramifications of the game’s final choice. I still can’t decide which of the two endings I unlocked was the “better” choice. One choice left me feeling like it probably wasn’t the “ideal” ending. In the other, I felt I had made the best choice for my Traveler, but a post-credits cutscene left me wondering if I had done so at the expense of humanity itself.
For some, horror means nightmarish creatures rendered with bone-chillingly realistic details, and while Cronos hits those marks, it fundamentally understands a truer, arguably deeper fear: the universal pain of indecision, and the personal hell that tears you apart from the inside, as you wonder if you made the right choice or the wrong one, and knowing you’ll never get a clear answer one way or the other.
Cronos: The New Dawn is out Sept. 5 on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a prerelease download code provided by Bloober Team. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
