Cronos: The New Dawn

The release of Cronos: The New Dawn is a bit of a make-or-break moment for its developer, Bloober Team. Their 2024 Silent Hill 2 remake didn’t just defy expectations, it crushed them as it took its place among the rest of the survival horror pantheon. And while my intention isn’t to diminish their achievement, in the case of that game they had the advantage of standing on the shoulders of giants, working with arguably the greatest source material in the genre. With Cronos, Bloober needed to not only prove that Silent Hill 2 wasn’t just a fluke, but that they’d actually grown as a developer and could apply that growth to a wholly original game. Let’s face it. Bloober’s back catalog is—if I’m being kind—uneven. Their last original game, 2021’s The Medium, received mixed reviews and was met with criticism for how it handled subjects like trauma and mental health. Considering, pre-release, that the game had been deemed a spiritual successor to the original Silent Hill 2 by the media (a label Bloober arguably embraced) only served to make The Medium‘s missteps feel that much more egregious upon release. Would the wholly original Cronos: The New Dawn further vindicate the embattled developer, or would it mark a return to their previous status quo?

Now, introducing Cronos this way probably makes this article sound like it’s going to be a review. It assuredly is not. I’m not interested in reviewing games. If I’m given room and time for the appropriate qualifiers, I can recommend just about any game I’m writing about to somebody. On top of that, in 2025, it’s incredibly rare for a AAA game—or AA or A or whatever the heck Cronos is—to be outright bad. Enough “best practices” have been codified within the industry that any game big enough to have a marketing budget will end up being at the very least mechanically competent. It’s very hard to be outright bad when playing at this level. It generally isn’t a matter of if a game can be recommended, instead, who it can be recommended to. And it’s with that in mind that my previous ramblings about Bloober’s history are relevant, as people’s history with their games is important when considering Cronos‘ achievements and its place in the horror lexicon.

To say Cronos is mechanically derivative would be a tremendous understatement. The DNA of pioneers like Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 are felt strongly throughout, but to dismiss it for its adherence to genre conventions would be to overlook how deftly it uses those conventions to build a game that as a whole exceeds anything that Bloober has done before—including Silent Hill 2. While there’s nary a mechanic that you haven’t seen elsewhere, Cronos collects them into a compelling package that is further held aloft by its worldbuilding.

But let me correct myself there. There is a place where a mechanic and the worldbuilding intersect in a particularly unique way. Throughout the game, the main character has the opportunity to absorb the essence of important individuals from the past. She can only hold on to three at a time and they serve as a basic loadout system, allowing you to increase certain stats to help boost your personal playstyle. This is not the unique part. What is unique is how the essences of these individuals bleed into the main character’s consciousness, influencing the psychological horrors of the world. Even if it amounts to little more than some very minor audiovisual differences, it has the effect of making your experience feel surprisingly personal and unique.

As for the story, Cronos succeeds in the rare feat of crafting a time travel story that actually works. That isn’t to say that its philosophy is rock solid. Instead, it keeps the details around its time hopping vague enough as to not call attention to any inconsistencies that might get in the way of the story it’s telling. And that is the one thing I admire most about Cronos: it resists the temptation to overexplain itself. I read one Steam review that claimed its vagueness was “lazy” and that it should have explained more about the mysterious Collective, but a take like that doesn’t seem to understand that those details add nothing to what is, at the heart of it all, a love story.

While it would be easy to dismiss the cat collecting in *Cronos* as fanservice, it’s actually essential to The Traveler’s character development

Furthermore, one of the game’s most important themes is fueled by this ambiguity: Who’s the actual monster?

Now, this is hardly a new question for horror media, but I think Bloober does a terrific job playing with the theme. In a world overrun with literal monsters, the survivors you come across are far more afraid of you—the [Time] Traveler. This sentiment is further solidified by expertly placed environmental clues that position the Traveler as a mythical, otherworldly interloper, spoken of in hushed tones around campfires.

*Cronos* leans heavily into body horror. The game is very… squishy

You’re led to believe your goals are altruistic, and even by the end, it seems they are. But are they actually for the good of the survivors? For the good of mankind?

Not knowing is part of the horror.

That’s all to say that Bloober has proven with Cronos that it has truly grown as a developer. Maybe give it a shot.