Once known for their experiential horror titles focused on surviving rather than fighting, Bloober Team has slowly shifted their focus into a more combat-centric survival horror experience. After the success of last year’s remake of Silent Hill 2, the Polish developers recently unveiled a science fiction title they’ve been developing in tandem with The Medium. We and a small number of other journalists were recently invited out to Oakland, California, to get an early look at the first few hours of Cronos: The New Dawn.
Sometimes it’s about writing what you know, and Bloober Team has taken that old adage to heart with Cronos: The New Dawn being set within a very familiar backdrop for the developers. Some of their earlier titles, such as Observer and The Medium, were also set within the country’s borders, but Cronos: The New Dawn represents a particular moment in time for the citizens. Following the aftermath of World War II and the Soviet occupation, the city of Nowa Huta was idealized in real life as a monument to the power of the Soviets and a utopian society centered around the city’s steelworks. It’s here, set many years in the future from the city’s intended groundbreaking, that Cronos: The New Dawn takes place. As one of the developers said, putting an authentic piece of the world into a horror story makes it more attractive because you can identify with it even if you’ve never been there.
As a Traveler, the player is tasked with venturing back into key moments of time and extracting a target before they are killed. This is done by piloting into time rifts and exploring the world with only a rough idea of where the intended survivor is. From there, the Traveler is largely on their own, taking over in the footsteps of where their predecessors might have fallen.
Cronos: The New Dawn takes a lot of inspiration from the development of Silent Hill 2 in how the game flows, from the intimate camera angles to inventory management and opening locked doors. What sets this science fiction horror apart from the more psychological traumas of James Sunderland are the enemies known as Orphans. These grotesque and often indescribable masses of flesh and tentacles seek out the player with indiscriminate focus, chasing them down and even coordinating their attacks to sneak up on the player while their back is turned. Something unique that Bloober Team has introduced in Cronos: The New Dawn is the ability for these creatures to merge into one another and combine attributes from a fallen comrade, making them more deadly and more difficult to put back down. Having to deal with one Orphan that can spit acid is bad enough, but once they get reinforced armor, fighting them face to face becomes a struggle.
The most efficient way of dispatching these Orphans once they’re knocked down or slain is by using fire. The Traveler can use accelerants scattered around the environment, like discarded jerry oil cans or conspicuously marked barrels, to fill the area with fire. The player can also restock up to a single fuel cell (at least this early on in the story) that can be used to shoot out a small flamethrower and engulf those around in flames. As Cronos: The New Dawn doesn’t feature your traditional dodge or evasion movements, the developers showed off that this flamethrower ability is their way of giving players a way to escape from enemies or mitigate an incoming attack. While the player can only hold one unit of fuel at a time, I did make an effort to see if the game would let me store one in the Item Box that litters many save rooms; the game already knows if you have any fuel in hand, even if it’s in one of these boxes, so there isn’t a way to break the game and carry around more than intended.
Inside these save rooms are a number of terminals that can be used to upgrade The Traveler themselves as well as their different weapons they pick up. From your modest pistol to a stronger shotgun and others, each gun can use the currency that The Traveler picks up on their mission to upgrade the various parameters, giving weapons more damage, a faster reload speed, or also giving the player more health to stand a better chance at surviving. There’s also a crafting table in most locations and the same materials used to make bullets are also used to craft healing supplies, so players must make a conscious decision as to which would give them a better chance of surviving.
The gunplay in Cronos: The New Dawn is largely similar to what players saw in Silent Hill 2 or even EA’s Dead Space series. Played in an over-the-shoulder perspective, players can freely target limbs on an enemy to knock them down or aim for the head for increased damage. Out of all the weapons that I picked up during my two-hour session, the shotgun was the only one that felt like it was properly effective. The pistol was little more than a deterrent unless you were willing to unload the better part of a full magazine into a single enemy to take them out. Of course, you could just as easily try to run around some of these enemies and save your bullets, but the tight corridors of Nowa Huta’s apartment buildings don’t give The Traveler much room to run past an enemy. Once they’re downed, you can always give them a good head stomp just to be sure, but that won’t stop enemies from merging. Only fire gives players that certainty.
My experience culminated in a boss fight against a writhing mass of tentacles that would form itself into a hulking black humanoid that would either chase me down and swing indiscriminately in my direction or start throwing parts of itself at me when I tried to shoot it at range. I was rather thankful that this was at the end of the demo, as I had used up all of my healing items and bullets that I brought with me and was limited to the ammo that I could scavenge from the enclosed arena to do the final bits of damage. It was a bit of a low point to the experience, not just because it took me multiple attempts before I could dispatch the boss and get to my final destination, but also at how spongy some of the enemies can be and just how many bullets they’d take to go down.
If you take a step off the beaten path and explore around Nowa Huta in Cronos: The New Dawn, there are multiple small side paths that often lead to lost artifacts that can be cashed in for currency or those essential few bullets or healing items necessary for survival. There are also a variety of collectibles, from your usual gamut of audio logs and written notes to comic books. Backtracking to a much earlier section of the demo with the wire cutters I picked up rewarded me with a quiet respite filled with collectible supplies and a single cat that was added to my lorebook, seemingly one of the various collectibles to scour and find throughout neofuture Krakow.
Cronos: The New Dawn merges a familiar take on the developer’s homeland with the science fiction of time travel and trying to divert a catastrophe from taking place. With an estimated runtime of sixteen hours, this will be longer than your usual survival horror trip. I am curious to see how Bloober Team intends to pace the story and how rescuing these survivors (or not) will affect how the narrative plays out.
Cronos: The New Dawn is tentatively set for a Fall 2025 release across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X, and PC/Mac.
[Editor’s Note: Travel accommodations were provided by Bloober Team and their PR agency to attend the preview event in Califonia.]
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