Cronos: The New Dawn Review

If you know the name Bloober, you will know that the studio is synonymous with horror. Between Layers of Fear, Blair Witch, and The Medium, it’s fair to say that the studio has received a mixed reception throughout the years. Last year, it struck gold with the excellent Silent Hill 2 remake, but people were still unsure if Bloober could make a game of this quality without the backing of one of the best stories of all time. Having played Cronos: The New Dawn, I’m pleased to say it can.

Cronos: The New Dawn’s appeal is deeply embedded in its world-building, and here it excels in both the past and the present. You take on the vocation of Traveler, an entity that works for a hivemind known as The Collective. Travelers return to the past to collect the essences of people who held key information about the apocalyptic event known as The Change. What is done cannot be undone, but maybe we can learn for the future.

New Dawn’s world is in your hands. You will make choices as you meet and extract the ghosts of the pandemic’s past. Don’t expect massive changes to the story as a result, but there are some differing scenes that add more context to the story. The major differences relate to the endings, giving plenty of replayability. Cronos is about questioning. Not only are you asked to decide others’ fates, but also whether what you’ve bestowed is what you think it is.

The Change is central to Cronos’ world, story, and combat. A disease spread quickly throughout society, and no matter how people tried to contain it, it continued. Quarantined areas were quickly overrun by the infected, and everyone from medical staff, the government, and the military was swept up in the storm. The strength of the disease is that it is living, growing, and merging with everything living around it.

Zombie apocalypse meets steampunk sci-fi isn’t novel, but Cronos hasn’t tried to reinvent the genre. Instead, the team has taken strong core concepts and blended them into a smooth consistency. You have tight inventory and resource management, tense stretches between safe rooms, and plenty of risk-reward-based decision-making. It’s the classic formula of encouraging exploration with the promise of good items, while players know that it could cost more resources than they find. One annoyance is that you might see a juicy breakable box and fight your way to it, only to find that it is empty thanks to Random Number Generation (RNG).

Both balance and pacing have to be spot on when it comes to survival horror. Peaceful sections of exploration and puzzle-solving should follow tense areas that require quick thinking and speedy reactions. Cronos builds tension as your regular shots bounce off enemies and melee attacks barely register. Charged shots take time, but are essentially the only way to deal meaningful damage. With the game’s limited resources, charging and precise aiming are vital to success.

Cronos has the perfect method for encouraging exploration. The one creature to have survived The Change are cats, and you can find them hidden throughout both the past and present. They are usually hidden away and require many specialised items to get to them, but they are worth finding, even if petting an in-game cat doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. The cats not only offer some of the best items in the game, alongside new explorable areas, but they also come to live in your apartment after you find them, allowing for further pets.

Areas off the beaten path are fun to explore, but that doesn’t mean that some of the locations couldn’t have been improved by ruthless editing. Much of Cronos: The New Dawn consists of roaming around to find key items for progression and puzzle solving, which, while a staple of the genre, isn’t always compelling gameplay. At one point, our Traveler openly points out that an objective is repetitive, but winking at the fact that you know something is tedious isn’t the same as fixing it.

Enemies are mostly well designed – just not the ones who live in the walls and snipe you – but there could be fewer of them. Cronos adds its spin on your standard survival horror enemies by allowing them to merge with fallen foes and become more powerful. It’s a neat trick, but horror gamers know that seeing and fighting a monster isn’t scary, the expectation that you will see one is scary. Reducing the number of enemies and using arenas where you have to defeat them all more sparingly would have allowed the tension and fear to build more naturally. However, if you prefer a more action-oriented horror game, á la Resident Evil 4, then there is plenty here to love.

My final experience of Cronos was less positive than the majority of the game. In the section leading up to the final boss, I was locked into a cinematic slow walk and I couldn’t interact with anything. I trudged around the hub, wondering what I was meant to be doing for around 20 minutes before I reset and realised it was a bug. Not long after, I was sure that I should be able to slide something aside to progress, and after five minutes of fiddling, resetting proved that I was right all along. Then, as I defeated the final boss for the first time after many long attempts, they disappeared from the planet, never to be seen again. Naturally, this necessitated another reload and a second final boss win, starting from scratch.

Bugs throughout the rest of the game were persistent but minor. Frames dropping, the feeling that I’m hitting buttons too fast for the game to register them, and visual glitches where beaten enemies suddenly stood up or exploded. These were all mostly harmless, but these three major bugs back to back and a crash so close to the finale tasted bitter.

And yet, I enjoyed Cronos: The New Dawn. The bugs meant that I had plenty of time to figure out the ending, but the story was more about the alternate world the game builds than any single plot point. I happily endured the trials posed to me for that feeling of anxiety when I had mismanaged my resources and knew I had to evade enemies with no way to fight them.

Cronos is a solid entry into the genre that borrows key elements from the classics while choosing to excel in creating a world and lore that feels unique. To reach greater heights, it would require a tighter focus, allowing the story to breathe and exploration to shine, rather than being dampened by repetition. Despite this and the bugs, Cronos is an excellent example of what a strong setting and mystery can do to keep you enraptured in a game.

Cronos: The New Dawn is out on September 5, 2025 and will be available on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and Nintendo Switch 2 with a $59.99 price tag. This review was done on the PS5 version of the game with a code provided by the publisher.

For the latest gaming news, follow GameWatcher on BlueSky, check out our videos on YouTube, or give us a like on Facebook. We sometimes include affiliate links in our posts, which grants us a small commission, thank you. Please support independent Games Media. ❤️