Cronos: The New Dawn review — A brutal and grim future

Sometimes a studio's reputation does a complete 180 so fast it gives you whiplash. Just a year ago, Bloober Team was the poster child for "ambitious but flawed" horror games, with forums full of skeptics worried about their Silent Hill 2 remake. Fast forward to today, and that remake turned out brilliant, silencing doubters and suddenly making their next project, Cronos: The New Dawn, one of the most anticipated horror releases of 2025. It definitely is one of mine!

This project is Bloober's biggest gamble yet. This is their first fully original IP since establishing themselves as horror remake masters, and they're not playing it safe (in a good way). We're talking about a third-person survival horror that blends time travel, body horror, and Eastern European brutalism into something that looks like Dead Space had a creepy baby with 12 Monkeys. 

You play as a Traveler, an agent working for a shadowy organization called the Collective, bouncing between a devastated future wasteland and Communist-era Poland in the 1980s. The core mission sounds straightforward enough: extract people who didn't survive something called "The Change," a cataclysmic event that transformed humanity into creatures known as Orphans. But knowing Bloober's track record, nothing is that simple.

What caught my attention is how the studio weaves Eastern European history into science fiction horror. The choice to set the past segments in 1980s Poland under communist rule isn't just a shallow stylistic choice. There's something deeply unsettling about mixing the oppressive atmosphere of that era with body horror and time paradoxes, and I’m all for it. 

Cronos: The New Dawn represents a significant shift for Bloober Team. They're moving away from their traditional walking simulator roots toward something with actual combat teeth. The third-person perspective gives you both melee options and firearms like pistols and shotguns, but here's where it gets interesting: there's a unique burning mechanic that sets it apart from traditional survival horror titles.

By now, you’ve probably heard of the phrase: “don’t let them merge” from all of the marketing material. If you don't properly dispose of defeated enemies using fire, surviving enemies will merge with the corpses to create stronger, more difficult versions. This isn't just a gimmick. It fundamentally changes how you approach encounters. Instead of the typical survival horror resource management of counting bullets, you're also managing the incendiary tools the game provides, which is very limited. It's reminiscent of Dead Space's limb-cutting system in how it forces you to think beyond just pointing and shooting.

You start with the Sword, a standard pistol-type weapon. Confusing right? But you quickly acquire tools like the Hammer (a shotgun variant) and the Javelin (assault rifle) for rapid-fire crowd control. Each weapon feels purposefully designed for specific combat scenarios, and with ammo being perpetually rare, choosing the right tool becomes a tactical decision rather than a preference.

Enemy variety adds another layer to gameplay. The Orphans come in different breeds. Some are runners, rushing towards you to inflict melee damage. Others have ranged attacks, spitting corrosive acid at you instead. Then there are the bruisers, giant Orphans with malformed arms and limbs that can also soak up tons of damage. As you progress, more variants emerge, including 4 legged ones that can crawl on walls and ceilings, along with exploding ones and wall grabbers!

The pacing of combat is more aggressive than Silent Hill but more methodical than something like Resident Evil 4. The Traveler moves painfully slowly, with no quick-turn option or evasive maneuvers. Many of the Orphans can and will outrun you. Like I also mentioned in my preview, opening up the crafting menu mid combat does not pause the game, making enemy encounters even more frantic if you are ill-prepared. Your inventory space is the other limiting factor that forces you to play smart and strategic. You can’t just hoard everything you find!

What really stood out to me is how most combat encounters are handcrafted arenas, where you are forced to engage in combat. These fights are deliberately designed to test your spatial awareness and resource management. You need to think about positioning kills, using environmental tools like explosive barrels, and preventing merge chains before things spiral out of control. Bloober has really made "survival" the operative word in survival horror. The game actively punishes sloppy play.

Boss encounters are by far the best test of your mettle for all of the above. These often culminate in multi-phase battles that weave in brilliant environmental design. Not only that, but many of them lean into Bloober’s psychological horror roots while wrapping them in more action-oriented gameplay, which is super neat.

Your primary mission involves using a device called the Harvester to extract "Essences" from key individuals who didn't survive The Change. This soul harvesting mechanic attempts to add something new to the table by creating a moral and strategic dilemma. Each essence you harvest makes you stronger in combat, whether that be through increased damage to enemies on fire or increased melee and stomp damage. But these aren't just power-ups. They're the souls of actual people you're ripping from the past and carrying with you into a hellish future. The more you carry, the more your suit becomes haunted, manifesting as auditory and visual hallucinations. It's thematically perfect!

Throughout Nowa Huta, where this game takes place, you can rescue cats modeled after the real pets of Bloober's developers, and these furry survivors help you gather resources. How cute! It's such a bizarre tonal contrast… Here you are in this oppressive, body-horror nightmare, and suddenly there's a cat just chilling in the apocalypse waiting for pets. When you interact with them, they drop ammunition, crafting materials, or health items. 

The art direction is where Cronos truly shines. It marries Eastern European brutalist architecture with retrofuturistic design in a way that feels fresh. The oppressive concrete blocks of Soviet-era housing projects are infected with biomechanical nightmares. The future wasteland has this sun-bleached, deteriorated quality, all rust and decay under harsh light. 

The enemy designs are beautifully disturbing. The merging mechanic isn't just a gameplay element; it's reflected in genuinely grotesque creature design. These aren't your standard zombies or monsters. The Orphans were human once, but in ways that make your skin crawl. When they merge with corpses, the resulting abominations have this awful biological architecture that reminds me why body horror works so well in games.

Bloober Team has always understood that horror lives and dies on sound design, and they clearly haven't forgotten that. The audio mixes industrial ambience with organic squelches in seriously uncomfortable fashions. The merging sequences, where enemies combine with corpses, sound wet and wrong in exactly the right way.

Music is more prominent here than in Bloober's previous titles, with synthesizer-heavy tracks that lean into the retrofuturistic aesthetic. It's giving me strong Perturbator vibes, that dark synthwave sound that works surprisingly well with horror. Voice acting quality is solid for the most part, with some characters leaning more into B-movie campiness that sometimes plagues horror games.

Performance on a base PlayStation 5 is mostly solid, but the frame rates do stutter and drop during combat encounters. There is also full DualSense support with haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, which adds meaningful tactility to both combat and exploration. And the game only takes up a small 21.44 GB on your console!

That being said, I did hit a few technical rough edges during my playthrough that dampened the experience. I got stuck in terrain geometry multiple times, forcing checkpoint reloads - particularly frustrating given the already sluggish movement. Items would occasionally clip through walls or get lodged in shelves, making precious ammo and crafting materials impossible to retrieve. Whether it's a bug or just poor design, you can also get body-blocked and cornered by enemies with no escape route, leading to inevitable death. The melee swing needs work; my punches consistently whiffed when trying to break loot boxes, despite what looked like direct hits. There’s also this weird audio bug in the latter parts of the game, where everything would be silent except the dialogue.

For the most part, Cronos: The New Dawn does not break new ground in terms of survival horror mechanics. Yes, the team introduces some refreshing new twists on the formula, but the loop of searching for keys, managing inventory, and solving puzzles follows the playbook so closely overall that it feels a bit derivative. But at the end of the day, was this a solid survival horror experience? Yes by all means.

For a fairly linear game, there’s also quite a lot of replayability here. New Game Plus is unlocked after finishing the game, with an even harder mode to tackle. Unfortunately there’s no infinite ammo cheat to unlock. To get the platinum trophy, you need to find all cats, comic books, travelogs, essences, and weapons while fully upgrading everything. Of course, this also means multiple playthroughs and endings to achieve as well.