We are coming up on a year since Bloober Team announced Cronos: The New Dawn. While the game isn’t due out until this fall, MP1st was invited to breezy Oakland, California, for some early hands-on time with a beginning portion of their latest horror game.
After a couple of hours spent fighting through hordes of Orphans (the enemies’ name in this franchise), we have our initial impressions ready for you now.
Can Bloober carry the momentum from the excellent Silent Hill 2 remake into its new, original IP? So far, things are looking promising.
A Fireproof Traveler
Though our slice of the campaign was only around two hours, we saw many tropes you’d expect to find in any classic survival horror game. Find a key, craft medkits or ammunition from a shared pool of resources, manage inventory (but, as in many modern survival horror games, in real-time), use clues to solve puzzles…the list goes on. While many of the ideas presented in our session have been explored before, the new setting and story details kept things feeling fresh, even if, in reality, I’ve done most of this before, just in another story.
You play as the Traveler, working for a mysterious corporation known as the Collective. The Traveler’s goal is to survive the present, post-apocalyptic environment, while extracting victims of the “Change,” this universe’s name of a world-ending event in 1980s Poland that turned people into hideous beings named Orphans. These extractions are performed via a “dive” mechanic, which we were unable to see in our demo. It is perhaps being kept a secret for a little while longer.
Burn Them All
One unique tool in the Traveler’s arsenal is the very suit they have on at all times. It is big and bulky, but that’s because it’s fireproof. The suit is fireproof because certain enemies must not only be killed, they must be burned to prevent merging. This is one of the key differentiators of Cronos. Merging occurs when an enemy that has readily-identifiable tentacles comes upon the deceased carcass of another enemy with those same tentacles. The still-alive Orphan will start to absorb the dead one, a process which the player can interrupt with a well-placed critical shot, or by dropping a firebomb right at their feet. The merging mechanic can definitely cause a shift in strategy: the firebomb has extremely limited ammunition when you’re first starting out, so it’s going to be used sparingly, which means you’ll need to keep enemies spaced out. That way, merges will be less common. It gives you something new to think about when you kill the tentacled enemies.
Combat mostly consisted of slow, measured shots, because ammunition was never plentiful. Enemies drop random items, which can be combined to craft healing items or ammo. What’s more, the healing and ammo items share some of the same crafting ingredients. So, you often have to choose to make one or the other, because rarely do you find yourself with enough resources to craft multiples of both items. It’s an interesting way to maintain tension.
Refined Horror, New IP
Certain areas of the map turned into what were essentially arenas, where you had to clear out all Orphans in the area before being able to progress further. Conveniently-placed explosive red barrels usually lined these areas, and since you’re in a fireproof suit, there’s no issue with lighting the area up once too many enemies for your liking coalesce to one spot.
Overall, Cronos: The New Dawn appears to be a well-polished survival horror game, crafted in a classically inspired style reminiscent of Resident Evil, yet incorporating modern gameplay and design elements that have evolved with the medium’s progression. Though, during the final boss fight of the section we played, I did notice items were randomly generated on each attempt, which means some runs might end up with fewer resources by pure luck. That felt like a decidedly old-school mechanic, but generally you have just about the right enough amount of resources to survive, provided you’re not that lousy of an aim.
Getting Ready for Release
The Unreal Engine 5 helps to present the horrifying world of Cronos in all of its unsettling glory. We were playing on high-end desktop hardware, so naturally performance was not an issue. Graphics specifics were not detailed during this demo, and while the minimum specs call for an 8th-gen i5 and GTX 1080, a 10th-gen i7 and RTX 3080 are recommended, if that gives you any indication of how your rig might perform.
Cronos: The New Dawn is shaping up to be an unsettlingly good time. Grotesque enemies, perilous resource counts, and an occasional puzzle all feel like they are adding up to a horror game you’ll want to keep an eye out for. Cronos:
The New Dawn is inching towards release on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows and Mac this coming fall, and horror fans will want to keep an eye on this for a new experience, but with that sense of familiarity that survival-horror fans have grown accustomed to over the years.
