Why 'Cronos: The New Dawn' is the most impressive survival horror debut on Xbox and PC in over a decade

I wrote previously how I owed Bloober Team an apology. When I heard the Observer, Layers of Fear developer was slated to tackle the Silent Hill 2 Remake, I wasn't particularly enamoured with the idea.

Silent Hill 2 is a personal pillar game for me, and Bloober's previous titles, while sporting shades of brilliance, never really gave the impression they could tackle something as subversive as Silent Hill.

I was dead wrong.

Silent Hill 2 Remake is up there with the likes of the Resident Evil remakes for quality and faithfulness to the source material, but it remained true that Bloober effectively had a legendary blueprint to work from here ... is it enough proof that Bloober Team could hit a similar high bar with one of their own franchises?

Cronos: The New Dawn emphatically says "yes."

Cronos: The New Dawn | Gameplay Showcase - YouTube

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Bloober Team has well and truly ascended to "AAA" quality with its very own IP. Cronos: The New Dawn takes everything the studio has learned about curating seminal horror experiences and pours it tenderly into an amalgamation that is as familiar and oddly nostalgic as it is fresh and bold.

The unnerving atmospherics, panic-inducing combat, and ambitious storytelling put Cronos: The New Dawn up there with the likes of Dead Space, Silent Hill, and, dare I say, Resident Evil itself as one of the best horror franchise debuts of all time.

Without spoilers, here's an overview of what you can expect from Cronos: The New Dawn, which launches on Xbox Series X|S (with Xbox Play Anywhere), PS5, and Windows PC on September 5, 2025.

Cronos: The New Dawn — Visuals and sound

If there's one thing Bloober Team has always been able to nail, it's raw visuals and atmospherics. Cronos: The New Dawn is no different here, with a truly haunting collection of locales, and even timelines — more on that shortly.

In Cronos: The New Dawn, you play as the mysterious "Traveller," whose mission remains obscured in intrigue deep into the game. What is quite apparent from the outset is that something truly horrifying has happened to society, and possibly, the entire universe.

An unnamed virus has turned all biological entities into hideous lichen-like masses, mindlessly (and forcibly) merging themselves with other infected hosts to create even more glistening concoctions of bone and flesh, without even a hint of sanity.

You're here in the aftermath, as a sort of time traveller. The apocalypse has already happened, you're just a visitor, and that sense of loneliness punctuates across pockets of hideous and towering mounds of congealed body parts and flesh.

Set in Poland across multiple timelines, players navigate a variety of urban locations across a variety of points of decay and destruction. You'll encounter buildings that have been utterly twisted by the unnamed virus, making hallways look more akin to inner bowels, dripping and squelching underfoot.

On the flip side, time itself has also become fractured for reasons unknown. The sky is wreathed in an endless murk, choking visibility, and ramping up tension as you struggle to make out shadows in the fog. Bloober uses lighting absolutely masterfully here, with various segments shrouded in total darkness, save for the torch on your suit.

The warped flow of time has objects suspended in the air, with entire portions of the city twisted into the sky and floating in unknown space. The game flips seamlessly between sci-fi vistas and grotesque 80s-style body horror, with environs that bleed with lived-in details and palpitation-inducing sound treatment.

There were points during my run through Chronos: The New Dawn that I found myself stopping simply to admire the scenery. Bloober has always seemed savvy to how a player might behave in their games, and every time I felt like stopping to admire the view, the game's majestic soundtrack would kick in to accompany it in ways that felt dynamic and seamless.

The soundtrack in general is also just fantastic, generally leaning into nostalgic analogue 80s sci-fi tones, accentuated with a variety of creepy discordance as appropriate.

The game's dilapidated locations feel painstaking in their construction and detailing, and combined with stellar modelling work and fantastic dynamic lighting, Cronos: The New Dawn is as immersive as they come.

I played Cronos: The New Dawn primarily on Xbox Series X in quality mode at 30 FPS to get the full force of the game's lighting and murky inclemency, but it also has a 60 FPS mode for those who prefer the added frames. It's often the case that quality modes want for smoothness, but Bloober Team really delivered when it comes to performance here, with no perceptible frame drops or graphical glitches throughout my entire playthrough. I didn't encounter a single bug, crash, or game-breaking issue during play, which is a testament to Bloober's craft.

Cronos: The New Dawn — Gameplay

If you've played games like Dead Space or Resident Evil, you'll know immediately what to expect here — but I suspect fans of The Evil Within might more immediately get to grips with what Cronos asks of you.

Cronos: The New Dawn, much like its in-game monsters, feels like an amalgamation of various horror stylings. It borrows the armor-clad, helmeted protagonist of Dead Space, complete with heavy movement and two separate "last resort" melee attacks. It follows the over-the-shoulder survival horror gunplay style of Resident Evil 4 onwards, and the map design of Silent Hill 2, with mist-shrouded linear segments connecting more complex, often punishingly dark interior locations.

I felt like it reminisced mostly of The Evil Within, though, with its quite aggressive insistence that you should approach combat thoughtfully, and wield the environment as a primary weapon.

In Cronos: The New Dawn, you are a futuristic explorer of sorts, endowed with H.R. Giger-inspired retro-tech pulled straight out of Prometheus. However, you do sport an archetypical handgun and shotgun from the outset, albeit with a twist.

You can charge every weapon up to boost their damage, and boost their damage, you will very much want to do — ammo in this game is incredibly scarce, with Bloober carefully managing how much you receive when compared to the encounters dotted throughout the game's sizeable campaign. Throwing in a melee kill to save a couple of bullets or using a strategically-placed gas cannister to ignite enemies can save precious resources, and you'll need all you can find to survive.

Fire is also a very precious resource in the game, much like The Evil Within. The Traveller has a wrist-mounted flame thrower, Boba Fett style, that can be used to stun enemies and deal some modest damage over time. It can also be used to clear obstacles in the environment, but perhaps more crucially, it can be used to burn felled enemies into dust. Why is this important? Well, the nature of the virus compels the afflicted to literally merge together, forming huge clumps of hideous and violent biomass.

The more you allow enemies to merge, the more dangerous they become. They will sprout additional limbs, gain new abilities, and deal far more damage. Approaching combat carefully to prevent merging enemies forms a large basis of play, and it keeps combat encounters feeling as dynamic as they do frantic.

I was a bit disappointed when I noticed Cronos: The New Dawn clocked in at "only" 20GB, assuming that was indicative of the game's length. It isn't. Cronos is a very meaty game with a good variety of complex locales, easily topping 15+ hours for an average playthrough. Completionists hunting for every text and audio file, every secret, and every cat (yes, you can save cats in this game), may be looking at 18-20 hours on top.

I played the game quite slowly and methodically, checking every corner and managing ammunition carefully. The game is creepy first and foremost, but I would say it isn't quite as punishingly scary as something like Silent Hill or indeed The Evil Within. Cronos: The New Dawn doesn't lean on cheap jump scares or overly terrifying music to keep things tense, and its reassuring save room music is always a few corridors away to give you a welcoming reprieve.

The game's level designs, to that end, are very well done. Much like Resident Evil and similar games, Cronos has interior locations that require some puzzling and key hunting in order to progress. There is no map, but there is a compass that guides you in the general direction of your next objective. The level designs are varied enough to maintain a sense of direction despite the lack of an actual map, impressively. The hand-crafted details and landmarks help orient you, which is a testament to the game's thoughtful design.

Much like Dead Space and The Evil Within, you will have opportunities to upgrade your gear throughout. There are also tools and other items you'll unlock as you explore, helping you gain an edge over the game's various enemy types. Just as earlier enemy types start becoming trivial, the game throws new horrors into the mix to test you, however.

From the outset, your weapon sway can be quite aggressive, making landing shots tricky. The game does have quite aggressive aim-assist options, but I found them to be a little too aggressive at times, pulling your cursor away from enemy weak points and getting stubbornly locked onto resource crates and things like that. With a few upgrades to your accuracy, you won't have issues placing crucial headshots on enemies, however. A quick punch or flamethrower spray can also stun mobs, helping you line up shots more easily.

I found Cronos: The New Dawn to be fun and varied throughout my time with it. The diverse array of detailed locations, the environmental storytelling, the impressive vistas, and infectious combat made Cronos: The New Dawn one of the most fun action horror games I've played in years, but it's probably the game's maddeningly mysterious story that will hook you above all.

Cronos: The New Dawn — Story (No spoilers)

It's always a bit tricky reviewing a game's story without hitting spoiler territory, and Cronos: The New Dawn makes it particularly tough given its format — making every moment a potential spoiler.

As noted, you play as the Traveller, in what will seem from the outset like a deliciously warped homage to The Thing and 12 Monkeys in equal measure.

Much like 12 Monkeys, The Traveller hints that you have been sent from the future to gather information on the past, in an attempt to ascertain what caused the apocalypse. The virus has twisted and melted society into crazed cells of a deadly lichen-like slime mould, and if that wasn't bad enough, the laws of space and time also seem to be utterly broken.

The Traveller knows just about as much as you do going in, armed with only fragments of information on just what the hell went wrong. You will travel with them across different timelines, meeting key players during the events at the start of the outbreak, and exploring evidence about its concluding act.

The Traveller itself is shrouded in mystery throughout much of the game. She wears a large suit that shields her from the virus and time anomalies outside, but she also speaks with a robotic, minimalistic tone at the start of the game. The Traveller is part of an organization known as The Collective, who speak in riddles and has peppered the apocalyptic landscape with retro-future tech, including resources, weapons, save room check points, and blockades.

It seems, however, only one member of The Collective is allowed to actively search the wasteland at any one time. It gives Cronos: The New Dawn a uniquely lonely atmosphere, as you pick through the ruins of civilization and explore correspondence of various characters that may have been involved directly or indirectly with its downfall.

The game is set in Soviet-era Poland, primarily before the fall of the USSR. The game explores real-world themes of political corruption and Marxist-Leninist socialism. The futuristic "Collective" and the amalgamate hivemind of infected slime mould doubtlessly represent themes of losing one's individuality. It's furthered by the Traveller's "vocation." It's quite literally your job to travel to the past and physically extract (violently) the psyche of individuals before their minds are lost to the virus.

The more individuals you "extract" using your future tech serves to drive The Traveller down a winding road of warped sanity, with overlapping consciousnesses being absorbed directly into your suit's "Phylactery" computer. The information therein could help The Collective in its mission to ascertain what went wrong, but much like those who came before you, the risks get increasingly extreme as you plot your course through the wastes.

The present might be utterly destroyed, but across various trips to the past, you'll meet a variety of characters who were at ground zero during the outbreak. The game offers various choices that will shape the game's multiple endings, giving you plenty of reasons to return and try different routes through the game's beefy campaign.

Cronos: The New Dawn feels a bit like tumbling down a rabbit hole. Its unique blend of retro-futurism, high-concept time-travelling sci-fi, and traditional body horror feels like it shouldn't work on paper — but it inexplicably does. Cronos: The New Dawn's ambitious mish-mash of inspirations comes together in a glorious whole and emerges as something utterly unique in its own right.

Cronos: The New Dawn — Conclusion

Cronos: The New Dawn is the most excited I've been about a new game in a very long time. Independent developers are increasingly stepping up and taking the role traditional publishers used to fill, as they go off and chase infinite service games and shareholder bait. The creativity, ambition, and raw passion inherent in games like Cronos: The New Dawn remind me what I love so much about gaming, and it represents the culmination of years of hard work, learning, and growth for Bloober Team.

Cronos: The New Dawn is an absolutely fantastic horror sci-fi experience. Its classic survival horror gameplay will be immediately familiar to vets, but its mind-warping story showcases Bloober's unique talent for making horrific and fantastical scenarios seem uncannily believable.

Cronos: The New Dawn's satisfying combat, evocative environments, stellar sound work, polished performance, and inexplicably ambitious story showcase Bloober at its absolute best, solidifying their place as one of the industry's most exciting independent studios in the world. September 2025 is absolutely stacked, but horror fans absolutely must not sleep on this game.

Cronos: The New Dawn launches on Xbox Series X|S (Xbox Play Anywhere), PS5, and Windows PC on September 5, 2025.

Cronos: The New Dawn: was $59.99 now $51.29 at loaded.com

Cronos: The New Dawn is a huge landmark title for Bloober Team, showcasing the studio's ascendancy to AAA quality with confidence. This is survival horror mastery at its finest, and something every horror fan should consider.

See at: GMG (Steam) | Xbox | Loaded (CD Keys)

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