by MJ Dark
I still remember the first time I saw Cronos: The New Dawn during the Xbox Showcase; its haunting aesthetic immediately gave me Dead Space and Callisto Protocol vibes. Developed by Bloober Team, this marks their first new IP since The Medium, following their much-anticipated Silent Hill 2 remake. The question was simple: could Bloober finally bridge the gap between atmosphere and gameplay, crafting something that feels as good to play as it looks
I’m happy to say they cooked.
For full disclosure, I played Cronos: The New Dawn on both PC and Nintendo Switch 2, on normal difficulty, completing it three times and unlocking all three endings.
What Is Cronos?
Imagine if Dead Space, Callisto Protocol, Silent Hill, and Netflix’s Dark all had a beautifully twisted baby — that’s Cronos: The New Dawn.
Set in an alternate 1980s Poland, this “retro-futurist” world was once a socialist utopia built on the strength of its massive Steelworks — until an unknown virus, known only as The Change, turned its people into horrifying entities called Orphans. You play as The Traveler, an operative of the mysterious Collective, sent back in time to locate key individuals and extract their essence before history collapses.
It’s a world drenched in decay, dread, and mystery — the kind of environment that lingers in your head long after you stop playing.
Gameplay
At its core, Cronos is survival horror through and through — methodical, weighty, and deliberately tense. The Traveler handles like a battle-hardened veteran, more capable in close combat than Isaac Clarke, yet still vulnerable enough to make every encounter feel dangerous.
While the Orphans echo Dead Space’s Necromorphs, Cronos trades limb-dismemberment for a more tactical combat rhythm. You can charge your weapon for precision strikes at enemy weak points, but the true twist lies in what happens after a kill: corpses must be burned using limited gas canisters, or they’ll be reabsorbed later to spawn more dangerous forms. It’s a brilliant tension mechanic that forces you to make brutal, strategic choices under pressure.
Combat often unfolds in arena-style skirmishes that reward environmental awareness luring foes near explosive barrels or chokepoints to conserve ammo. Inventory management is classic survival horror: scarce bullets, limited space, and constant trade-offs. Every shot counts, and panic will get you killed.
There are also light RPG elements, allowing you to upgrade your suit, weapons, and gear, which adds just enough progression to keep each run rewarding. And like Dark, Cronos weaves time travel into its core design, bending the story and world in ways that feel both fascinating and unsettling.
Visuals & Performance
On PC, I played with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 120GB of RAM, and an RTX 4090 — and the game looked phenomenal running off a Samsung 990 SSD. No crashes, no performance hiccups that I encountered on my playthrough. I also enjoyed the consistently crisp visuals whether I was playing on my desktop or my MSI Claw 8AI handheld.
Surprisingly, the Switch 2 version also impressed me. It held a near-constant 30 FPS and retained much of the game’s visual fidelity, a testament to Bloober’s optimization. Character models, armor textures, and facial animations all hold up beautifully, and the environmental design is a masterclass in atmosphere — dense fog, flickering lights, and industrial ruin all coming together to create pure dread.
Final Thoughts
After 75 total hours and three full playthroughs, I can confidently say Cronos: The New Dawn is Bloober Team’s best work to date. It’s a chilling, visually stunning, and mechanically rewarding survival horror experience that finally elevates the studio into the same conversation as the genre’s greats.
If you’ve been craving a new Dead Space — something atmospheric, slow-burning, and genuinely unsettling — this is the one. Bloober didn’t just make a homage — they made a statement. Cronos: The New Dawn proves they’ve officially stepped out of Silent Hill’s shadow and into their own.
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