For the past few weeks, I’ve been slightly anxious before bedtime. In a corner of my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder how my subconscious might remix the barrage of unsettling images I had seen while scraping my way through Cronos: The New Dawn.
Mercifully, I don’t remember having any dreams about vicious tentacles bursting from the abdomens of mutated people or of wandering infernally twisted corridors enveloped in gross, fleshy viscera.
But that a small part of me fretted over that possibility is a compliment to the developers at Bloober Team who have taken the foundations of the Resident Evil and Dead Space games and made a formidable, if derivative, survival horror game that becomes more interesting as it goes along. (Bloober also made last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake.)
In Cronos, players step into the clanky boots of the Traveler, a mysterious being in a get-up that recalls a bulbous, old-timey diving suit. The Traveler uses alien technology to traverse openings into the past, known as dive points, with the aim of extracting individuals or uploading their consciousness into some sort of hive mind.
With little initial information to go on, players find themselves in the Nowa Huta district of Krakow, Poland, searching for traces of a man named Edward Wisniewski, a prepper who senses the apocalypse is nigh.
By the early 1980s, the conditions of the district — originally built in 1949 as a utopian project for communal living — are sordid. An unknown virus has eradicated virtually all of the area’s human population, leaving in its place “orphans,” zombielike creatures who can merge and absorb the attributes of their fallen brethren with sickening, tentacle-sucking fanfare.
When I started Cronos, all I noticed were the design elements it had lifted from other games. Most obvious were the hub environments that gradually open up as one discovers shortcuts and ways around locked doors, a hallmark of the Resident Evil series.
As with those games, resources are limited and ammunition must be thoughtfully conserved, making spray-and-pray shooting a folly to be avoided. Upgrading weapons is vital to not only make them more powerful but simply to alleviate drift from the targeting reticle that makes the Traveler, at first, seem like a pistol-packing dipsomaniac.
I’ve long contended that horror games benefit from brisk pacing and that developers should think long and hard about placing too many roadblocks in them. And my first several hours with Cronos were rough.
I bristled at the scarcity of ammunition and the wonkiness of the weapons, which seemed unnecessarily punitive. Being forced to repeat monster encounters until I memorized the enemies’ patterns and was able to use my precious resources with maximum efficiency leached away whatever dark energy got my pulse racing the first few times.
But while the game’s challenging combat frustrated me, Cronos’s setting and story — which dramatizes the tensions between individual and collective aspirations — drew me in. Cat lovers, take note: Cronos pays wonderful homage to the ennobling benefits of feline company.
As the story progresses, easy explanations for the outbreak are gradually shot down — as are targets for blame. The possibility of tweaking the past to make everything turn out better recedes while the Traveler’s response grows more urgent. Part of what breaks open her robotic let’s-just-get-on-with-the-mission reserve are the cats she comes across, who have miraculously survived and also happen to guard some of the game’s best items.
Cronos is a game “about discovering humanity within yourself,” its lead writer, Grzegorz Like, said after we chatted about how the Traveler’s dialogue gradually becomes more human as she interacts with the cats.
Like said the events in Cronos were inspired by the real-life 1981 imposition of martial law on Nowa Huta. The government was afraid of solidarity, he said, and wanted to lock up people to prevent gatherings.
In the game, however, Like’s team imagined a scenario where congregating was what made people sick.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What if people are locked down because there are no sparks of this kind of togetherness?’” Like said.
He explained the hedgehog dilemma, where the animals want to huddle in the winter to stay warm but then injure one another with their spines. It was a resonant philosophical idea, he said, because the story Bloober wanted to tell went beyond the Traveler’s personal growth.
“Sometimes we want to help each other, but in the process we hurt each other,” Like said. “I think that’s one of the main aspects of human relationships. It’s not very optimistic, but it’s there and fits the world of Cronos very well.”
Cronos: The New Dawn was reviewed on the PlayStation 5 Pro. It is also available on the PC, Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S.
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