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Just a year after their Silent Hill 2 Remake Bloober Team released their own spin on the surival horror genre with Cronos: The New Dawn. Given the small timeframe, relatively speaking considering today's standards, between releases it didn't surprise me to find out that they were developing both games at the same time. One might think that would make these game rather similar, but they could hardly more different from each other.
While Silent Hill is known for its frightening and oppressive atmosphere, Cronos for the most part only feels tense. Your character is fairly vulnerable, not being able to dodge or block enemy attacks, with melee attacks that are almost useless and a heavily limited inventory space. The game only sparsely provides you with resources such as ammunition and healing kits. As a result of these design choices you're likely to feel in danger most of the time. Enemies can easily take you out if you're not careful and don't know how to play with precision and strategy. The game is by no means difficult if you know what you're doing, but the overall experience always has you on your toes, stressing the survival aspect in survival horror. However that doesn't mean Cronos is no horror game at all, because it certainly has its moments that can make you feel scared. But compared to games such as Dead Space the stark atmosphere of a true horror game is more restricted to certain parts instead of being a constant companion throughout the adventure. Cronos also features many jumpscares of the explicit kind. They made me roll my eyes more than once, but were definitely effective and usually had their intended effect on me.
Cronos starts off having the player character ND-3576, a woman in a military space suit, land with a shuttle in future, post-apocalypse, Poland. Post-apocalyptic settings are not exactly new in videogames, but here there's time travel segments that let you play through the time during which the apocalypse occured. It's just a small addition, but it certainly affected me emotionally to some extend, especially on NG+ when I was sufficiently immersed in the game's setting. I found the overall narrative to be good. Cronos' plot is intriguing with a lot of mystery to it that kept me interested to the end. Unfortunately the writing is not always great however. Especially cutscenes are often corny and usually really drag on. That dragging on is a real problem because most characters in this game are not exactly composed. This is understandable considering the situation they find themselves in, but doesn't make the scenes any less hard to watch. The ending also has problems, suddenly reducing the plot to an off-tone relationship meta-narrative and ending on a cliffhanger for a potential sequel. But what Cronos lacks in its narrative department it makes up for with it's superb combat.
The lack of dodge, parry and block mechanics force you to keep your positioning in mind and play with caution. Cronos is also not equipped with a stealth gimmick that let's you assassinate enemies safely. However that doesn't mean your character is underpowered since we finally have some crowd control (which the Silent Hill 2 Remake lacked). Your shotgun actually deals spread damage and hits multiple enemies at once. Charged shots from the handgun penetrate enemies and deal significant amounts of damage when aimed at enemies' heads, especially when fully upgraded. Flamethrower fuel and grenades allow you to not only prevent enemies from becoming stronger through merging with nearby corpses, they can also be used to stun groups of enemies, allowing you to safely put yourself in a better position and assess the situation. Most areas allow you to kite enemies towards explosives to deal with them while saving ammo. In short, Crono's combat encourages you to play smart unless you want stock up on ammo. Playing Cronos might well be the most fun I had with combat in any surival horror game to date.
In terms of aesthetics Cronos is a mixed bag. The models of the main character and many key visuals are of high quality, but there's also a lack of detail in many parts of the game that are often somewhat obscured by fog and dust. The soundtrack is fantastic, but only plays in very few select parts of the game, while the larger part is accompanied by ambient sounds at best. There's places with great sound design, but also parts with no sound design to speak of (that's mostly the linear filler areas where you go explore abandoned buildings). I dearly missed a Yamaoka soundtrack to accompany the explorative parts of this game, which as is often felt quite mediocre. I also wasn't a fan of how bright the in-game surroundings are outside of your flashlight. For some reason those were only a dark grey at their darkest on my setup, and adjusting the gamma through the game's settings only made some places harder to see than was probably intended by the devs. Actually black darkness likely would have made the game a lot scarier and feel much more like a horror title. However this might only be a problem with the PS5 version on non HDR displays.
Outside of combat the game can feel a bit gimmicky sometimes. The way you sometimes have to shoot at "time oddities" to make bridges appear or clear the way from rubble doesn't feel great and usually pulled me out of immersion. The emitter puzzles later on are even worse, and the gravity jump gimmick feels very half-baked compared to how Dead Space handles it. Generally some parts of this game feel awfully scripted, which is a shame because it's a great game outside of those moments.
Although Cronos has a some noteworthy shortcomings and a very mediocre early game — it's incredibly linear until you make it to the first dungeon possibly many hours into the game on a first playthrough — I honestly enjoyed it a lot for it's mysterious plot, the fun combat, constant tension and appreciated every moment it created a good horror atmosphere. Also nothing in this game feels as padded out as the Silent Hill 2 Remake does in most parts. Overall, speaking for myself I probably had the best survival horror experience since Resident Evil 4 and REmake (not counting Dead Space since I hadn't played that until after Cronos). I really appreciated that no area in this game had me feel like I was playing Doom or Call of Duty all of a sudden, a quality I would have liked The Evil Within and recent Resident Evil games to possess.