Posted in: Bloober Team, Games, Indie Games, Video Games | Tagged: Cronos: The New Dawn

Hard As It Can Get? – We Preview Cronos: The New Dawn

We had the chance to take part in an exclusive preview for Cronos: The New Dawn ahead of the game's launch, and man was it rough!

It's rare that we get a game that slaps us in the face while we play it, but Cronos: The New Dawn brought the heat this time. Recently, Bloober Team was gracious enough to let us try out a preview with other media and content creators, as we were given a few hours to delve into the early part of the game and see how it holds up. Keep in mind, this is a preview, and it more than likely could change when the full game is released. So with that said, we go back in time and give the game a proper shot.

Without giving away many spoilers for the story, you play as a time traveler who has been sent back to a specific point in time to retrieve information abouty how the future got all messed up and how you might be able to either undo it or repair it. But not everything is as it seems, as you'll run across several mysteries along the way that make you wonder just how we got to this weird, broken-up, mutated, monstrosity field of a planet to begin with. From the very moment the game starts, you are brought into what feels like a classic horror cityscape, with monsters around every corner, light shining in just the right areas to make it creepy, and plenty of jump scares to mess with you as a player.

When it comes to setting the tone, much like the team did with the Silent Hill 2 remake, Layers of Fear, and The Medium, they know how to craft a landscape of horror that will put you on edge just looking at it, let alone crossing over it. On more than one occasion, I caught myself staring off into the abyss of what was ahead of me, wondering what was going to pop out and from where. Cronos: The New Dawn sets a pretty significant tone in making the world feel realistic while also scaring the hell out of you.

The storytelling is pretty basic when it comes to horror exploration games, as you're following a trail of breadcrumbs to get to your objective, which leads you to the next objective, which sends you down another path of breadcrumbs to complete the objective to finish the overall objective. You get the gift of what we're saying, and we're making light of it a bit, but it is true. A lot of horror titles of this ilk rely on you doing things you don't necessarily want to do in order to accomplish them. All set up in third-person, which helps, as opposed to doing it in first-person. With this comes the usual tropes, which if you've played horror games like this a lot, you know what to expect with item juggling, lore drops in the form of left behind notes, jump scares by inanimate objects, squeezing through tough to navigate areas, and diving into places you really shouldn't.

The core gameplay for Cronos: The New Dawn involves dealing with mutated creatures throughout the world, which you'll have to kill as efficiently and quickly as possible. When we say this game is ruthless and brutal, we mean it. You need to kill these suckers right away, or they just don't go down while you right them off in your slow-moving suit. And if they're near fallen commrades, they will latch onto them in a weakened state and mutate into a brand-new, even bigger creature that becomes bigger and harder to kill. You'll have various weapons and tools to handle this, as well as a variety of red-colored explosives to help you out. But a lot of this is trial and error, as we only saw one player in our group who knew immediately how to 3D Chess their way through the battles and finish the demo in record time. The rest of us were getting our asses kicked repeatedly. We were literally having flashbacks to The Callisto Protocol when we played that demo, as it took the majority of us playing it for hours to get to the end.

The other element is the ability to mess with objects that have been affected by anomalies in the space-time continuum, using a tool built into your suit. (You;'re from the future, so you know how to mess with these objects) You'll be able to change their dynamics to help you. For example, you could see a collapsed wall and make it rise in time to be fully standing, or you could use pieces of a broken road to form a bridge. I enjoyed this mechanic, but there wasn't a lot of it around the game for me to really have fun with it, so the scope of what we were able to experiment with was limited.

Overall, we had a lot of fun playing Cronos: The New Dawn for this demo, but it's also one of the toughest games we've played in a while. And we're not saying tough as in it was difficult to understand or grasp the story or figure out the mechanics, none of it. It was tough in that the game has zero threshold for the inexperienced. If you don't figure out what you need to do, it will punish you with death until you figure it out. You can't brute force your way through it, you can't evade and sneak around it, you can't even minmax it to find the best way to get the most out of what little you have. You are given a set of parameters, and you'll need to find your way through it as best you can. For some, that is thrilling, but for others, that will be a turnoff. We'll see how the final version of the game looks when its released on September 5, 2025.

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