Cronos: The New Dawn review: Tense and atmospheric

Released on September 5, 2025, Cronos: The New Dawn is a sci-fi survival horror gem that’ll have your skin crawling. With a mysterious story and gritty world to explore, it’s a title that’s sure to appeal to fans of franchises like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. 

Here’s The Escapist’s full review of Cronos: The New Dawn, looking at everything from the dark story to the gore-soaked combat – and most importantly, the feature that allows you to befriend cats while exploring the desolate landscape. 

The Escapist recaps

• Cronos: The New Dawn is a fresh survival horror title from the iconic Bloober Team, mixing classic survival horror elements with dark sci-fi story beats. It’ll be a hit for fans of franchises like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
• The game is ominous and unnerving, building tension without relying on cheap scares or loud noises. 
• The combat feels somewhat heavy, but once you get used to it, the protagonist feels powerful and well-equipped to deal with the nightmares ahead. This can minimize the frights somewhat, but it’s still fun. 
• Some elements, such as inventory management, may frustrate players, as they can be cumbersome; however, this is part of the survival horror experience. 
• We reviewed the game on PS5 and found it to run smoothly for the most part, although some players have reported graphical inconsistencies on PC. 

A world torn apart by The Change

Cronos: The New Dawn follows the story of The Traveler, a futuristic agent who works for an organization called The Collective. She’s woken up from what appears to be cryo-sleep in the very beginning of the game and must work to achieve The Vocation, aiming to save certain people from an apocalyptic event called The Change.

To do this, The Traveler must track down key people throughout a foreboding wasteland and use time-travel mechanics to save their Essences – essentially their consciousnesses – before The Change takes place. 

The further The Traveler progresses with The Vocation, the trickier things become, both for her and the people she interacts with. Without spoiling it, the story gets dark and twisted, with multiple endings for players to unlock via their choices.

Other than the underwhelming naming conventions, the story is well-written and flows well, tying together detailed combat scenes and puzzles to make a cohesive and compelling experience. 

While The Traveler will mainly be focused on tracking down key people to extract and defeating tricky enemies, she’ll also need to traverse obstacles by solving puzzles that warp time and space. They’re not difficult puzzles by any means, but they added an extra level of detail to the world. 

Cramped corridors and crumbling ceilings

The world-building is solid in Cronos. The aesthetics are immediately impressive right off the bat, with a fog-drenched, apocalyptic scene coming into view as soon as you gain control of the protagonist.

There are plenty of interesting tapes, files, and letters dotted around the game that add to the story. Admittedly, this style of exposition can be hit or miss; some players may not enjoy this, and there’s a real sense of progression as you stomp your way through each new area. 

Something that particularly stood out during our testing was the introduction of the first monster. The standard monsters in the game are called Orphans, and they boast gnarly, elongated limbs, gaping maws, and a surprising level of speed. 

Instead of just throwing creatures at you right out the gate, the game bides its time and lets you wander through an abandoned building with a few mannequins dotted around. Without spoiling when it happens, the first Orphans pops up rather unexpectedly.

It pops in a literal sense, too. When killed, some monsters will explode into what seems like a pile of glistening, writhing worms, splattering the ground to signal the end of an encounter. There’s plenty of grossness to enjoy in Cronos. 

Small things like the first monster introduction make it evident that Cronos: The New Dawn was made with love, coming from a team that adores the survival horror genre. 

This game felt like a love letter to titles like Dead Space, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil, combining sci-fi story beats with nasty-looking monsters, tight corridors, and atmospheric level design. It felt like an homage in the best way possible, but still had plenty of its own charm. 

Arguably, the most important feature of them all is the cat mechanic. You’ll encounter several adorable cats as you tear through walls of biomass and flesh, each letting you pet them on the head and giving you a present in return. It was a surprisingly whimsical feature in such a dark game and helped to humanize the stoic main character. 

Slow but punchy combat

Combat in Cronos will likely be divisive. Some players will love it and feel energized by how strong the character eventually feels, while others will dislike the slower cadence of gearing up and working through fights. The story and exploration are linear, and this translates into the gearing system, too. 

The main character, The Traveler, moves slowly, even when sprinting, and getting stronger takes time, effort, and resources. Unlocking new weapons is incredibly fun, though. One of the best moments in the early stages of our playthrough was picking up the shotgun. 

There is an NG+ option available for Cronos: The New Dawn, which will provide a higher level of challenge for fans who want to test their mettle.

One of the biggest challenges that players will come across isn’t the swarms of shambling undead or mish-mash horrors beyond comprehension; it’s the inventory management curse that’s plagued survival horror since the genre’s inception.

Getting enough bullets is tricky, with resources being incredibly sparse, and some of the enemies being absolute bullet-sponges. There’s a minuscule amount of inventory space available as well. 

If you’re a long-time fan of survival horror, chances are that this won’t bother you too much. You’ll need to make a sprinkle of bullets go a long way in your battles, and you’ll likely need to reload a save to try an encounter again now and then.

For the most part, this was expected and didn’t present much of an issue, but it did get admittedly annoying at some key points in the story. There were two cavern-based fights early on that went from fun challenges to slightly irritating.

Boss fights were both fun and challenging, with mechanics that tested environmental awareness and resource management. Every bullet counts in a Cronos boss battle, as does every canister of torch fuel.

Torch fuel plays a big part in Cronos thanks to the merging mechanic. If an enemy spots a dead Orphan on the ground, it’ll go through a gruesome merging process and enhance its own body, getting even stronger as a result. To combat this, The Traveler must incinerate every dead body in a battle arena. 

Decent performance on console

We reviewed the game on PS5 and found it ran smoothly throughout our testing sessions, with no notable graphical issues or performance problems to note.

That being said, there have been a handful of community reports that mention performance issues for PC players.

If you’re hoping to pick up Cronos for PC in particular, it could be worth looking into the game’s specs and community posts about the matter to check that it’ll be a good fit for your setup. It’s available for PC players on both Steam and the Epic Store. 

All in all, Cronos: The New Dawn was tense, gritty, and challenging. While some portions of the game were trickier than others, thanks to the scarce amount of bullets, the game was enjoyable and provided some tense moments. The story was interesting, although the storytelling method of dotting lore around the world may not gel well with some players. 

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References

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