How Cronos: The New Dawn Won Over A Stalwart Bloober Team Hater

By Grace Benfell | September 11, 2025 | 3:41pm

Video Games Features cronos: the new dawn

How Cronos: The New Dawn Won Over A Stalwart Bloober Team Hater

I went into this one expecting, but not hoping, to be a hater. Silent Hill 2 Remake represented so much of what is distasteful to me about contemporary games—a set of “game design best practices” and cold competences pasted over what is still one of the most affecting and beguiling games ever made. Between that and a host of other embarrassments in their prior work, I had written Blooper Team off entirely. But even in its first few hours, Cronos won me over. I don’t want to overstate it. There are few ideas in Cronos: The New Dawn that you will have not encountered in another survival horror game of its weight class. But it has craft and mystery to spare. No one is more shocked than me.

In its basics, and in most of its elaborations, Cronos: The New Dawn is like any action survival horror game you can pick up. It’s a riff on Dead Space in the same way Dead Space was a riff on Resident Evil 4. You play as a Traveler, an astronaut who travels through time. Much like Resident Evil 4’s unnamed Spanish village or Dead Space’s spaceship USG Ishimura, the Polish city New Dawn is a decayed place. Only the dead wander it now. The Traveler hunts for places where she can turn back the clock to when the city was merely dying, in order to preserve a chosen few of its inhabitants.

Most Popular

I won’t spoil what is meant by “preserving,” but instead point to how evocative the game’s mystery is. For the first few hours, the mood is thick and answers are thin. The Traveler drops phrases juicy with ritual and out-of-sight meaning. Some things become clear. A disease ravaged the New Dawn, turning its inhabitants into twisted, transformed corpses. The communist government attempted quarantine measures, but these all failed. The Traveler is a creature of some future project, with ambiguous connections to the past she explores. Like Dead Space, Cronos indulges in contrasts. The Traveler is almost pure metal, sealed inside a can, and she faces off against pure flesh, which contorts into unity. She’s a being of perfect loneliness surrounded with the ultimate togetherness.

The Traveler’s armored form also contributes in the game’s mood. In a piece for Endless Mode sister site A.V. Club, I wrote about how Silent Hill 2 Remake trades the original’s alienating, distant cinematography for lots of well-rendered close-ups. The change gives the game a blaring obviousness, which belies the subtleties of the original. Cronos is not subtle, but it does have shades. Its protagonist hides her face under a bulbous mask. The camera turns her into a looming shadow, creating an uneasy dis-identification. Weird dialogue choices further that alienation. The Traveler knows more than you and each choice carries implications that you cannot fully mark, but that weigh down every word.

For example, in the first face-to-face conversation with another human being, the Traveler hunts her conspiracy-touting boyfriend. When she panics at seeing an astronaut you can respond in two different ways: “I’m not here for you” or “I’m not here to harm you.” Each lends its own disturbing implications. The juxtaposition between them paints a picture neither phrase could on its own. The choice feels alienating, underlining the difference between the Traveler and you, rather than softening it.

I may gripe at every opportunity about the flattening of horror games into an over-the-shoulder perspective, but the angle fits Cronos. In Resident Evil 4, the perspective feels mostly practical. It’s claustrophobic enough that enemies can remain out of sight, but wide enough that it is a breeze to aim. Cronos is not different exactly, but the sense of hovering outside of the Traveler, being close enough to embrace but still far away, contributes to its sense of unease.

Still, the game’s aesthetics suffer from a sense of total anonymity. At its best, Cronos has an industrial beauty of decay, color, and line. One section in a steelworks swallows the screen in sharp steel edges and moody yellow shades. But much of the game is set in anonymous apocalypse, in settings that would not be out of place in The Last of Us, give or take a communist memorial. Furthermore, the enemies are rote. I’ve played enough of these that it is impossible for me to find corpses with elongated limbs or oozing monsters with glowing weak points scary. But the fundamental tensions will make you sweat and curse.

One of its twists on the action horror formula is that most guns have a charge function. Using it is essential to killing enemies with any kind of efficiency, but it takes time. You have to get distance from foes to use it without taking hits. Furthermore, your sights will waver and twist as your weapon charges. It’s a dance of timing, which enemy velocity and unpredictability make fraught. You will struggle over what items to craft, what to keep on you when you have such limited space. You will curse yourself for missing a shot, only to land your follow-up square between the eyes. In short, it’s a thrill.

But because Bloober Team cannot stop embarrassing itself, we have more to talk about. In a interview with Gamesradar+, director Jacek Zięba swore that the game has “no feminist agenda,” and elaborated, “It’s not like we hate ourselves, or males.” In fairness, essentially every game which dares to feature a woman or a person of color will get bombarded with bad faith accusations. I understand wanting to head those off. Nevertheless, the fact that a game developer felt comfortable saying this to an interviewer without qualification is a bad sign for where gaming culture is right now. You don’t have to take a cheap dig at feminism, truly a complex field with many differing points of view, to defend your game.

Despite my pontificating, I like Cronos in an unpretentious way. I like it as a video game, where the guns feel good to shoot, the puzzles feel crunchy, and the atmosphere has enough mystery and dread to it to make me wonder what will come next. And I agree, it is a game without feminist agenda (whatever the hell that means). But god, I could have used without the reminder that some will always consider my every step an intrusion, even the creators whose work I’ve come to admire.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.