Cronos: The New Dawn

 I think I really like Bloober Team now?

I played this on my PS5.

I went into last year's Silent Hill 2 remake skeptical it would live up to its name, both because the original is such a landmark title and because, to my casual eye, Bloober Team didn't exactly have a great track record. I've heard (secondhand) stories about the narrative of The Medium that don't fill me with hope, and obviously there's that Jerma Layers of Fear clip, and in general some people I trust went into that game looking for reasons to hate it. Against all odds, however, it was excellent.

Cronos: The New Dawn doesn't have the luxury of having one of the most well-regarded games of all time as its foundation, however, and is instead a wholly original thing. The game's director (essentially) said that Bloober Team was done making shitty games and, as far as I can tell, he might be right. Cronos is great.

This game is, in a lot of ways, effectively a modern take on Dead Space (which was, itself, heavily inspired by Resident Evil 4). I love Dead Space and this game hit all of the right buttons for me as a result. There are so many mechanics and little details that feel pulled from Dead Space meaning despite the lack of a developmental lineage between the two games (like what The Callisto Protocol touted) it feels like another Dead Space.

To break down what I mean, it's a third-person shooter where you control a very stiff, heavy protagonist and fight off a bunch of gross, fleshy not-zombies. You have a stomp, there are save points located in walls that open up when you get near them, and you've even got zero-g jumps. This game wears its influences on its sleeves and I love that.

Look at these gross flesh monsters.

While there isn't the same dismemberment mechanic as Dead Space, this game instead focuses on something almost resembling Crimson Heads from Resident Evil HD, that is to say there's an emphasis on destroying corpses. When a living enemy encounters an enemy corpse, it can "absorb" that corpse to gain health from it (and whatever special abilities that enemy may have possessed). So, the game hammers home the idea that you shouldn't "let them merge", and while the repetition of this phrase gets a bit silly, it feels in line with Dead Space's (somewhat goofy) "Cut Off Their Limbs" signposting.

They've even got the blood-writing in this!

I mentioned Crimson Heads earlier, but the inspirations run even deeper. Despite all of the Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space in this game, there is also a lot of classic survival-horror DNA in this.You have a very limited inventory, and to help offset that there are storage chests located in pretty evenly-distributed safe rooms.These safe rooms have upgrade terminals, save points, the aforementioned storage, and an infinite supply of one of the game's utility items. There's even a save-room theme that plays when you're in one of these areas.

These safe rooms are usually centrally located within one of the game's various hub areas. This game,  breaks down into a series of large open areas, each with spokes coming off that you'll need to investigate, that also helps sell the classic survival-horror feel. While nothing is quite as intricate as, say, the police station from RE2, having a number of areas that are all reminiscent of that felt really cool. There's no map, unfortunately, but luckily the relative simplicity of these areas meant I wasn't very likely to get lost, so it was a bit of a tossup in that regard.

In the survival-horror tradition, I spent a lot of time backtracking and fiddling in menus. I'm torn on whether this is a bad thing, or even whether it's worth noting, but given how limited the inventory was it's almost certainly going to be something you'd also run into when playing the game. While there is a part of me that wonders whether a more linear game might've been a better fit, I do think the approach here is for the best, ultimately, as we don't get a lot of games like this these days. At least, not at this scale. With how long the game is, however, there were certainly times I wish they'd been a bit less stingy with what I was allowed to carry.

If you're anything like me, you'll be seeing a lot of this screen.

The story was... unexpectedly compelling. I don't know why I went into this with relatively low expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed its narrative. It all gets a bit convoluted and some of the storytelling is a bit needlessly obtuse, especially near the end, but all in all it was a pretty solid sci-fi story.

The setup is this: you play as a member of some mysterious futuristic "Collective" sent into the ruins of a post-apocalyptic Poland and you're tasked with using some sci-fi doodad to go back into the past, to before the world completely fell apart, to somehow save certain people from their fate. Or something. The framing is a bit mysterious, deliberately so, so I'm not entirely sure how to explain it fully, but it all makes enough sense in the moment to keep you moving and invested in what's going on. 

Like many other games in the genre, there are multiple endings. I saw Ending A on my initial playthrough (I then immediately reloaded my final save and saw Ending B). I've included clear screens below.

I said "initial playthrough" because, well, I enjoyed playing this so much I think I'm going to give it a second, NG+ run at some point. From what I understand, you keep just about everything you picked up and upgraded during your first playthrough, so even though I'll be doing it on the newly-unlocked "Hard Mode" it's, allegedly, probably actually easier than the first time around. But only time will tell. I may update this after I do that if I have anything meaningful to add, but I doubt running through it again will change the way I feel about the game.

And the way I feel is this: this game rules. It's a wholly new thing in the vein of RE4 and Dead Space that has its own identity but pays homage to the classics of the genre, I really couldn't be happier with the end result. I went into this game skeptical they could match last year's Silent Hill 2 remake but I think they, somehow, made the best thing they possibly could have here. It's a great game and it leaves me excited to see what Bloober Team does next, even outside of their Silent Hill 1 remake. I never thought I'd be saying that.