Games

What to Expect From Cronos: The New Dawn

Published

5 hours ago

December 4, 2024

Christoph Rediske

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Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

Bloober Team’s forthcoming title, Cronos: The New Dawn, looks to potentially draw inspiration from The Medium and Dead Space, offering a mix of sci-fi and survival horror.
The game follows the Traveler searching for “Essences” in an alternate 1980s Poland after an apocalyptic event known as The Change devastated humanity in the future.
The 2025 release promises a unique experience, combining an Eastern European setting with retro-futurist elements for a compelling narrative and gameplay.

Cronos: The New Dawn is developer Bloober Team’s upcoming third-person sci-fi survival horror title. Shortly following the studio’s launch of the widely anticipated Silent Hill 2 Remake to largely positive reception earlier this year, it then revealed its newest IP, Cronos: The New Dawn, at the Xbox Partner Preview in October. The announcement was perhaps a little surprising, given that it came so soon after the SH2 Remake, and has many intrigued about what Bloober aims to achieve with Cronos.

Following the reveal, further leaks about Cronos: The New Dawn also surfaced. These outlined some supposedly additional details of what the experience might entail. While these are secondhand and thus unconfirmed, nevertheless, combined with what Bloober has officially shown off and stated so far, they provide a good general picture of what players can expect from Cronos: The New Dawn.

Cronos: The New Dawn Will Need More Than Silent Hill 2’s Goodwill to Succeed

Cronos: The New Dawn has a spotlight on it thanks to the Silent Hill 2 remake and will be a true test of what Bloober can accomplish with a new IP.

What to Expect So Far From Cronos: The New Dawn

Cronos: The New Dawn’s Inspirations

Before the Silent Hill 2 Remake, Bloober Teams’s titles were mainly first-person narrative-driven experiences rooted in psychological horror. However, the studio released The Medium in 2021, which was technically its first use of a third-person perspective. The Medium had fans playing through two worlds simultaneously to approach combat and puzzles, which could inform Cronos: The New Dawn‘s direction.

Additionally, based on its trailer and promotional material, many immediately noticed that it seemed to clearly resemble one of the most beloved sci-fi survival horror classics, Dead Space, in a lot of ways. It looks like the case then that Cronos may be taking cues from Bloober’s prior work on The Medium as well as the general atmosphere and design of Dead Space and similar games as its major inspirations.

Cronos: The New Dawn’s Story, Setting, and Mechanics

According to information available for Cronos: The New Dawn, it is stated to feature among its main elements:

The Change, an apocalyptic event that has devastated humanity.
A player character known only as the Traveler.
An art style that invokes Eastern European brutalism mixed with a retro-futurist vision.
Allegedly having 17 different locations, according to the unconfirmed leaks.
Set for a 2025 release, though there is no firm date as yet.

Expanding on these, the Traveler will explore the wastelands of the ravaged future in search of anomalous time rifts that will transport them back to an alternate 1980s Poland. In this era, the Traveler will need to search out and collect the “Essence” from certain characters, which seems to be the key to humanity’s survival. This might also be how Cronos: The New Dawn will iterate on The Medium‘s use of alternate worlds to present the parallel timelines and realities.

Design-wise, Cronos: The New Dawn‘s comparisons to Dead Space are most obviously reflected in the appearance of the Traveler, who is clad in a bulky space suit. In the trailer footage, the Traveler is seen battling grotesque creatures that invoke aspects of Dead Space‘s body-horror and possibly suggest a similar combat style. Elsewhere, the Traveler plays chess against an elderly woman before a disturbing claw-like device unfolds from their suit and reaches menacingly towards her. Presumably, this is the method of extracting Essences from NPCs, and it looks brutally unsettling.

While the above is pretty much all that’s known about Cronos: The New Dawn at this point, fans could see more revealed before the year closes, maybe at the upcoming 2024 Game Awards, or in a separate update around the same time. Either way, Bloober Team has proven it can handle third-person survival horror well, and fans of the genre will likely want to keep a close eye on Cronos: The New Dawn. The studio’s vision for its new IP contains a lot of potential, and promises a compelling experience that could elevate Bloober’s profile further while contributing to the general streak of excellent sci-fi horror titles into the new year.