Bullets. More bullets. My kingdom for more bullets. Or maybe a fire grenade. That was how I felt playing a preview of Bloober Team‘s recently revealed sci-fi horror survival game, Cronos: The New Dawn.
I had a chance to play through early levels of the game at a recent preview event in Oakland, California. I’m not being greedy here. At any given time, I had no more than 11 bullets for my six-shooter handgun at the start of Cronos. I did a full interview with the team leads from Bloober Team about Cronos, which comes out on the PC and console later this year, and you can read it on our GB MAX membership platform.
But let me back up a bit. Cronos is the new game from the veteran horror game devs at Bloober Team, which has made some great psychological and physical horror hits like the recent Silent Hill 2 remake, Blair Witch, Observer, The Medium and Layers of Fear. The Cronos team has about 100 people and they’ve been working around four years.
They talked about setting the game in their hometown in Krakow, Poland, inside a giant steel manufacturing complex built during the Communist post-war era. The time fast forwards into an alternative history future when the Brutalist architecture is in ruins and destroyed objects just float in the air because gravity, like time, only occasionally works.
Cronos: The New Dawn takes place in the sterile post-apocalyptic time where humans are scarce and fallen monsters known as The Orphans like in the ruins, which are infested with horrific good that absorbs the bodies of humans. It’s got bloody physical horror — where you shoot enemies or set them on fire — and psychological horror as well.
When I played it, I was struck by the slow pace. This game’s art direction and gameplay gives me the feel of eerie works of art like BioShock, Gears of War, Alien, Silent Hill, The Last of Us, The Evil Within and, most of all, the Resident Evil games.
Slow-paced survival horror
You play as The Traveler, and it is clear that you are one of a series of such explorers who are sent on a mission to clear out monsters from environments. The survival-oriented combat is pretty terrifying, as multiple zombie-like monsters come after you, moving slowly for the most part.
The team gave the press group some background on the Brutalist architecture, the time period of the totalitarian Communist regime of the time, and how they took that into a sci-fi setting. But they didn’t explain what happened to the world.
As you awaken as a Traveler inside some kind of life preservation pod, you start to learn. I walked through a scene that was like a trip through a ruined hospital with monster slime all over it, and
You start the game with some pretty feeble weaponry: A pistol that holds six bullets before taking forever to reload. So you have to hope you get a headshot on the Orphan coming at you. Fortunately, they’re not super fast.
I asked why the devs why they only gave me around six or nine bullets at a time when I really needed around 18 or so. You’re notice in the video embedded (b-roll from the devs) that it takes six bullets to bring down the very first Orphan you see. If it takes you six bullets to take down every Orphan, you will not complete the game. (Fortunately, later on in the game, as you can see in the official dev trailer, you get things like shotguns).
I think they smiled but didn’t really tell me the real answer, which is that they want to torture us players. Your job is to shoot the enemies, or take them out with fire, one at a time before they “merge” into something more powerful.
I don’t know why these devs wanted to torture me. But let them keep their secrets, for they have done the very difficult job of building a brand new intellectual property at time when such games are scarce in the triple-A or double-A space.
The demo I played covered two areas. In Islands in The Mist, players navigate a mysterious liminal space where visibility is limited, tension is high, and danger lurks in every fog-drenched corner. Meanwhile, The Hospital delivers a claustrophobic descent into madness, where sterile corridors twist into nightmarish labyrinths, echoing with the remnants of a forgotten past.
Over time, you’ll learn that the Traveler is an agent of the mysterious Collective who emerges from a dystopian future to journey back through time. Their mission: to extract individuals before they perish in the apocalypse. Along the way, you find the bodies of other travelers, and learn their discoveries until the point of their demise.
Guided by the cryptic travel log of a mysterious predecessor, Traveler ND 3500, players will explore unsettling post-apocalyptic environments inspired by real-world locations, including the Kraków district of Nowa Huta. Here, decaying Brutalist architecture is warped by reality-bending anomalies.
One of the things you find along the way is the ability to manipulate time. This helps you solve puzzles and make your way through impassable paths. The Traveler navigates two time periods – the decaying future and 1980s Poland – thrusting players into the decaying district of New Dawn, inspired by real-life Nowa Huta, where survival means bending time itself. As for the boss, I’m told it’s an ominous entity called the Terror. But I didn’t get that far in my playthrough.
The video gives you a good idea of the psychological and physical horrors that await. Cronos: The New Dawn is set for release in Fall 2025 on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation®5, and PC via Steam and Epic. Wishlist now.
More preview details
The good thing about the beginning is they ease you into the combat. At first, you just run into one enemy at a time. You’ll find the Orphans occasionally drop valuable loot like bullets. But not all of the time.
You can empty your gun into the initial Orphans and then expect to get your ammo replenished. And as you solve the different barricade puzzles, you’ll eventually find fire grenades. But these are not useful in the usual way you use grenades.
You can’t really throw them. Rather, you just sort of drop them on the ground at the last minute as you’re getting overwhelmed. (Think of the soldiers in the Vietnam War that had to call in artillery strikes on their own positions). Fortunately, you’ve got a huge suit of armor on and the fire only really damages the Orphans.
This fire serves the purpose not only of paralyzing the enemies long enough for you to take them out with head shots. The head shots don’t always kill them, but they do stun them enough to let you take the time to aim accurately and take them out with the next shot or two.
The fire grenade also burns their bodies and prevents other Orphans from coming upon their bodies, reviving them, and “merging” with them. If you want to accomplish anything in this part of the game, you have to stop the merging because they combine into a more powerful monster.
The sad thing about the fire grenades is you can only hold one of them. Once you use it, the fire grenade container replenishes. You have to make your way back to it and get another grenade, just in time for the next enemy or two to come at you.
If the enemies strike you, you can heal yourself. But the healing stuff isn’t plentiful either. And if they strike you just once or sometimes twice, you’re a goner. Then you start up again and have to tread some of the same ground you’ve already covered. Interestingly, you find other dead Travelers along the way, and some have vital info for you.
As you can see in the b-roll video here, the game has bosses. You run into one after you obtain a shotgun. That comes in very handy as this boss protects its body with snake-like tendrils. You have to shoot it to expose a vulnerable orange spot. If you hit it again, you can cause an explosion and put the boss in a lot of pain. Do that enough, and the shotgun becomes a great finishing weapon.
My impressions
I think this game looks terrific. It’s not a slow game per its frame rate. Rather, it’s deliberately slow, like the slow-moving Resident Evil games. It gives you time to think about your strategy of how you’ll take down an Orphan in multiple steps, or how you can use the environment to your advantage. You can also plan how to take down a boss after you’ve fought and died multiple times. I look forward to playing this one soon.
I do think they need to have multiple settings for something like ammo access. If you tend to blow through your ammo too fast because you can’t get head shots, then you’re going to die a lot in this game. My advice? Never shoot in panic. Always take careful aim. This is easier said than done.
A rich history of horror
Bloober Team is a publicly traded company in Krakow, Poland and it has been making horror games since Piotr Babieno and Piotr Bielatowicz started the company in 2008.
The company now has 250 people, split between a couple of major teams. One of them is working on Cronos: The New Dawn, which is based on a brand new intellectual property.
The firm hit its stride in 2016 with Layers of Fear. It followed that with Observer in 2017, Layers of Fear 2 and Blair Witch in 2019, and the Medium in 2021. Then it did a remake of Layers of Fear in 2023.
The company also shipped the remake of Silent Hill 2 in 2024 and it is working on a Silent Hill remake as well.
I spoke with Jacek Zieba, producer at Bloober Team; Grzegorz Like, lead writer at Bloober Team; and Piotr Tylus, lead level designer at Bloober Team. They seemed to have a good time chatting in old warehouse in Oakland, California.