Cronos: The New Dawn review: "An unabashed mash-up of survival horror greatest hits, from Dead Space to Silent Hill, with plenty of its own gory ideas"

I was walking to my grandmother's apartment from the Black Sea. Blinking stray cats watched me avoid gaps in the city's cobblestone sidewalks like they knew me, and I, separated from my life in New York at that moment, was calm for once. Memories like these float to the surface as I play Cronos: The New Dawn, Polish studio Bloober's first original title since releasing the Silent Hill 2 remake in 2024. Not even its occasionally frustrating combat experience can break how nostalgic this survival horror game makes me feel.

The more I play, the greater sense I have that I'm becoming entwined with its retrofuturist version of the Soviet '80s, where I open wounds in spacetime to bound across different versions of Kraków's real Nowa Huta district. I'm the stoic Traveler, who's been tasked by her shadowy employer to discover why its inhabitants started morphing into a mindless mass of pink skin, vomit, and many limbs. Things get gross.

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Along the way, Cronos: The New Dawn is a shameless ode to obvious inspirations like Dead Space, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill without ever feeling too much like copy – something I credit entirely to its sort of literary horror, where most of what distinguishes Cronos from other games can be found in scribbled notes, graffiti, and dialogue in its half-melted world.

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I quickly become absorbed by this scrapbook of information – and all the meditations on the individual against the collective, personal duty against social responsibility, and whether or not these supposed opposites can coexist without the bigger fish cannibalizing the other.

But before I can start consulting Kierkegaard, I have to actually play the game. If you're familiar with the survival horror hall of fame I mentioned earlier – James Sunderland and friends – there isn't much to acclimate to. After I first previewed Cronos: The New Dawn in July, director Jacek Zięba told me playing the game makes you "feel, 'Oh, this is more like Silent Hill. More like Dead Space. Oh, now I'm on the more Resident Evil level." And it's true.

There are visual parallels: the Traveler never takes off her leaden head-to-toe suit, which features an eyeless helmet that makes her look like an octopus or Isaac from Dead Space. Similar to Isaac, the Traveler wears zero-gravity boots that allow her to jump across platforms suspended in midair – a necessity, not a luxury, since much of Cronos' world has exploded like a dying star. So I also require a gun that can manipulate temporal abnormalities – repairing things like collapsed bridges or electricity to power rusty trams – to solve simple environmental puzzles and reach my objective.

I'm not always happy to get there. You can't go a single step in any of Nowa Huta's bombed-out apartments (there's piles of dust in every corner, but icons of the Bogoroditsa look just as perfect as they do in my clean room) without encountering a freaky monster, sort of the opposites of the Dead Space zombies. While blood smears on the wall in that game instruct you to "cut off their limbs," the goal in Cronos is "don't let them merge." These enemies use throbbing tentacles to absorb those you've already downed, becoming stronger once they've fully combined. This is where Resident Evil comes in to ruin my vibe.

Take what you can carry

I stop merges-in-progress by delivering bullets to what's left of constantly screaming, spewing, moaning monsters' brains, but it's even better to fry them up with torch fuel or throwable mines, which prevent the merge mechanic entirely. But extremely limited inventory slots sometimes make these battles feel like I'm holding my breath underwater – time is running out.

In frenzied situations where I'm facing maybe a couple of beer-bellied giants, a spider-like mass of skulls that projectile puke corrosive goo, and a handful of used-to-be women grabbing me from several feet away… there's not much I can do but get lucky. I'll handle the onslaught well at first, cutting down the horde to just a single enemy, but then I have no bullets, nothing to patch the health of my suit, and no chemicals to craft a single resource. So after whoever's left is done merging with a few other abominations and looks like a Chernobyl byproduct, I let him kill me, and I try again.

Other times – since I use my relatively rare upgrade materials as wisely as I can, and I still only have eight inventory slots, including the up-to-four weapons I can equip – I have the opposite problem. I dive octopus head-first into battle only to discover I can't pick up any item scattered in breakable boxes around the room because my inventory is full.

So I don't enjoy the inconvenience of The New Dawn's action as much as I appreciate the way I interpret it among the diary entries I find, which promise me things like "They didn't suffer. I swear to God." As Nowa Huta's residents get sick and glued together from the Change – what I begin to see as a caricature of the Soviet Union's supposed solidarity – the Traveler experiences a less violent "merge" of her own.

Bittersweet empathy

Many of my missions in Nowa Huta require I extract a person's consciousness in order to discover what started the Change. While these people give the Traveler certain perks, like finding more energy to upgrade with, they're also starting to haunt her suit. I hear their voices sometimes, or their faces flash suddenly across my screen, causing the Traveler to crumple in agony, overwhelmed by their memories of funeral processions, Catholic church service, a sink full of something dark…

She's compelled to empathize with these people – a soft togetherness unspooling – like an unwitting mother. So I start to think more about my own. The communists trained her to use a Kalashnikov, but all she wanted to do was sing opera. Capitalism in the US made her forget the music. All around the world, people sacrifice themselves for what they're told is the health of society. But Cronos: The New Dawn recognizes in its story that this is injustice. Deeper understanding – that's all we can aspire to either as individuals or as a group.

One of the stray cats runs up to the Traveler for a scratch on the head, again reminding me of the path I would walk to my family apartment. I feel at home in Cronos: The New Dawn's frustrating world, because I know what it's like.

There's more where that came from: take a look at the the 25 best horror games to play right now.