Cronos: The New Dawn (PlayStation, Xbox, Switch 2, PC, £49.99)
Verdict: Happy travels
A new dawn has broken. But not the sunny, Ronald Reagan-y kind of dawn, oh no.
This one has turned the industrial buildings of Poland into writhing hellscapes; it’s left the streets strewn with rubble and strange, faceless monsters; the sky is permanently dark and bruised-looking.
For this is the world of Cronos: The New Dawn, the latest game from the Polish studio Bloober Team, who last year released the brilliantly ghastly Silent Hill 2 remake.
Dark satanic mills: A Traveler gets ready to take on…whatever that is, lurking in the (perpetual) darkness on the edge of town
If you were to ever wake up to whatever’s happened in this place, you’d close your curtains and call in sick.
But that’s not an option afforded to the Travelers, mysterious folk who step out into the darkness under a whole load of armour and toting some serious weaponry.
You play as one in Cronos, out to discover what became of your predecessor and complete their mission.
This is much easier said than done, of course. In the spirit of other survival-horror games, ammunition and other supplies are perilously hard to come by.
And the monsters aren’t just plentiful, they’re also persistent. If you don’t burn their corpses after death, their squelchy compatriots will suck up their biomass to become bigger, stronger, grosser. Yuck.
Train assassin: Monsters, like the one lurking in this ramshackle railway carriage, are plentiful in Cronos – and extremely hard to kill
Cronos also stirs in some time-shifting shenanigans, but it’s not quite enough to distinguish the game from its obvious inspirations, such as the Dead Space series.
What’s here is actually more like yesterday’s dawn.
Still, if you don’t go in expecting a revolution, you’ll enjoy one of the most atmospheric and compelling horror releases of recent years.
So keep on trudging through this awful dystopia, Traveler. It’s worth it in the end.
