Cronos: The New Dawn – Everything We Know

After the famous title Silent Hill 2 remake debuted, Bloober revealed their next release, Cronos: The New Dawn, during the Xbox Partner Showcase. The game will offer a third-person survival horror experience. Additionally, it will be Bloober’s first original franchise in the survival horror genre. It features a time travel story with a twist, set in a post-apocalyptic future in 1980s Poland. You will take on the role of a traveler exploring and surviving in a wasteland resulting from a cataclysmic event called The Change. Monstrous abominations lurk in every corner of the land. Players will have to survive the future to save what’s left of the past.

What is Cronos: The New Dawn?

Cronos: The New Dawn is a Bloober creation that features aspects of a science-fiction horror survival game. It follows the narrative of a post-apocalyptic event that changed the course of humanity. The title revolves around a time traveler who journeys back to the past of communist Poland around the 1980s. The traveler is an acting agent for the Collective. You are tasked with locating distinct people from the past and taking them with you back to the future. Players will explore a deadly wasteland, fighting off the mutated humanoids and creepy creatures that plague this land.

Story

The game incorporates a twisted story on time travel set in a dangerous post-apocalyptic future in 1980s Poland. Cronos: The New Dawn will feature a world where Eastern European brutalism meets retro-futurist technology, exploring the lines between the past and future. As a player, you will embody a traveler who is an agent of the enigmatic Collective. In the past, you will work to survive a deadly world created by an event called The Change. The event completely transformed the course of humanity for the worse. Your mission is to extract people from the past who did not survive the apocalypse and take them with you to the future. To complete this task, you will face and fight off monstrous abominations. The game will test your combat skills, reflexes, and tactical thinking in a fight for survival.

Gameplay

Cronos: The New Dawn can, in a few ways, be compared to Dead Space in terms of the title's gameplay. The creators of this third-person sci-fi survival horror could thus aim to put their twist on the Dead Space formula, which will satisfy players. A cataclysmic event alters the fate of humanity in the narrative. As a traveler and agent for the enigmatic Collective, you will search for time rifts that will take you back to 1980s-era Poland. You will scour the lands trying to locate a select group of people from the past who died in the ensuing apocalypse. 

Players will use a powerful tool called a Harvester to extract the Essence of their targets and take them to the future. Danger fills the land, and survival depends on your ability to strategize and plan. You will battle monstrous creatures that are born from the remnants of humanity. As you fight, employing quick thinking and making full use of your arsenal will ensure you survive longer in the narrative. The protagonist can select weapons from the few provided in the game. One of the weapons resembles Isaac Clark's signature plasma cutter. Cronos: The New Dawn features intense combat and other aspects like zero-gravity sections. 

Development

The developers shared that Netflix's Dark inspires the title's theme. Dark is a frightening series with a plot that involves a mystery concerning various periods. Similar to many of the games created by Bloober Team, Cronos: The New Dawn retains horror survival features.  However, this title uses a time-traveling sci-fi backdrop for the horror narrative. The game, set in a post-apocalyptic world, takes players on a mind-bending journey through a retro-future Eastern European setting. The Change, an event that left humanity in utter chaos, caused the apocalypse. The players will take up the role of a Traveler working for the collective. They are working to rescue individuals from the past who perished in the apocalypse.

You will journey through a fine line between the past and the future, fighting dangerous creatures as you work to complete your mission. From the details revealed about the game so far, the title is a multiplatform. Moreover, it has sound designs that only add to the crippling horror aspects, as seen in the game’s trailer. The sound produced when firing the gun contains a futuristic pitch, which mirrors aspects of the sound designs in Silent Hill 2 Remake. It has elements that showcase the difficulty of navigating the game. Hence, players' skills and resilience will be constantly tested.

Cronos: The New Dawn Trailer

Bloober Team has created some of the best survival horror titles. Cronos: The New Dawn seems to embody the same qualities. The cinematic trailer to the game goes on for about three minutes, showing a Spacefarer. He is wearing a hard exoskeleton as he journeys through a horrifying location. It is pretty evident in the trailer that the fallen city is the same one from the start of the game after calamity befalls it.

Creepy mutated humanoid creatures follow the protagonist in Zero-Gravity conditions. The creatures eventually attack, resulting in a shootout. In a different scene, the protagonist plays chess with an elderly woman. He then performs a procedure on her while she stares at him, resigned to her fate. Moreover, with their gun drawn, the protagonist enters a twisted hellscape with a tower in the distance. The mutated creatures from before cover the walls in this location. 

Release Date and Platforms

The official release date for Cronos: The New Dawn has yet to be announced. However, as revealed during the Xbox Partner Preview on October 17, 2024, the game was confirmed to be released in 2025. The studio also confirmed that the game will be accessible on  PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X|S.

So, what’s your take on the upcoming video game release, Cronos: The New Dawn? Let us know your thoughts here on our socials or down in the comments.