Bloober Team’s Cronos: The New Dawn suggests a remake of Dead Space as helmed by Andrei Tarkovsky. That, though, isn’t exactly a compliment, because as striking as the game’s distinctly Eastern European fatalism can be, its disparate and often obtuse narrative strands rarely mesh well with the more traditional gamified survival horror elements. Still, as can be said about a lot of Bloober Team’s work, the developer gets points for trying.
Aboard a craft seemingly sprung from the imagination of H.R. Giger, your nameless Traveler is awakened from a deep slumber by a series of odd questions reminiscent of K’s baseline tests in Blade Runner 2049. If it isn’t already obvious, The New Dawn’s influences are front and center.
What little you learn upfront is that a cataclysmic event called the Change occurred in this universe’s 1980s Poland, and it played utter havoc with the laws of physics, especially when it comes to human flesh. The beings still alive are misshapen abominations that seem to devour other abominations to survive. The Traveler, though, seems less interested in any of this, as she’s more concerned about the holes in the space-time continuum that have been ripped across the city of New Dawn leading back to 1981, pre-Change, as well as the specific, damaged souls residing therein, who all seem to know the Change is coming before it happens.
The New Dawn is a grim depiction of late-Cold War Poland, and of a crisis of social identity spurred on by an eerily relevant pandemic response. Through letters, the dead environments, and the Brutalist architecture brought to ruin by the ravages of capitalism, we see the slow collapse of humanity long before humanity surrendered its flesh.
The cold indifference of the Traveler as she walks through it all only puts every cry for help into stark relief, especially given just how much her communications come off less like emotional reactions and more like a homily at church. Later, the full picture of what the Traveler actually is gets clearer, and these revelations lead to some unnerving hypotheses about humanity. Pity, then, that the enthralling nihilism of the narrative is at war with the tedium of the combat.
Bloober Team has clearly built the game around a framework deeply beholden to Dead Space, with everything from the melee attacks to the way the game’s industrial-sized crafting stations work coming off as a blatant copy. That’s not a bad thing in itself, especially considering that the excellent 2023 Dead Space remake didn’t sell well enough to warrant a sequel. The problem is that The New Dawn does everything that Dead Space did without that game’s visceral catharsis.
Players have the illusion of choices to deal with enemies—with guns, melee attacks, a stomp directly ripped from Dead Space, a range of fire-based counter attacks and proximity mines—and while they look and sound devastating, for most of the game your attacks deal all the damage of a warm hug from a loved one. The shotgun variant you eventually earn and the proximity mines are the most effective tools in the arsenal, but even for a game where resource scarcity is baked into the mechanics, keeping a healthy stock of shotgun ammo is an ordeal.
Meanwhile, the Traveler’s only recourse against attacks for much of the game is a close-quarters fire attack or a fairly useless melee. (Weirdly, considering that it’s such a Dead Space staple, the stomp attack is mostly useful at opening boxes on the floor.) Much is made about the need to burn corpses to prevent enemies from absorbing them and becoming stronger, but you can count on one hand the number of times when burning a corpse feels like a matter of urgency, especially when shooting an enemy mid-absorption gets the job done just fine.
The New Dawn is essentially a middling survival horror game that’s just barely salvaged by a disconcerting narrative. Ultimately, the horror that lingers most here is the sense that you can get your fix of gory, fleshy delights in a hundred places more effective than they’re presented here. Socialist ecclesiastical horror is a unique and valuable foundation for a game, and Bloober Team knows that, but as The New Dawn stands, its combat doesn’t prove the narrative’s worth.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by ONE PR Studio.
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