Note: This review was originally going to be longer and more in-depth, but my migraines are acting up badly at the moment so I had to cut it short
After the Silent Hill 2 remake came out and was excellent, a lot of people were wondering whether it was a fluke. Would Bloober Team, when not working within the constraints of Silent Hill 2’s structure and Konami’s guidance, slip back into their old bad habits? Or is the Blooberenessaince truly upon us?
Happily, we won’t have to wait for the recently-announced Silent Hill 1 remake to find out, as a separate team within the company were quietly beavering away at Cronos: The New Dawn, a completely original survival horror game. Let’s find out if it’s good or not.
Cronos throws the player into its scenario with very little explanation for who they’re playing as, what they’re doing, or why, and as you can imagine, finding the answers to those questions is a big part of the story. As such, I’ll only lightly describe the game’s premise, which goes like this: in the 1980s humanity was destroyed by a zombie-esque plague that started in Poland, some time in the future you’re a “Traveller”, a woman encased in futuristic armour who travels back in time to a point just before the infection turned fully apocalyptic in order to track down specific people for an initially-unknown purpose. In order to do this you have to traverse the ashen ruins of a socialist planned city finding time rifts to jump through, while fighting the “orphans” (zombies) who stand in your way. All of this is in service to something called the Collective, whose nature and purpose is, again, not initially explained to the player.
Tossing a setting at people with zero context or explanation is always a risky move. Cronos is one of the better examples I’ve seen across all media types, hooking the layer simply by virtue of the strangeness of the situation the players finds themselves in. Your character’s odd robotic speech patterns, body covered entirely in Geiger-esque armour, and the quasi-religious way she talks about her “Vocation” all indicate that whatever is happening here is far weirder than your typical zombie plague scenario, and even if the game’s actual story had completely dropped the ball, getting the answers to all of these questions would likely have kept me playing anyway.
Happily, the game’s story does not drop the ball. In fact I dare say it’s one of the better game stories I’ve experienced in quite some time, very deftly weaving together the cold alien logic of the Travellers with the more grounded human drama of the ordinary folks of communist Poland as it slides into disaster, all wrapped together with a strong character arc for the protagonist. Barring the occasional odd phrasing (probably the result of translation errors), the dialogue and the copious notes you find scattered around the environment are well-written and effective.
Most of Bloober’s old bad habits do actually show up here in some form, but they’re all greatly attenuated by virtue of being used far more sparingly than in The Medium or Layers of Fear. Even when the game features villains who pop up to blather at the player, it happens rarely enough that it didn’t get on my nerves. The only real problem I had with the writing is that some of the dialogue scenes drag on for two long, partially as a result of the Travellers’ slow speech patterns but also because a lot of them are just over-written.
One element of the writing that skirts the line a bit for me is the plot’s ambiguity. A lot of the answers to the big questions you probably have after reading the plot synopsis above are only vaguely alluded to, and the actual events of the story are only explained in just enough detail for the game’s events to make sense, but a lot of the specifics are left up in the air. You very much get the sense that the game only covers a relatively small slice of a much larger story; whether that’s because Bloober wanted to keep things open for spin-offs and sequels/prequels or whether the plot construction is just a little bit sloppy, I don’t know. All three of the game’s endings also seem to sacrifice proper closure in order to leave room for a sequel, which is something that always frustrates me.
Cronos’ has been compared a lot to Dead Space. That makes some sense, given that you play as a protagonist in a big chunky suit of sci-fi armour who can stomp on monsters (the stomp button is even the same), but in terms of moment to moment gameplay I found it a lot closer to Resident Evil 4. Dead Space’s iconic limb-based dismemberment system has no equivalent here; instead you’re doing the standard “shoot them in the head to do big damage or shoot them in the leg to stagger them” thing. Strategies that have served you well in playing either version of RE4 (stagger enemy, follow up with melee) will work similarly well here. Like in Resident Evil 4 you’re working with strict inventory limits and a requirement to conserve ammo that makes every shot count. I actually think the latter factor is even better-implemented here, as the game does a good job of keeping the player hovering just above the point of outright resource depletion. Over and over again I found myself getting out of a fight on my last few bullets, and I actually finished two bosses with no ammo at all by punching them to death.
This is all very standard action-horror fare, implemented with surprising competence (remember, before they started developing this and Silent Hill, Bloober had never made a game with any combat systems at all). The one unique spin is enemy merging. When you kill an Oprhan their body turns into a nest of gloopy tentacles, and if another Orphan gloops onto them it will hulk out and acquire its fallen comrade’s abilities. If you don’t keep on top of enemy corpses by burning them with a nifty 360-degree flamethrower, things get can very quickly get out of hand. Like, “I am stuck in a small room with multiple boss-level enemies that I don’t have enough ammo to kill” out of hand. I greatly admired the game’s willingness to let you put yourself into an unwinnable situation by not keeping track of this gameplay mechanic.
On the topic of difficulty, I’ve seen a lot of people lamenting that the game is too difficult. Personally, I didn’t have much trouble, only dying eight times according to the post-game summary (five of those were bosses, three of them the final boss). I actually wish you could make the game harder on a first playthrough (you do unlock a hard mode for new game plus), as the default difficulty offers a lot of ways to almost triviliaze the whole “burn bodies, don’t let them merge” system via respawnable exploding barrels. In theory you’re clearly meant to use risky strategies like killing enemies in proximity to corpses so you can maximise torch efficiency, but in practice I rarely found this necessary.
My sick gamer skills aside, the game’s structure also works against these mechanics a bit. Having to clear up enemy corpses makes a lot of sense in a game structured like classic Resident Evil where you’re spending a lot of time in the same environment and backtracking a lot (in fact the Gamecube remake of the first Resident Evil implemented just such a system), but it makes less sense in a game like this where there’s a lot of one-off combat encounters where once you clear out a room, you’re never going to have to fight enemies there again. And if you do end up using all your fuel, you can almost always just run back to the nearest save room to get more, which means flamethrower efficiency is less a matter of strategy or inventory management and more a question of patience.
These are small nitpicks against what is otherwise a very solidly-constructed experience.
(Blah blah insert more review here, tldr Cronos gets an 8/10 in the numerical review system I don’t use, buy it if you like action-horror games)