Cronos: The New Dawn

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Scavenge a ruined future and burn the monsters before they merge.

Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch
Price: Paid
Rated: Very Positive on Steam (88% of 12,028 reviews)
Length: a full-length campaign
Players: 1
Made by: Bloober Team
Released: 2025

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What frightens In a ruined future you walk through grey brutalist blocks in a heavy diving-style suit while flesh creatures, made from what is left of people, lurch out of the dark. Kill one and leave its body, and another can absorb it to become faster and deadlier, so every fight ends with a scramble to burn the corpses before they merge.
Content: gore, body horror, violence, strong language.

A third-person survival horror game from Bloober Team. As a Traveler in an armoured suit, you search a ravaged future for time rifts back to 1980s Poland, extracting the essences of people who died in the apocalypse, while fighting creatures that grow stronger by absorbing their fallen.

About Cronos: The New Dawn

Cronos: The New Dawn is a survival horror game by the Polish studio Bloober Team, released on 5 September 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2. Its world mixes Eastern European brutalist architecture with retro-futurist technology.

You are a Traveler working for a mysterious group called the Collective. In the wastelands of the future you search for time rifts that take you back to 1980s Poland, to the days of the Change, the disaster that destroyed humanity. Your job is to find key people who died in it and, with a device called the Harvester, extract their essences and take them with you into the future.

The fighting is slow and tense. Ammunition and supplies are limited and you scavenge for more, and you can use temporal anomalies in the environment to open paths. The creatures are what remains of humanity, and the dead do not stay dead: if a body is left lying, another monster can absorb it through Merging and become tougher. The only answer is to burn bodies quickly, which turns each encounter into a choice of what to shoot and what to set alight.

The essences you carry change your journey. The more you hold, the stronger your suit becomes, but they also whisper to you and flicker in your vision. Critics gave the game generally positive reviews. It suits players who like methodical survival horror in the line of Dead Space, with a grim Eastern European setting.

How to play Cronos: The New Dawn

Explore the future wastelands as the Traveler, searching for supplies and time rifts.
Fight the creatures with your limited weapons, aiming carefully to save ammunition.
Burn the bodies of fallen enemies before other creatures can merge with them.
Go through time rifts to 1980s Poland and use the Harvester to extract the essences of key people.
Upgrade your suit and weapons and choose which essences to carry.