Cronos: The New Dawn

About Cronos: The New Dawn

Cronos: The New Dawn is a survival horror game by the Polish studio Bloober Team, built in Unreal Engine 5 and released on 5 September 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2. On Steam it also runs on Linux and on Macs with Apple processors. Its world mixes Eastern European brutalist architecture with retro-futurist technology, and it is directed by Wojciech Piejko and Jacek Zięba with music by Arkadiusz Reikowski.

You are a Traveler, ND-3576, working for a mysterious group called the Collective. In the wastelands of the future she searches for time rifts that lead back to 1980s Poland, to the days of the Change, the disaster that destroyed humanity. Her job is to find key people who died in it and, with a device called the Harvester, extract their essences and carry them into the future.

The fighting is slow and tense. You fight over the Traveler's shoulder with pistols, shotguns and heavier guns, with melee as a last resort. Ammunition and supplies are limited and you scavenge for more, and you can use temporal anomalies in the environment to open paths. The creatures, called Orphans, 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 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. The developers said play testers finished the game in about 18 hours, and there is a New Game Plus mode for a second run.

Critics gave the game generally favourable reviews, with a Metacritic score of 77 on PlayStation 5, and players on Steam rate it Very Positive. It had sold 500,000 copies by late November 2025. Voice acting is in English and Traditional Chinese, with subtitles in many more languages, including Polish and Ukrainian. The Switch 2 version comes as the Standard Edition only, and a prequel add-on called Lazarus is announced for fall 2026. 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

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

Tips

• Group enemy bodies close together and burn them all at once.
• Do not leave a corpse near a living creature; a merged enemy is much harder.
• Pick up everything you find; ammunition and crafting supplies are scarce.
• Retreat to a choke point when several creatures come at once.

Questions