I got to play Cronos: The New Dawn at Gamescom 2025 and it kicked my ass. No seriously, I was struggling against the very first few basic enemies, and yet I’m still very excited about this? Let’s read on and find out why that is!
Story & Atmosphere
The demo starts as we awaken and have to perform some cognitive tests. From what I can gather, our consciousness has been uploaded into this new vessel after the previous one perished in combat. It’s not unlike SOMA in that regard, and I’m sure we’ll face some equally harrowing decisions about what it means to be human along the road, at least in the full experience.
I’m in control of what feels like a crossover between a Big Daddy from Bioshock and Isaac from Dead Space, but with a female voice. I set foot outside of the chamber I just woke up in and find a post-apocalyptic world, torn to shreds by an unknown disease. The lighting, the set-dressing, everything oozes atmosphere and immediately tells me this will be a world I’ll love to explore.
Exploration is rewarded
The world is littered with pamphlets, most of them from the mayor who’s trying to paint a scenario like everything is fine. “re-use your bathwater to water your plants” or “there is no pandemic, just stay inside” they say. You’ll obviously find audio logs, just like in the two previously mentioned similar titles and they help you piece together just what kind of nightmare you find yourself in.
But Cronos: the New Dawn is its own thing and much more difficult, so scavenging for resources is more vital than ever. Every bullet counts, and finding a hidden chamber full of Energy or some elements you can use to craft health vials or bullets, can be the difference between a successful or a failed run.
It kicked my ass
Before I sat down to play, the people at the booth informed me just how important resource management would be. It takes 3 fully charged headshots to take down the first enemy I encounter, and that was half my ammo gone, then and there. If I encountered a 2nd enemy before I found more bullets, every single one should be a hit.
My gun can shapeshift into knuckle dusters, which I thought would save me some ammo, but the punches didn’t seem to do any damage at all, if anything, they just knock the enemy back a feet but they’ll be right back to charging at you. I play a lot of my games on easy or normal, but this felt like it was set to hard and they wanted me to suffer.
So a little more about the controls: it’s the over-the-shoulder 3rd person camera you’d expect ever since Resident Evil 4 made that the default (and we all love it) but it’s much slower. Your character feels like a hulking, heavy diving suit-wearing giant and moves slowly through the world. The enemies are faster than you. This meant that when I was aiming at them and stepping backwards, they were still gaining distance on me.
Combine this with lots of tight corridors and the requirement to charge your shots, and the fact that the gun fires when it’s fully charged, and it means that you need to train your aim on their vital parts at all times. If they do get close they grab you and a “press R1” QuickTime event starts, but no matter how quickly you tap it, that’s half your total health gone. This game is NOT forgiving.
Sparsely scattered checkpoints and reanimating enemies
I found just a single save point in the game, and one automatic checkpoint (before the first enemy encounter). When I kept exploring and got killed by the second monster in the game, I was brought back to just before the first one and lost about 6 minutes of progress. I obviously wanted to get back to the point where I died as quickly as possible, to see what else the demo had to offer, but at the same time, exploring back to all the nooks & crannies to destroy crates and hopefully find ammo, was much-needed as well. I was shocked to discover that the contents of such crates are random though, so you can’t count on the one with ammo to have bullets the second time around, which is a weird design decision, because it can mean the difference between life and death.
I also knew enemies would join together with the remains of other fallen foes, so it’s key to take them out quickly, but I didn’t get far enough into the demo to discover this. The 4th enemy fight I encountered proved to be too difficult, and with one missed shot (again, the gun fires automatically when fully charged, which will take some getting used to), I was back to the same save file as before, this time losing about 10 minutes of progress and if I’m being honest, also my patience š
But I’m excited for more!
Despite the difficulty, I can’t wait to play more when the full game is available. When I’ll play at home, I won’t feel as rushed to free up the computer for the players who are waiting for their own chance to get destroyed, and hopefully I’ll explore more and find more checkpoints, which would make a world of difference.
It’s clear that fire will play a major role in the game, both to create some distance between yourself and the biomass monsters, and also to burn their remains so they can’t join up and become more difficult to beat.
I just hope I’ll have the fight in me to keep getting back up, as the game keeps knocking me down. But despite the difficulty, I’m eager to see more of this post-apocalyptic world and Cronos: the New Dawn is easily my game of the show.
Conclusion: Must Play – Gamescom 2025 Game of the Show.
here is the first hour of gameplay:
Robby lives and breathes video games. When he’s not playing them, he’s talking about them on social media or convincing other people to pick up a controller themselves. He’s online so often, he could practically list the internet as his legal domicile. Belgian games-industry know-it-all.
