Such is our calling.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/72560/cronos-the-new-dawn-switch-2-review
Cronos: The New Dawn is a third-person horror game where you play a nameless character wearing something resembling an astronaut suit with a Mysterio (fishbowl) helmet that has a slit in the front. You are the Traveler, the latest in a string of Travelers who comprise a group called The Collective. After going through a string of Rorschach tests and personality questions, you’re tasked with finding your predecessor, and eventually you take on the task of exploring time rifts and helping stuck spirits reach ascension. When the first attempt fails, your character is then pulled into investigating what’s wrong. These rifts pull from 1980s Poland, at the center of a brutal pandemic that turns people into homogeneous skinless monsters, and they exist in a present-day wasteland. The world of Cronos is bleak and void of life. You’ll explore abandoned warehouses, dry, barren outposts, and dark corners underground, all slathered in a fleshy and wet overgrowth.
The Traveler is barely a character from the outset. Her communication is almost entirely observational without thought and devoid of emotion. The detachment makes sense in context of the hivemind she comes from, but it is almost too wooden at the start, and at times felt a little silly. The story is almost entirely environmental. Documents and pictures littered about give a glimpse into the terror caused by this monstrous disease. Audio logs left by prior Travelers provide you with discoveries they found, serving as an interesting backdrop to the players’ experience, but the game doesn’t take much of a moral stance on any of the topics touched on. All the pandemic-related tropes and perspectives are on display, but the theme isn’t wrestled with in any meaningful way. You’ll read of people scared to death of the illness, the military forcing people into quarantine zones and the anger it produces, doctors observing and making horrified discoveries, and interstitial personal stories woven in between–all without deeply tackling the subject matter or having a viewpoint beyond “look at this crazy stuff.” You are an outside observer with the same detachment the character you play as – distant curiosity and no genuine investment.
The gameplay has a structure that borrows from Resident Evil, Dead Space, and even a few touches of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. You walk with a lumbering heaviness, often through corridors that are dimly lit and obscure your field of view. You’re gated by locked doors that need a certain key to open, and ammunition and health items are scarce. There is a crafting system to make those items, but the components are also scarce. There is an upgrade system that relies on items called cores and a currency to purchase enhancements to your suit or weapons. Safe rooms exist with a save point and storage space for items that take up too much space in the Traveler’s limited inventory slots. The gunplay is very weighty, with a charge ability that empowers each bullet with an extra oomph. The shooting feels very good, or at least it did after I went into the menus and upped the camera sensitivity.
The monsters in the world feel like a mix of the zombies in Resident Evil and the Wendigo in Until Dawn. They shuffle quicker than zombies, and your best bet to take them out is with a few headshots before they swing a tentacular limb your way. What’s unique is their ability to assimilate. If there are monster bodies lying on the floor after you kill them, a living one can walk over to consume them, thereby evolving into a larger, scarier, more threatening beast. The evolution itself is gross, with fleshy tentacles grabbing onto the corpse and gobbling them up before turning into a completely new horror. You can stunt the process by using pyro to burn the corpses or shoot the absorber mid-process, but your limited inventory makes it impossible to stop all of them. When they evolve, they can grow in ferocity, as well as develop a harder outer shell that deflects bullets. Sometimes there’ll be an exposed limb that you can take out to bring them down, but if you let them eat each other eventually you’ll be cornered by a truly terrifying beast. The monsters as they evolve shapeshift their awful appearance, but in all phases they retain a humanoid shape, giving them a samey-ness that is a bit disappointing.
One of the most curious parts of Cronos is in how the player interacts with the world. Much like other survival horror games, a path will be locked off until you find the appropriate tool or key to break down doors to the next section. Some tools like a set of bolt cutters are a multitool across the game, but each section will have one or two items that act as a master key for that area. I appreciate this flattening of item searching because it keeps the game from locking you behind an area for too long. The developers attempt to create other obstacles with dilapidated buildings or piles of rubbish. There are these black holes that you can hone in on with your gun and shoot with a laser, that then shifts the rubble into its original constructed state or moves it. This is the most puzzle-like element to the game, as often you’ll have to enable one, progress further, and search for another one in an obscure location to open the pathway through. There are a few interesting cases, like a scenario where you must stand on top of a broken pathway then trigger the black hole to pull it back up to the original walkway, but often it is just a minor inconvenience to moving forward. In practice such puzzles feel like a way to pad the length rather than a novel gameplay device, but you can use the black holes and gun to reconstitute explosive barrels at times, which is nice.
All that said, I did feel invested into learning more about the world of Cronos: The New Dawn. No, you’re not going to get a substantive exploration of the politics of pandemics or a deep exploration of human nature, but there’s enough information littered about that at least paints a picture of people in the throes of their annihilation. The game does a good job of keeping some mystery throughout while unfolding the world at an effective pace. The combat is harrowing, and I could feel the pang of dread in most encounters. The game is workmanlike – it’s unlikely to dethrone your favorite survival horror–but there is a meaty and reasonably enjoyable experience to be had here.
Topic: Cronos: The New Dawn (Switch 2) Review (Read 56 times)
