Cronos: The New Dawn

Cronos: The New Dawn is a science-fiction survival-horror game developed and published by Bloober Team, the Polish studio behind Layers of Fear, Observer, and the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2. Bloober announced it in October 2024 as its first original intellectual property built around a large-scale science-fiction setting. The game is set in a devastated future in which humanity has been reshaped by an event called the Change, while much of the story reaches back to Poland during the 1980s.

The player controls the Traveler, an agent working for an organization known as the Collective. Her mission is to enter rifts in time, travel into the past, and extract specific people before the Change kills them. Those targets are called “Anchors.” Returning with an Anchor is not a simple rescue: the Traveler uses a machine called the Harvester to pull a person’s essence from the past, then carries that essence into the future. This premise connects the ruined future with recognizable locations from Poland’s communist era, including the Nowa Huta district of Kraków.

The future sections emphasize exploration, resource management, and deliberate combat rather than unrestricted action. The Traveler carries a distinctive, modular weapon called the Javelin, which can be configured for different combat needs. Enemies known as Orphans are dangerous creatures created by the Change. A central gameplay rule makes them especially threatening: when a fallen Orphan is left unattended, other Orphans can merge with its body, producing a stronger enemy. Burning corpses therefore becomes a tactical decision, because ammunition, health, and other supplies are limited.

Bloober Team designed Cronos: The New Dawn as a single-player experience with a strong narrative focus, but its structure is not a conventional linear time-travel adventure. The player moves between two periods, gradually learning what caused the Change and why the Collective is collecting Anchors. The contrast between industrial, abandoned future spaces and 1980s Polish environments gives the game a specifically regional historical backdrop instead of an anonymous apocalypse.

Cronos: The New Dawn launched on September 5, 2025, for Windows PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and Series S. Its release followed Bloober’s successful return to psychological horror with Silent Hill 2, but the project is separate from that remake and is based on Bloober’s own characters, mythology, and world. The game represents the studio’s move from adapting established horror properties toward developing an original science-fiction horror series.