A few weeks back, I checked Cronos: The New Dawn out from the local library, without knowing much about it.  It looked like it would do nicely as a follow up to my Resident Evil binge from last year, and the nice thing about borrowing a game is that you can try it out and not feel too badly about dropping it if it doesn’t gel with you – after all, you didn’t pay for it.

And, yeah.  I dropped it pretty quickly despite digging the overall vibe of the game.  It’s a crazy atmospheric post-apocalyptic survival horror game, low on the narrative but heavy on the creepy environments , and that would normally be right in my wheelhouse, but the pressure it put me under was just a little too much.  I spent a lot of time scrounging for ammunition, which was in painfully short supply, and then it would just evaporate the next time something jumped out at me.  I decided it wasn’t my thing and quit.

After a little time to consider things, I resolved to start over on the game’s “easy” mode.  In “easy”, you do double damage to enemies while taking half damage from enemies.  That seemed to promise a pretty breezy experience.

It was not a breezy experience. I felt like I was having just as much trouble finding supplies on easy as I was on the normal difficulty, which made no sense at all.  Enemies soaked up fewer bullets before falling over, but I was still always short.

I gave up, ejected the disc, uninstalled the game and put it back in the box to be returned to the library.

…but…

Something didn’t feel right.  I looked at the trophy percentages for the game and read some reviews and while the consensus seemed to be that, yes, it’s a hard game, I had also dropped it before getting the first main story trophy.

That is a trophy with a 61% achievement rate.

I didn’t like the thought of giving up when so many other people had gotten further than me.

So, I found a Cronos discord and I posted something along the lines of “guys, what am I doing wrong?”, fully expecting to hear a chorus of “git gud, noob” as the response.

In contrast, I discovered that I had accidentally stumbled into one of the more helpful and healthy internet communities I’ve ever come into contact with, because what I got instead was pages and pages of “so the game doesn’t tell you this, BUT…”

I won’t go into details, because this isn’t really a guides sort of site, but the limited ammo the game gives you is intended to be a hint that there are a LOT of ways to get through encounters without specifically inserting Bullet A into Fleshy Horror B.  Not by running away from them, but by using environmental damage or by taking extra time to set up a charged shot that does more damage and stuns the enemy so you can get a couple of free melee swings in… that sort of thing.

Short version, the game went from “this is impossible!” to a really fun experience in finding out exactly how many resources  I REALLY needed to get from point A to point B and in making do with what I had at any given time.

I’ll probably write a separate post up talking more about the game’s setting and mechanics, but the real thing I got from it was a life lesson in how sometimes giving yourself permission to give up on something can lead to asking why you gave up on it and whether you might have just needed to ask for help.