The most important thing you need to know about Cronos is that it lets you find hidden cats in the world, and they go back to your base and you can pet them and have conversations with them.  Honestly, that alone is enough to put it above almost every other survival horror game I’ve played recently, but I wanted to ramble on about it a bit more because after I got over the initial learning cliff it turned out to be something rather special.

I’ve seen it compared to Dead Space, and this is a fair and obvious comparison.  Both games have you controlling rather hulking protagonists in armor with an impressive stomp move and Very Specific Instructions for dealing with the fleshy horrors that are trying to kill you, with these Very Specific Instructions scrawled in blood on a wall somewhere for you to read:

Only one of them has instructions written in Polish, mind you.  Now I’m wondering how Dead Space was localized.  Subtitles?  Different texture?  Not curious enough to look it up.

Side note, when I went to load up Dead Space to get that screenshot it happily found and loaded my save from 2009.  Seventeen years ago.  Regardless of whatever else you think about Microsoft they are leading the pack with regard to letting you play your old games.

Both of them are also very, for lack of a better word, goopy games.  Lots of ick factor.  If you don’t like ick factor, you are advised to steer clear.  Eviscerated bodies hanging from walls that are also somehow still alive and trying to eat you are a pretty common enemy and unless you are very good at checking corners before walking into a room or down a hallway you WILL eventually get grabbed and dragged into one of them.

In addition to Dead Space, Cronos had some features that reminded me of Prey (2006) and Singularity, both of which are pretty good games to crib from, and a couple of puzzles that made me really wonder whether the developers ever worked on hidden object games because boy I had to find a lot of fuses.

It definitely retains its own identity, though.  Not just because you can find cats, but because mechanics alone really don’t define how you experience a game like this.  It’s more about the mood, and there is a particular edge to the flavor of hopelessness in this specific post-apocalyptic future that I haven’t experienced before.  Things are bad, and it’s not entirely clear that anything you’re doing is really making them better, but you’re still pushing forward.

Mood aside, while the game can be very obscure when it comes to some basic mechanics, it is good at teaching you lessons during the moment to moment gameplay with occasional tests to see if you have been paying attention.

The game’s first boss is a great example. To get to him, you need to navigate through an apartment building full of things that need to be set on fire to progress. You technically can do this by burning each obstacle and then retreating back to the nearest safe room for another flamethrower charge, but what you’re supposed to do is find the environmental object that you can shoot or punch to make it explode and clear the obstacle.

Then you get to the boss, and you’re warned in advance that he’s weak to fire.  You’ve just spent an entire sequence setting things on fire so you should be ready for this.

Again, you can come in with a flamethrower charge – or possibly more, if you’re willing to spend enough resources – but what you should be doing is looking around the apartment you fight him in to see all the things that will handily catch fire when shot or punched so you can use them against him.  During the fight, he even occasionally retreats to give you a chance to regroup and find the next hazard.

A later boss is a crowd control fight where you’re swarmed with fairly weak enemies that don’t present a ton of threat individually but that you will probably be overwhelmed by if you can’t figure out how to deal with the mob.  And, curiously, the level leading up to the boss has had a lot of little arenas full of lots of enemies to juggle.

Not all the bosses are so interesting. Some boil down to “kill them before they kill you” but even the less interesting ones have some interesting quiz questions for you to see if you’ve properly understood the situational uses of the game’s four basic weapon types, or whether you’ve gotten the hang of the game’s traversal mechanics.

tl;dr: I have seen a lot of different encounter designs over the years and the ones in Cronos felt absolutely top tier.

I don’t think it’s for everyone, because it IS on the difficult side and it DOES demand a lot of patience and seems to derive a sadistic glee in making sure that you always feel just a little short on resources, but if you can approach it on its own terms it is a heck of a ride.