Cronos: The New Dawn

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Note: This review was originally going to be longer and more in-depth, but my migraines are acting up badly at the moment so I had to cut it short

After the Silent Hill 2 remake came out and was excellent, a lot of people were wondering whether it was a fluke. Would Bloober Team, when not working within the constraints of Silent Hill 2’s structure and Konami’s guidance, slip back into their old bad habits? Or is the Blooberenessaince truly upon us?

Happily, we won’t have to wait for the recently-announced Silent Hill 1 remake to find out, as a separate team within the company were quietly beavering away at Cronos: The New Dawn, a completely original survival horror game. Let’s find out if it’s good or not.

Cronos throws the player into its scenario with very little explanation for who they’re playing as, what they’re doing, or why, and as you can imagine, finding the answers to those questions is a big part of the story. As such, I’ll only lightly describe the game’s premise, which goes like this: in the 1980s humanity was destroyed by a zombie-esque plague that started in Poland, some time in the future you’re a “Traveller”, a woman encased in futuristic armour who travels back in time to a point just before the infection turned fully apocalyptic in order to track down specific people for an initially-unknown purpose. In order to do this you have to traverse the ashen ruins of a socialist planned city finding time rifts to jump through, while fighting the “orphans” (zombies) who stand in your way. All of this is in service to something called the Collective, whose nature and purpose is, again, not initially explained to the player.

Tossing a setting at people with zero context or explanation is always a risky move. Cronos is one of the better examples I’ve seen across all media types, hooking the layer simply by virtue of the strangeness of the situation the players finds themselves in. Your character’s odd robotic speech patterns, body covered entirely in Geiger-esque armour, and the quasi-religious way she talks about her “Vocation” all indicate that whatever is happening here is far weirder than your typical zombie plague scenario, and even if the game’s actual story had completely dropped the ball, getting the answers to all of these questions would likely have kept me playing anyway.

Happily, the game’s story does not drop the ball. In fact I dare say it’s one of the better game stories I’ve experienced in quite some time, very deftly weaving together the cold alien logic of the Travellers with the more grounded human drama of the ordinary folks of communist Poland as it slides into disaster, all wrapped together with a strong character arc for the protagonist. Barring the occasional odd phrasing (probably the result of translation errors), the dialogue and the copious notes you find scattered around the environment are well-written and effective.

Most of Bloober’s old bad habits do actually show up here in some form, but they’re all greatly attenuated by virtue of being used far more sparingly than in The Medium or Layers of Fear. Even when the game features villains who pop up to blather at the player, it happens rarely enough that it didn’t get on my nerves. The only real problem I had with the writing is that some of the dialogue scenes drag on for two long, partially as a result of the Travellers’ slow speech patterns but also because a lot of them are just over-written.

One element of the writing that skirts the line a bit for me is the plot’s ambiguity. A lot of the answers to the big questions you probably have after reading the plot synopsis above are only vaguely alluded to, and the actual events of the story are only explained in just enough detail for the game’s events to make sense, but a lot of the specifics are left up in the air. You very much get the sense that the game only covers a relatively small slice of a much larger story; whether that’s because Bloober wanted to keep things open for spin-offs and sequels/prequels or whether the plot construction is just a little bit sloppy, I don’t know. All three of the game’s endings also seem to sacrifice proper closure in order to leave room for a sequel, which is something that always frustrates me.

Cronos’ has been compared a lot to Dead Space. That makes some sense, given that you play as a protagonist in a big chunky suit of sci-fi armour who can stomp on monsters (the stomp button is even the same), but in terms of moment to moment gameplay I found it a lot closer to Resident Evil 4. Dead Space’s iconic limb-based dismemberment system has no equivalent here; instead you’re doing the standard “shoot them in the head to do big damage or shoot them in the leg to stagger them” thing. Strategies that have served you well in playing either version of RE4 (stagger enemy, follow up with melee) will work similarly well here. Like in Resident Evil 4 you’re working with strict inventory limits and a requirement to conserve ammo that makes every shot count. I actually think the latter factor is even better-implemented here, as the game does a good job of keeping the player hovering just above the point of outright resource depletion. Over and over again I found myself getting out of a fight on my last few bullets, and I actually finished two bosses with no ammo at all by punching them to death.

This is all very standard action-horror fare, implemented with surprising competence (remember, before they started developing this and Silent Hill, Bloober had never made a game with any combat systems at all). The one unique spin is enemy merging. When you kill an Oprhan their body turns into a nest of gloopy tentacles, and if another Orphan gloops onto them it will hulk out and acquire its fallen comrade’s abilities. If you don’t keep on top of enemy corpses by burning them with a nifty 360-degree flamethrower, things get can very quickly get out of hand. Like, “I am stuck in a small room with multiple boss-level enemies that I don’t have enough ammo to kill” out of hand. I greatly admired the game’s willingness to let you put yourself into an unwinnable situation by not keeping track of this gameplay mechanic.

On the topic of difficulty, I’ve seen a lot of people lamenting that the game is too difficult. Personally, I didn’t have much trouble, only dying eight times according to the post-game summary (five of those were bosses, three of them the final boss). I actually wish you could make the game harder on a first playthrough (you do unlock a hard mode for new game plus), as the default difficulty offers a lot of ways to almost triviliaze the whole “burn bodies, don’t let them merge” system via respawnable exploding barrels. In theory you’re clearly meant to use risky strategies like killing enemies in proximity to corpses so you can maximise torch efficiency, but in practice I rarely found this necessary.

My sick gamer skills aside, the game’s structure also works against these mechanics a bit. Having to clear up enemy corpses makes a lot of sense in a game structured like classic Resident Evil where you’re spending a lot of time in the same environment and backtracking a lot (in fact the Gamecube remake of the first Resident Evil implemented just such a system), but it makes less sense in a game like this where there’s a lot of one-off combat encounters where once you clear out a room, you’re never going to have to fight enemies there again. And if you do end up using all your fuel, you can almost always just run back to the nearest save room to get more, which means flamethrower efficiency is less a matter of strategy or inventory management and more a question of patience.

These are small nitpicks against what is otherwise a very solidly-constructed experience.

(Blah blah insert more review here, tldr Cronos gets an 8/10 in the numerical review system I don’t use, buy it if you like action-horror games)

Books I Didn't Finish: Needful Things

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I was recently recovering from a bout of covid and found myself unable to do much of anything to pass the time. What I needed, I decided, was a book that would grab me. Something fast-paced and not challenging, something that would go down easy.

What I needed was my favourite author and close personal friend, Stephen King. And none of his bad newer stuff. I wanted vintage King. As luck would have it, at some point I had picked up his 1991 release Needful Things in a Kindle sale, a book that I knew absolutely nothing about. Despite hailing from the middle of King’s golden age, it’s not one that seems to get discussed a lot.

Turns out, there’s a reason for that.

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Longlegs

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If you’ve heard of Longlegs, it’s probably due to the amazing marketing campaign that Neon put together for the movie. That campaign made it a financial success, but it also led to a sharp divide among audiences, with many people walking away disappointed. The problem with constructing a mystery box is that people will put whatever they want inside that box, and if what you actually deliver doesn’t measure up, they’re going to be far more frustrated than if you never showed them the box in the first place. In this case, a marketing campaign that says (in so many words) that this is the scariest horror movie you’ve ever seen is going to make people imagine their own personal Ultimate Horror Movie, an expectation that it’s very unlikely any real movie can live up to.

I only watched Longlegs recently, after all the hype had died down. (I tried to see it in cinemas the day it came out, but a migraine forced me to leave the cinema after less than fifteen minutes). My reaction is neither particularly positive nor negative. The movie looks and sounds amazing, but it has an underbaked screenplay that clearly needed another revision or two to tighten it up. Like a satanic metal orb placed in the head of a life-sized doll, Longlegs is mysterious, sinister, and hollow.

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Old Soul

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A while back I did one of my posts where I callously judge books based solely on their covers and synopses for your entertainment. One of the books I gave a “will check out at some point” thumbs-up to was Susan Barker’s Old Soul, which happened to recently be available cheap in the Kindle daily deal. Let’s check it out.

As described in the above-linked post, this is a story about a mysterious, ageless woman—she goes by many names but her own narration simply calls her ‘the woman’ so I’ll stick with that—who has crossed paths with numerous people stretching back decades. Whenever she pops up she puts someone—typically a friend or loved one of the person recounting the tale—under her sinister influence; that person begins to act in alarming or scary ways before dying, by which point the woman is long gone.

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This Book Will Bury Me

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True crime has become a bit of a hot-button topic lately. The genre (if it can accurately be called that) saw a steady surge in popularity over the course of the 2010s, driven in part by breakout hits like Serial and Making A Murderer, and then exploded over the course of the pandemic, turning into one of the biggest and most lucrative Youtube and podcast scenes around. More recently, the genre has seen a heavy backlash, in part due to people digging into some of those viral hits and revealing them to not be quite as accurate as they claimed, in part due to the more ghoulish side of the community acting in a way that’s disrespectful to family members of victims. It doesn’t help that there’s a not-insignificant overlap between the true crime community and the disturbing serial killer fandom.

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The Nintendo Switch 2: Pulitzer-Winning Analysis

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Nintendo recently pulled back the curtain on the Switch 2 console, the successor to the 2017 Nintendo Switch that’s been single-handedly sustaining the company’s video game business (by which I mean single-handedly sustaining the company itself—they’ve branched out into partnerships for movies and theme parks, and they have their apps and merch as a side hustle, but they’re not like Sony or Microsoft where they could survive the loss of their gaming division). I know some of my loyal readers aren’t part of the Gamer Nation, so let me briefly put in context why this was a big deal.

Compared to its competitors (Sony, Microsoft, Sega back when Sega was making consoles), Nintendo has always been a bit eccentric. Where other console manufacturers make something successful and then iterate on it with more powerful “sequels” (Sony literally numbers its Playstation consoles like movie sequels), Nintendo frequently goes back to the drawing board with its new hardware, forgoing raw increases in computational power for innovative gameplay methods. This has been a double-edged sword.

On one hand it gave Nintendo the Wii and the DS, two of the best-selling video game consoles of all time. On the other hand it gave Nintendo the Wii U and the 3DS, both of which underperformed compared to their predecessors, the former so badly that it brought the company into arguably the most precarious position it’s ever been in. And even when this strategy succeeds, it’s sometimes a pyrrhic victory: the Wii sold extremely well, but it burned Nintendo’s core demographic by focusing on casual, simplistic games, and it pissed off everyone who owned one with long game droughts and a library that became increasingly dominated by cheap shovelware.

The Switch saved Nintendo after the Wii U’s failure. More than that, it restored them to a position of security they hadn’t had in years; the Switch is currently on track to become the best-selling home console in the company’s long history. It’s not appropriate to describe Nintendo as “beating” Sony and Microsoft since the “console war” doesn’t really exist anymore—all three of the hardware makers are doing their own thing these days instead of directly competing with each other—but if you were to look at it that way, they’d be comfortably ahead of Sony and running laps around Microsoft.

So naturally, that raises the question: what do they do next? Take the safe option and make a straightforward Switch sequel, or toss it out and try something new?

Smartly, they went for the former option. Now that all of the details have been revealed, let’s look at them: the console itself, the games, and the Weird Nintendo Bullshit, because with Nintendo there’s always Weird Bullshit even when they’re taking the safe route.

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All The Sinners Bleed

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Thrillers and crime novels aren’t a genre I usually have much interest in, but in the last few years I’ve made an exception for the works of SA Cosby after being impressed by Blacktop Wasteland, which seems to be the book that got him attention from readers in general. Unfortunately, I’m beginning to suspect that book might have been a fluke; I didn’t end up reviewing it on the blog, but I found his follow-up Razorblade Tears so lacklustre that I couldn’t finish it. Having now read All The Sinners Bleed, I’m disappointed to report that the problems I had with Razorblade Tears are just as present in this one as well.

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Smile 2

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A while back I reviewed Smile and found the movie to be frustrating, due in large part to the way it squandered some effective low-key horror ideas with annoying jump-scares. Now there’s a sequel, and it… does the exact same thing. No really, the exact same thing; this could almost be a remake of the first movie, employing an identical structure and falling face-first into all of the same pitfalls, despite in many ways actually improving on its predecessor.

(Warning: major spoilers for Smile 1 follow)

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Trash TV: Reacher Season 2

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Recently I was on a plane, and I found myself in that liminal phase where there was enough of the flight left that I wanted something to kill time, but not enough left to the point that starting a movie was viable. As such, I scrolled through the in-flight entertainment offerings and decided to throw on a few episodes of the second season of Reacher, a TV series I knew absolutely nothing about. In fact, prior to watching it I thought Jack Reacher and Jack Ryan were the same character.

Based on a long-running (26 entries and counting) series of novels about a guy who wanders around America punching and shooting people to death, Reacher is the second time this character has been adapted to live action, the first time being two Tom Cruise movies that don’t seem to have made much of an impact. Although they don’t really count, because as usual Tom Cruise is playing himself in those and not Jack Reacher.

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Silent Hill 2 (the new one)

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My reposts of my old Silent Hill reviews took a lot longer to complete than I had anticipated due to health issues, but finally they’ve been slapped up onto the internet and I’m free to talk about the main event: Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2.

I’m actually kind of glad it took me this long to get to it, because it allowed two things to fully crystallise: first, the game’s status as a critical and (from all publicly-available signs) commercial success, and second, my own thoughts on it. I often find that my reaction to something I’ve been either looking forward to or dreading is like a free-standing tower of jelly, prone to changing shape in the immediate aftermath as gravity and time pull on it. This is more pronounced for things I had a negative initial reaction to—I actually feel quite a bit more positive about The Last of Us Part II than I did when I reviewed it shortly after its release—but it’s definitely also a factor when it comes to things I like, the well-known “Phantom Menace effect” tending to cause an afterglow that can obscure substantial issues.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that my initial reaction to Silent Hill 2(024) was very positive. My sober, more carefully-considered long-term reaction is…also very positive, actually. Turns out, it wasn’t just fan enthusiasm: it’s 2024, and Silent Hill is officially back.

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Repost: Silent Hill Shattered Memories

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In 2009 rumours of a Silent Hill 1 remake finally came true, with Climax once again at the helm and the Wii as the lead platform. Oddly, the game’s announcement came on April Fool’s Day, which led to some dithering about whether it was actually an elaborate joke.

It was fairly obvious right off the bat that Shattered Memories was going to be quite different from its predecessor- the screenshots showing a snow-covered town and a frozen Otherworld made that obvious enough- but I don’t think anyone was prepared for quite how sharply this game would diverge from the norm…..

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