Every October, I like to humor myself with a spooky game or two. Last year, I missed out (I was deep in the One Piece journey), but this year, I went overboard. Not only did I beat one scary title, I beat two.

Funnily enough, both titles I played are almost two pieces of the same puzzle.

Cronos: The New Dawn has a solid gameplay foundation, albeit with a very stingy resource economy, making every fight feel like your last. However, the story got much cooler once I rolled credits because it was only then that I understood what was happening. As it was unfolding, I was intrigued until halfway through, then it lost me. Not because it’s boring, but because the conclusion is a little dull. 

Conversely, Silent Hill f’s gameplay is pretty meh. Puzzles aside, the loop of trying to fight back is janky and punishing, as you could find yourself dead by the time you recover from a dodge animation. That said, the story is brilliant, dark, and full of themes and ideas that linger in my mind days after I rolled credits. 

Let’s talk about it.

Cronos: The New Dawn is the closer to Dead Space than The Callisto Protocol

Cronos: The New Dawn is very open about where it got its inspiration from. You play as an armored-up person, you’ll carefully navigate a ruined world overrun by biomass and bodies galore, and you’ll fight aliens that need to be strategically dealt with, or you’ll find yourself in a nasty predicament. 

Cronos’ core gameplay effectively leverages its inspiration very well. Much like the Necromorphs, Orphans (terrible name by the way) need to be strategically approached. They’ll merge with corpses to level up, and if you let them merge, they’ll become so strong you’ll find yourself out of resources. 

Coupled with a stingy resource economy, shit can go wrong very fast. But it works, albeit when you can’t run away from a fight, and run out of resources in a “kill all to proceed” encounter. 

It helps that the game is very atmospherically sound, with huge props to the audio and world design. The world is littered with biomass, with squelching noises being a predominant sound effect. I love Dead Space’s audio design, and Cronos does a very good job of making you feel isolated and tense. 

Cronos feels more like Dead Space than The Callisto Protocol (shameless self plug) did, and that game was made by former Dead Space developers. Yet, while Cronos’ gameplay loop is good, the story leaves a lot to be desired. 

My issue here is that the narrative seems really good. The Traveler works for The Collective, a group determined to figure out how to circumvent the change via time travel, complete with a quirky Mandalorian “This is the way” catchphrase and all.

It quickly turns into a convoluted story that blends way too many influences together – Returnal‘s never ending time cycle, a seemingly deep conspiracy theory that ends in a love story, a religious sect that seemingly prays for the end of times.

You can have all those things, but it feels so shakily tied together in contrast to how the game starts. You’re hunting people to extract, and when you do, the ending makes it feel like your mission didn’t matter because it’s all about love.

Boy, do I sound miserable.

If that explanation was confusing, imagine how it felt playing the game.

I’ll tell you what though, story problems are the last thing this next game is worried about.

Silent Hill f and the “f” stands for f-enomenal story

I mentioned it already, and I’ll say it again: Silent Hill f’s combat is pretty damn bad. There’s a lot of jank to it, which I’ve heard is normal for Silent Hill games.

Combat aside, the puzzles are really good, although sometimes they’re rather obscure in what the solution is. The one that comes to mind is a box puzzle in school that made me look up the meaning of “tart.” I know what the word means, but I don’t know how to describe it.

Silent Hill f is definitely a surprise for many reasons. I totally planned to skip this one, since I’ve never played Silent Hill prior to this game. I always assumed this series focuses more on the type of horror I can’t handle, the dark psychological horror, whereas comfort titles like Resident Evil are more action-oriented survival horror-oriented (at least 4 and 5).

So not only am I surprised I found myself playing and beating the latest Silent Hill game, I am surprised at how much its narrative hooked me. Once I rolled credits after my eight-hour playthrough (another shameless self plug), I found myself flabbergasted. In a complete 180 to Cronos, everything related to the game’s narrative perfectly tied together.

It made sense, and it was spectacularly assembled.

In layman’s terms, Shimizu Hinako has it rough. Whether it be her father, who’s a drunk and treats her mother like crap, her “friends” who wish nothing but ill upon her, there are a lot of dark threads here carefully woven together.

Being a woman in 1960s Japan, forcing yourself to conform to societal norms and the identity crisis that comes from that internal struggle – you name it, it’s there front and center. The literal definition of facing your inner demons.

At my journey’s end, the lightbulb switched on.

“Wait, this is what that scene meant.”

“Holy crap, this was a reference to that.”

I won’t talk much about it because this is something you have to experience, especially if you’re a fan of the series.

As a first-time player, this game is dark and very narratively sound; it makes me want to play again just to experience the other four endings.

But I won’t, I do not want to deal with the stress again.

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Until next year October, maybe I’ll finally play the Silent Hill 2 remake then.