The best thing about Cronos: The New Dawn’s reveal trailer? Completely believable chess, apparently

Cronos: The New Dawn – an interesting looking third-person survival horror game – was revealed at the latest Xbox Partner Preview, and, in a amongst lots of monster shooting, its trailer featured a chess match that’s earned big praise from chess nerds.

Yep, fresh off of releasing the Silent Hill 2 remake that’s earned a lot of praise, Bloober Team showed off this thing ahead of a 2025 release, no doubt delighting folks who like the vibes of games like Dead Space. Given it also followed on in the showcase from that promised look at gameplay from Alan Wake 2’s Lake House DLC, it’s fair to say lovers of the spooks were eating good last night.

As you can see in the trailer below, Cronos introduced us all to its “grim world where Eastern European brutalism meets retro-futurist technology” by contrasting scenes of a mysterious protagonist in what looks like a cool biohazard suit with retro sci-fi vibes shooting their way through rooms of floating furniture and floating monsters with a chess match.

The good news is that this match, between an old lady and the person in the suit (who clearly forgot to wash the blood off of their hands, rude), has passed the eye test for chess nerds. “I would like to congratulate Bloober Team for having a trailer featuring chess where the moves and etiquette were not completely ridiculous,” tweeted one such nerd, Fallout New Vegas director Josh Sawyer.

I’m not sure about the etiquette part, given the trailer ends with the protaoginst losing, the immediately pushing aside the table and reaching for the lady’s face with a claw device. If you’re wondering why they’re doing that, the game’s blurb can shed a bit of light on it.

“You are a Traveler acting as an agent for the enigmatic Collective, tasked with scouring the wastelands of the future in search of specific time rifts that will transport you back to 1980s-era Poland,” it reads, “Your mission is to locate key people from the past who perished in the ensuing apocalypse. Using your all-powerful Harvester, you can extract their Essences and have them accompany you into the future.”

As that suggests, the game has sections that take place in the past and the future. In the past, you will witness a world in the throes of The Change, a cataclysmic event that forever altered humanity,” Bloober Team explains, “Meanwhile, in the ravaged wastelands of the future, every moment is a fight for survival against dangerous abominations that will test both your reflexes and your tactical thinking.”

If you’re playing catch-up on the Partner Preview, it’s also worth checking out the look at ship sailing in Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii, and the cinematic teaser for Subnautica 2