CRON Review (Xbox LIVE Indie Games)

Several games have teased us with ’blind’ sections over the years, giving you short areas where you cannot see the stage you’re playing on and have to make best guesses or memorize where things are based on very brief flashes of light. CRON asks players what it would be like to play a whole game like that, and surprisingly enough it works out better than you might think. It’s an overhead maze game somewhat like Pac-Man, requiring players to guide their character to the end of dozens of stages while evading traps, finding secret passages, and avoiding enemies... all of it made more challenging by the fact you can only see small parts of the stage at a time.

CRON doesn’t have you playing completely blind, instead arming you with a variety of ’sonar blasts’ that light up a small part of the stage for a few seconds and then fade. In early stages it’s perfectly acceptable to fire your sonar blast over and over to have a clear picture of where you’re going, but some enemies in later stages home in on the last point you used sonar from; you can lead them right to you if you’re not careful. While CRON’s flow of "fire sonar to learn this part of the map, memorize it, move, and repeat the cycle" is pretty easy to learn and includes a decent set of tutorials, new enemies and abilities are added every several stages to keep things interesting.

While the basic idea is easy to pick up, CRON is somewhat challenging. You are often required to make moves within a very narrow window of opportunity, with failure meaning you either have to wait for the next chance or may end up being killed and sent back to the start of the stage. You’re also required to move through very tiny gaps in a pack of enemies, and once again a single mistake can cause you to replay the level. This isn’t as harsh as it may sound, as most stages can be cleared in just a few minutes and new abilities will make some segments easier. On the other hand, new traps and enemies keep you from getting complacent.

With its difficulty being both a good and bad thing, CRON’s only truly serious flaw is repetitive controls. While the idea of having to navigate a maze you can only partially see is a good one, having to repeatedly press a button to keep firing sonar blasts gets annoying after a while... and more so once you get to stages where doing so is a bad idea and you are thus forced to move very carefully. These annoyances can be somewhat compensated for by adding a second player, who controls a small ’guide’ that can both slow down enemies and help scout the map for you, but even that only goes so far.

Despite that problem, CRON is overall an interesting game. With dozens of stages to play through, your $1 USD/80 Microsoft Points will buy a game that should last you an evening or two and that’s a pretty good deal. If you’re interested in trying an unusual take on ’maze chase’ games like Pac-Man, give CRON a try.