Cronos: Lazarus shows off the Pathfinder's new tricks

A meaner Pathfinder, shown in motion

Bloober Team used a Steam announcement on 21 September to walk through what the Pathfinder can do in Cronos: Lazarus, the expansion for Cronos: The New Dawn. The developer calls it a more visceral and intense style of play that builds on what players liked about the base game, and the showcase takes a deep dive into the character's new skills, weapons and threats.

Teleport, decoy, Gladius

Three additions frame the whole thing. Teleportation lets the Pathfinder move instantly across a designated area, which the studio pitches as a way to slip around groups of enemies; it doubles as a traversal tool, letting players cross distorted environments and reach otherwise inaccessible areas to find hidden resources. Decoy leaves a ghostly copy of the Pathfinder standing where he was while he moves somewhere else, invisible to enemies - a body-double for pulling attention off yourself rather than for dealing damage.

The third is a weapon rather than a trick. The Gladius is described as much more powerful than what the Pathfinder carried before, with a higher rate of fire and piercing bullets that deal increased damage. Between the mobility, the decoy and the new gun, the expansion is plainly nudging the Pathfinder's combat towards aggression - moving through a fight rather than managing one from cover.

No date, four platforms

Bloober Team has Cronos: Lazarus scheduled for release in autumn 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2. There is still no exact date, and the studio is not offering a window narrower than the season. That makes this an autumn with room in it rather than a date to circle: wishlists and existing save data are the only things being asked for at the moment.

The expansion extends a game that only arrived in September 2025, and the Pathfinder's rework is aimed squarely at players who finished the campaign and wanted the combat to bite harder the second time around. Everything in this showcase comes from the developer's own material; no hands-on impressions have been published alongside it, so the feel of teleportation and the Gladius is still unproven outside Bloober's own footage.

Our opinion

Teleportation plus a decoy plus a fast piercing weapon is not a small balance pass, it is a different survival-horror grammar. The original's horror came from scarcity and from being slow enough that every enemy mattered; a Pathfinder who can blink past a group and leave a phantom behind him is being handed control of the spaces he used to be trapped in. That can be excellent - the best expansions change how a game is played rather than adding a map - but it can just as easily sand away the tension a horror game lives on. The honest state of play is that Bloober has shown us the tools rather than the fights: a clip cut to demonstrate new abilities cannot tell you whether the danger survived the upgrade. Autumn 2026 is soon enough to find out, and until a date is fixed there is nothing here to pre-order anyway.