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PayPalCronos: The New Dawn is the latest survival horror from Bloober Team that arrived September 5th, and they just announced a Native Steam Deck release.
This is a little bit confusing though as they already had a Native Linux version at release. The Steam Deck uses SteamOS (Linux), and so it did already have a Native version available. They don't go into any details on what has specifically now been tweaked for the Steam Deck. The announcement simply said:
At launch, Cronos arrived as our latest survival horror title with full Steam Deck verification—but that’s not all!
Today, we’ve released a native build of the game for Steam’s handheld console, which means even better performance on this platform.
Enjoy Cronos on Steam, wherever you are!
Valve have also already changed the defaults to use the Native Linux version, where previously it used Proton to run the Windows version. It's possible with the change to the Steam Deck default, they just mean that and they're hyping it up, but without any details it's difficult to tell.
I've reached out to Bloober to see if they could clarify what's changed and improved.
Looking on SteamDB, there is still the normal Native Linux content depot along with a content depot tagged for the Steam Deck now too. So hopefully this won't cause any issues with downloading it on Desktop Linux PCs like we saw with the Native Linux version of Baldur's Gate 3 for Steam Deck.
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More about it:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.Cronos: The New Dawn is a brutal third-person survival horror where you fight for the future by salvaging the past. Burn monsters before they merge. Extract souls from the living. Adapt or die.
Set in a grim world where Eastern European brutalism meets retro-futurist technology, Cronos: The New Dawn lets you experience a gripping story that straddles the line between past and future.
In the past, you will witness a world in the throes of The Change, a cataclysmic event that forever altered humanity. 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.
You are a Traveler working for the enigmatic Collective, tasked with scouring the wastelands of the future in search of time rifts that will transport you to 1980s-era Poland.
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Last edited by nebadon2025 on 1 Oct 2025 at 2:20 pm UTC
ScottCarammell 2 hours ago
Steam Deck really shouldn't use Proton by default anymore, native runs the CPU cooler and still runs at an (albeit inconsistent at times) 30 frames now that FSR is available.well someone listened to my suggestion lol
I just installed and fired up Cronos for the first time on my steam deck and I got a whopping 11fps with the default settings, lowered everything as low as it could go and got a nice choppy 40ps.. bloober is nuts if they think this is acceptable..yeahhh not gonna sugarcoat it the game DOES run pretty bad. regardless of Proton or native you're not looking at good framerates. I still think there's a great game underneath the poor optimization though, and their dedication to making it work on Steam Deck gives me hope that it'll finally be in decent condition on there soon. Hopefully some of those optimizations can be backported to desktop too.
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