You are a nameless hero, fighting to save your home from a dragon. To reach it, you must travel across worlds until you find the one it calls home.
For the most part, the gameplay in Chronos is fairly typical for the genre, but it has a unique mechanic regarding death and respawning - every death you endure ages you up one year, and slowly changes your stats. The young boy swinging a sword that you start the game as will eventually become an older man more dependent upon magic to win his battles.
Additionally, the game is an Oculus Rift exclusive title.
In December 2020 a remake, Chronos: Before The Ashes was released, which overhauled the graphics and removed the VR requirement. Note that the title spoils the relation between this game and Gunfire Game's next project, Remnant: From the Ashes.
Chronos (and Before the Ashes) contain examples of:
- After the End: The game takes place a few generations after modern civilization was destroyed by invading monsters led by the Dragon. The tribe your character is a part of now seems to live at a Dark Ages level of development.
- Anti-Grinding: Enemies don't respawn unless you die, so there's a limit to how much you can farm them for XP. This is most notable if you're trying to get the achievement for beating the game with a character 21 years old or younger, which means you can't die more than 3 times through the whole game.
- Big Bad: The Wooden Dragon, Clawbone, acts as this, menacing your homeland such that you have to go out and slay it.
- Botanical Abomination: The creatures in Ward 17, responsible for the invasion of Earth, are clearly some sort of living wooden roots in humanoid form, as is the Dragon, Clawbone. They're the Root, and this is an early hint that the Talking Tree is really the Big Bad, as he has a very similar appearance.
- …But He Sounds Handsome: The Talking Tree can't resist speaking about the Dragon in these terms. Of course, the Tree is the Dragon.
- Close-Range Combatant: Your character has absolutely no ranged attacks at all, and is completely reliant on close combat.
- Continuing is Painful: In a unique way - while you don't lose items when you die, your characters ages up one year, as that is how long it takes for the crystal that lets them into the Labyrinth needs to reopen. This gradually weakens your physical powers while increasing your magical ones, which means that strategies that worked during your first few lives won't be as helpful later in the game.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: The Pan Guardian takes a truly ridiculous number of hits to bring down, with your every blow doing little more than Scratch Damage to it. Its attacks are mostly easy to avoid, so the main threat it poses is wearing you down over the long duration of the fight until you mess up and get hit too many times.
- Downer Ending: Though the player defeats Clawbone, they are drugged by Haarsgard and forced to become a new dreamer, leaving them alive but helpless to stop the dragon's allies. This sets the stage for Remnant: From the Ashes.
- Dragons Prefer Princesses: The Krell Guardian fell in love with the Krell King's youngest and fairest daughter and demanded that she be his bride. The Krell King tried to disguise his other daughters as his favorite and have them marry the Guardian instead; this never worked, the Guardian always saw through the deception and killed the princess. Eventually the King ran out of other daughters and was forced to have his favorite daughter marry the Guardian. Somehow the princess ended up dying as well, so the Guardian and the King are both now in a deep depression, the King especially due to the realization he could have avoided all this simply by acquiescing to the Guardian's demand in the first place. It's possible being linked to a Dreamer caused the Guardian to behave abnormally, as logs from Remnant: Before the Ashes note that this can possibly happen.
- Our Dwarves Are Different: The Krell are a short, stout, blue-skinned race that live in a stone fortress carved into the side of a cliff, wear stone armor, seem fond of forges and complex mechanisms, are apparently resistant to fire, and seem to attain adulthood in their early teens.
- Elderly Immortal: If you die often enough to reach age 80, you'll automatically unlock a perk granting you immortality, preventing you from aging any further from subsequent deaths. You're still an octogenarian adventurer, though. This seems to be to prevent you from failing the game due to dying of old age.
- Genre Shift: The original Chronos used fixed camera angles from an omniscient perspective, similar to the early Resident Evil games, in order to reduce the risk of VR sickness from camera motion. The non-VR Chronos: Before the Ashes re-release uses a more traditional over-the-back third-person camera, since VR sickness isn't an issue.
- Healing Checkpoint: Averted; there are no bonfires or similar in Chronos. The only way to refill your Dragon Hearts (your only healing items) is to die and age up a year.
- Life Drain: The 4th and final Dragon Eye spell you acquire, the Shadow Eye, allows you to absorb health from the damage you inflict on enemies. It's extremely useful, as the only other two methods of healing in the game are Dragon Hearts (which are only refilled when you die) and leveling up (which you have little control over).
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In order to progress, the player must kill the boss of each world. As is revealed in Remnant: From the Ashes, these creatures are actually the guardians of the worlds you visit, and killing them allows the Root to invade.
- Power Nullifier: The Final Boss, the Dragon, will cause your Dragon Hearts to harm you instead of healing you if you try to use them during the fight. The only time you can heal during the fight is when the boss flies away briefly between each phase.
- Sprint Meter: Like most Soulslike games, you have a stamina meter that depletes from sprinting or blocking attacks. Unlike most Soulslike, it does not deplete from attacking or dodging, so you can hit or dodge as much as you want without worrying. This is balanced out by your dodge being slower and granting fewer i-frames than most other Soulslikes, and your attacks likewise being more weighty and easier to interrupt by enemy attacks.
- Treacherous Quest Giver: The talking tree that empowers you near the beginning of your journey and sends you to kill the three Guardians, claiming they are protecting the Dragon, is actually an embodiment of the Root (the force controlling the Dragon) and manipulated you into killing the Guardians that were protecting their worlds from it, then killing the Dragon (its old host body) so it could use you as a newer, stronger host.
- Our Dragons Are Different: The Final Boss and Big Bad of the game, Clawbone, is a dragon made out of wood.
- Unique Enemy: There are only two Fleshopedes (snake/centipede hybrids native to Pan) in the entire game; they're guarding the little cave where the keycard to Ward 16 left behind by Captain Ford's expedition is.
