Cronos: The New Dawn is a challenging survival horror experience that strongly favors a ranged approach to combat, as melee damage is extremely weak. While you can swing a punch in a pinch to finish off a low-health enemy that has you cornered, it’s much better to keep your distance while kiting foes through rooms and hallways.

If you find yourself surrounded, use your Torch Fuel or shoot nearby fuel canisters to stun the enemies around you, giving you time to get clear. It’s better to use that replenishable resource and survive than it is to take a beating and have to use precious heals.

As you move through the world, keep your eyes and ears open for cats. You can often hear them meowing when they’re nearby, and you’ll sometimes see them take off running toward a destination. Make sure you track them down and give them a pet.

Cats will almost always lead you to a stash of good items, but petting them will earn you a Core, which is a rare and immensely useful material used for upgrading your suit. Even if you’re more of a dog person, surely you can agree that’s a useful trade for a few little scritches.

Upgrading your health and inventory space is likely to be the best use of any Cores you find throughout your journey. More health improves your survivability, obviously, while more inventory space allows you to keep more heals, ammo, and sellable items on you. Though it’s probably best to take turns upgrading these early on, inventory space should become a higher priority later in the game when being able to carry more weapons and ammo types becomes imperative.

Cores can be found by petting new cats you discover, opening a dispensary in some safe rooms, or exploring optional paths (remember how we told you to take those bolt cutters everywhere with you). Make sure you’re exploring thoroughly and gathering as many Cores as possible so that you don’t find yourself in a bad way later.

Any time you have no Torch Fuel in your inventory, you can obtain a single use of the item by visiting a safe room and opening the appropriate dispensary on the wall. And you’ll want to do so at every opportunity because Torch Fuel plays a huge role in Cronos: The New Dawn.

For starters, it stuns nearby enemies, giving you a chance to reposition or dish out damage without fear of being attacked. But perhaps more importantly, it’s used to burn corpses, which keeps other enemies from merging with them and becoming stronger.

As a side note, you should always keep Edward’s Essence equipped, too. This is found fairly early in the game, and it allows you to do extra damage to burning enemies. This is especially useful against bosses, allowing you to deal huge damage while they’re stunned in the fire.

Let’s just be blunt: Firing bullets without charging your shot first is almost always a waste of ammo, as they’ll do significantly more damage when charged. Given how scarce ammo can be, the last thing you want to do is pump enemies full of weak rounds.

With this in mind, it’s a good idea to use Energy to upgrade the charge time on your favorite guns. You’ll be sorry you didn’t when you’re surrounded and get pummeled because your shots are taking too long to go off. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

You’ll need to find keys and passcodes to unlock a lot of doors in Cronos: The New Dawn, while others are locked from the other side and can be opened from the other side as you work your way through a level. However, some doors simply have obstacles keeping them closed, meaning you’ll need to think outside the box a bit.

When you come across a door that won’t budge, take a look around to see if there’s a sightline into the room from another angle. Often, a window or broken wall will let you see what’s blocking the door. Perhaps it’s wood that you can clear with a well-placed shot, or some biomass that can be cleared by shooting a nearby fuel canister.

In most cases, these doors will lead you to a comic collectible or some useful materials, so you’ll be thankful you took a moment to clear the way.

During the opening hours of Cronos: The New Dawn, you’ll find bolt cutters, which can be used to break the chains that are on certain doors. Unlike most items (such as keys), which are only used once or twice and then disappear from your inventory, the bolt cutters are useful throughout the entire game.

You’ll come across quite a few of these chained doors as you explore, and you can all but guarantee there are useful items in the rooms behind them. As such, it’s a good idea to keep the bolt cutters in your inventory as often as possible. While it sucks to have them taking up an inventory slot all the time, it sucks even more to lose track of where you saw chained doors and possibly pass a point of no return without ever getting a chance to look inside.