The Forgettable Home Run of ‘Horizon Zero Dawn’
Guerilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn is often spoken about in the same terms as other big-budget 2017 masterpieces such as Nier: Automata and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but I found my experience with Horizon to be decidedly underwhelming across the board. One of the most visually impressive games on the Playstation 4 at the time, I was a reasonably early adopter of the game. I made it about 5 hours into Horizon before muting the bland and uninspired dialogue, mucking about in the open world for a dozen or so hours before abandoning the game entirely. Sometimes heralded games don’t click with me – and that’s okay.
Fast-forward to 2020 where Horizon Zero Dawn was ported to PC. Coming off the heels of Death Stranding, which was the most impressive PC port I’ve ever played, I decided to pick up another game using that same Decima engine: Horizon Zero Dawn. I was shocked to find Horizon initially unplayable in some configurations, despite running maximum settings in Death Stranding without a hitch. I waited for five patches before starting a new save file and giving Horizon a proper go. If not out of pure stubbornness, I might not have made it to the end.
Before unpacking my many problems with Horizon Zero Dawn, I always find it important to highlight the successes of a game – and there are many here. This game’s respectable 89 Metacritic score is worth analyzing.
In Praise of Horizon Zero Dawn
From the outset, Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the most beautiful outdoor game environments in recent memory. The varied locations range from barren deserts to lush jungles, contrasting ancient tribal architecture with jarring industrial caves that evoke futurism and lost civilizations. Even on the base PS4, every location of Horizon feels lush and rich with resources like the colorful medicinal plants you can collect near river beds throughout the world. The plant life is diverse and animated in such a way that breathes life into the environments at every non-human corner. Certain landmarks throughout the game – especially atop Tallnecks – caused me to open Horizon’s photo mode for a few quick screenshots that serve as breathtaking desktop wallpapers.
Taking a similarly visual approach to Horizon Zero Dawn, the character and enemy designs are fantastic throughout. The Nora, humans who have developed a religion around the game’s mysterious machine creatures and artifacts, have an authentically tribal feel in their outfits, decorations, and face paints. The way they display and manifest their religious piety through rituals and custom sells them as believable fictional people that only exist in proximity to the machines so ubiquitous throughout the world.
The machines themselves are extremely well-defined as distinct enemy types. From a distance, I could always read an environment in terms of what enemy variety was present, for much of this game can be taken advantage of through persistent and patient stealth mechanics. Whereas many games reskin existing models to increase diversity of enemy encounters, there was never a moment of confusion about enemy types when playing Horizon because they are all so physically different. This striking visual design extends to the combat mechanics themselves.
Why Combat is the Highlight of Horizon
Combat is the strongest point of design in the entirety of Horizon Zero Dawn. As aforementioned, when I first bounced off the game in its release year, I kept playing for about a dozen additional hours precisely because of how fun the combat mechanics are. When picking the game back up on my PC in 2020, this opinion was completely unwavering.
The majority of combat encounters in Horizon Zero Dawn require stealth, quietly taking down human enemies and reaching out of tufts of protective grass to stab or take over a machine. Once your cover is blown – as seemed to happen to me every time – however, combat becomes extremely fast-paced, precise, and dynamic. Aloy, Horizon’s protagonist, has two main melee attacks: light and heavy swipes of her spear or lance, with the heavy attacks bringing a chance of knocking down machines. Combat becomes interesting through the addition of peripheral weapons such as a bow that shoots various elemental arrows and more strategic weapons like the tripcaster, which requires careful tracking of enemy movement patterns.
In both attempted playthroughs of Horizon, I leaned heavily into using Aloy’s bow for the majority of combat scenarios. It feels the most precise of combat options, despite adjacent weapons like bombs doing greater (and wider) damage. Each machine is weak to a variety of arrow types, so I tended to cycle between three separate bows in combat. If I encountered half a dozen machines encircling a critical path forward and I noticed a fire bellowback at the center of this machine group, for instance, I could shoot fire arrows into its components that are weak to fire. Watching it explode a moment later, suddenly the entire combat arena is dealing with a substantial chunk taken off their health, many of which are receiving additional fire damage.
Many of the perks that can be explored through Aloy’s skill tree increase combat’s excitement greatly, like the extension of Aloy’s ability to concentrate when shooting arrows. In the early game, Aloy has a few seconds to slow down time to enable the player to get a more accurate shot. Unlock one or two perks from the skill tree and all of a sudden Aloy’s concentration ability enables an almost dead-eye precision that completely shifts the momentum of battle in key moments. Jumping in the air and shooting becomes another way to exploit time and aiming precision, etc. Unlike many action RPGs, I found myself genuinely battling with myself over which directions to upgrade Aloy’s abilities because all of them felt deeply impactful and meaningful to the core gameplay loop.
Where Things Fall Apart: The Narrative of Horizon
In this discussion of the numerous merits of Horizon Zero Dawn, one key aspect has been conspicuously absent: the pacing and writing of the story.
The story of Horizon Zero Dawn slowly unravels like a mummy costume made out of toilet paper. For a runtime of roughly 20 hours (if you skim the side content), we see Aloy grow up under the surrogate father figure Rost, an outcast from the Nora tribe who nevertheless displays an interminable love for Aloy, all the way until his dying sacrificial act, commanding Aloy to survive. We see Aloy struggle to find acceptance within the Nora tribe, even after proving herself repeatedly to them; she fights to earn their respect along the way. Aloy learns the truth of her birth and her mother’s deep connection to the mysterious and hostile machines. By the end, Aloy saves the world from complete devastation.
When summarizing the events in the story, it sounds like Horizon covers a ton of narrative ground. In reality, much of the narrative is fumbled by the generic and rigid presentation of the intermittent story beats. Except for major cutscenes where control is completely arrested from the player, the vast majority of Horizon’s storytelling comes from neutral, passive lore dumps.
In a game that is so dependent upon visual fidelity and intense action to present its vast world and diverse characters, it’s a design sin to leave so many written logs lying around for the player to read. But Horizon isn’t content with written lore dumps, it also houses holograms and audio logs to fill in the background for the player. I cannot be bothered to stand around in a cave for minutes at a time while waiting for an audio log to finish playing out when the entire hook of the game is the satisfying combat loop.
The game’s story vaguely gestures at morally complex themes but never lingers on them unless you’re meticulous in parsing through the lore. Aloy’s mother, for instance, occupies a prominent position of influence within Faro Industries – the company responsible for creating these machine life forms.
Through the clarity of hindsight, Aloy tracks through her mother’s memories and logs to piece together the kind of person she was. At nearly every turn, Aloy struggles to come to terms with her mother’s identity, but from the player’s perspective, Aloy’s mother was practically a saint as far as the narrative consequences are concerned.
Aloy was artificially created using her mother’s DNA in an attempt to reverse a cataclysmic plague corrupting the machines, and much of Aloy’s character arc is defined by digging into these ectopic origins. As the robots threaten to take over the world with corruption, Aloy finds her identity indelibly intertwined with the fate of the world. By the end of the game, Aloy learns how to eliminate the corruption that is driving the machines into apocalyptic ends, saving countless lives through her tenacity. Eventually, Aloy finds the body of her mother lying peacefully amongst a flowery field, leaving Aloy with one last holotape to listen to. It’s perhaps the only touching moment in the entire game.
The Forgettable Home Run of Horizon Zero Dawn
The fundamental frustration I have with Horizon Zero Dawn is the same problem I had with Astral Chain last year: it’s a completely serviceable game at every facet but it fails to stand out from its peers. You can see glimpses of greatness in the environmental design and combat loops in Horizon, but nothing about the story or the characters is memorable. And once that feeling cemented itself within the first few hours of the main story, I quickly steered away from the smattering of side activities available throughout the massive open world of Horizon. If the core of this story was nothing special, I found it reasonable to lower the bar further for the “side” content.
Aloy’s story is the typical hero’s journey with nothing new to add to the storytelling medium of video games. The narrative beats are predictable, the writing is awkwardly paced (even for an open world game), and the character performances are completely lifeless. While Ashly Burch’s performances in other games are fantastic, her performance as Aloy never sold the character for me. I struggled to care for her character even by the time the credits rolled. And that’s extremely disappointing given the dismal dearth of compelling women protagonists leading mainstream gaming releases.
A story only matters if you care about its characters. Because Horizon never made me care about its characters, relegating them to plot devices more than human beings, I never cared about the story. I was invested in the mystery of the machines more than any of the characters or relationships that serve as exposition dumps throughout. All things considered, Horizon is never a bad game, but it is never a great one either.
Ultimately, Horizon suffers under the weight of its ambition. Though a technical marvel, one of the best looking games on the Playstation 4 even three years after it was released, the open world philosophy of design truly overburdens the experience. The world of Horizon is simply too big and there is simply too much to do within the world. Every time I loaded up a new quest and toggled open the world map, I groaned at the thought of galloping back through miles of hostile terrain. Even using the fast travel system, the game caused a sort of psychological hum of lethargy when moving between points to earn the next major story beat. And when I would finally reach the next plot development, it seldom paid off beyond unlocking experience points to further upgrade Aloy in combat.
Moments of Horizon are like a flash in the pan of excitement, and I can see glimpses that make me understand why this game is so beloved by innumerable people. Climbing my first Tallneck or fending off my first Stormbird are exhilarating moments that are truly remarkable in the landscape of open world gaming. I just can’t help but often wonder if gameplay and visual design are enough to justify such a lengthy experience that commits all pretense into its narrative focus. I would not have finished the game if not for streaming it with an audience; I would have bounced off the game in nearly the same place once again.
Oddly enough, when Horizon Forbidden West releases later this year, I plan to pick up the game. I don’t expect anything from the story, which might be a healthy expectation as low bars are much easier to cross than high ones. Rather I’ll be purchasing the game purely as a technical benchmark for the Playstation 5, as the idea of next-generation console performance inspires kid-on-Christmas levels of excitement for me. But after giving Horizon Zero Dawn a proper shake all the way to the end, I can safely say that there’s nothing memorable for me to return to in this game, because Zero Dawn is the forgettable home run of Playstation exclusives.
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