Horizon Forbidden West

Back in 2017, I bought a PS4 and Horizon Zero Dawn was the first game I ever played on it. I was blown away by the detailed and stunning visuals, the strategic and epic machine combat, and the incredibly dense sci-fi backstory of the world. I ended up sinking over a hundred hours into the game and its DLC, and it quickly took a seat in my top three favorite games of all time. The world is just so pleasant to be in and Aloy as a character is a refreshing change up from the same-y generic white protagonists we’re used to getting. Horizon Zero Dawn alone was worth the price of purchase of a PS4 for me. I played a lot more games afterwards, including pretty much all the Sony big hits, but Horizon held a special place and rank in my most cherished gaming memories.

When the PS5 was announced, I told myself I’d wait until the Horizon sequel bundle launches to get it. I didn’t have a burning desire to play any of the PS5 launch titles and I really only wanted to play the sequel to Horizon. But lo and behold, the supply shortages and lack of availability of the PS5 anywhere made me jump at the opportunity to snag one when I received an email invite from PlayStation Direct, so I ended up getting a PS5 much earlier than I expected to have it. I played all the big titles — Demon’s Souls, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart, etc. But I had my eye on the Horizon sequel the entire time.

The reveal came in a Sony presentation when it opened with a shot of nature. The moment the violins started playing in the score, I knew it was the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn. My loop plays of the “City on the Mesa” track from the Zero Dawn OST came in handy for this brief microsecond when I knew what the game was before much of the viewers did, who got the hint at Ashly Burch’s voiceover or at Aloy herself riding a Charger across the sands in the foreground of the Golden Gate Bridge. I was mentally squealing with joy. The game looked amazing and the fact that it was to be set in San Francisco was the icing on top. I had just moved to San Francisco a couple of years ago, so getting the opportunity to explore my favorite post-apocalyptic setting in the city I was living in got me super hyped.

After several long months of post-reveal waiting, I carefully avoided every trailer and all interviews about the game. I muted key words on Twitter and marked “uninterested” on the Horizon topic on YouTube. I unsubscribed from the Horizon subreddit as well as all PlayStation-related subreddits for fear of spoilers. Yeah, this is how much I cared about wanting an unspoiled fresh experience. Here’s the thing about Horizon that a lot of players who haven’t played it don’t fully understand: Horizon’s backstory and lore is unusually good for a video game. In fact, if it was a book series instead and never was a video game, people would be raving about the wild ideas and concepts presented in it. Its speculative imagination for what our future could be is so captivating and yet so grounded as a realistic scenario that could result from the world we find ourselves in today. It addresses the problems with unchecked capitalism, societal conflict, megalomaniac techno-optimists abusing their power, mega-corporations making life a living hell for everyone, and so much more. I’m an avid sci-fi / post-apocalypse fan and trust me when I say that Horizon’s sci-fi lore is top tier, outclassing many great novels and movies of our time.

Its only fault is how the game delivers this lore and narrative to players. All the good stuff is typically hidden away in the form of datapoints or audio logs scattered throughout the world. Many players don’t bother engaging with these and just ignore them entirely, or wish that the game would have better integrated the lore bits into dialogue with characters/NPCs or general world exposition. I, however, am the type of player who will try to scour out every bit of these collectibles to get the tiniest bit of insight into what went down in the “old world”, and really enjoy the act of organically stumbling upon a random email from a loving son to his mother before he gets devoured by a biomass-craving mechanized robot. This is why I love this game, but many players who aren’t interested in this type of dense backstory and lore will just ignore it entirely, at which point Horizon is actually quite similar to many other open-world RPGs. Oh well, their loss.

Anyway, release day rolled around and I was ready at 9:00 PM (Pacific Time) the night before to hit that “Play” button as soon as it was available. And boy, was it grand. The game dives right into the sci-fi story and starts dumping lore exposition literally five minutes in. I loved every minute of it. You get to go to Meridien right after the intro mission and reunite with old characters, which bought back fond memories of the first game. I bet many players were confused about who all these random characters were, but I remembered all of them from sidequests in Zero Dawn (which I had Platinum’d), so it was super cool to get to interact with all of them again. And then you get to go to “The Daunt” after a cool intro sequence, which is the first main zone in the open-world and doubles as an open-world tutorial of sorts. I spent thirty hours of game time before I even left The Daunt, doing everything I possibly could and exploring every tower and cavern to the best of my ability. Oh, and half that time was in Photo Mode. I was loving it.

As I got deeper into the game, I appreciated all the new machines, the story, the tribes, the settlements, the new gameplay systems, the world, and literally everything about it. I was in awe. Guerrilla had taken everything about Zero Dawn and improved it tenfold. One big complaint from players in the first game was that the world felt too empty in the settlements. There was only one big city (Meridien) and the rest of the small towns felt lifeless. Well, now we have tons of cities and settlements across the Forbidden West, all teeming with life and people out and about. Standouts for me were Chainscrape, Plainsong, and Fall’s Edge, all of which featured different tribes in unique habitats. One more complaint from Zero Dawn players was the stiff facial animations, which was improved in the Frozen Wilds DLC but still wasn’t great enough. They truly made it “great” in Forbidden West. Characters move about and emote with their hands, they’re way more expressive, camera angles are a lot more dynamic, and all the models are highly detailed and textured. All of this adds to a vastly improved sense of immersion into the interactions.

The last “big complaint” was the climbing system. Zero Dawn’s release window alongside Breath of the Wild didn’t do it any favors, and begged comparison between the two, with Breath of the Wild offering a climb-anything-in-the-world system whereas Zero Dawn suffered from the oldschool you-can-only-climb-marked-handholds formula. Switching between the two games at the time was a disaster, with you feeling like you had stepped back into the stone age when going from Breath of the Wild to Horizon. Well, Forbidden West uses Death Stranding’s improvements to the Decima engine to mark climbable cliff edges and highlights them with yellow lines and x’s when using the Focus. It’s a huge improvement and makes wayfinding up a cliff or mountain a small platforming puzzle in itself. And best of all, Zero Dawn took a hint from Breath of the Wild and added a glider to slow the fall from tall heights. It greatly improves traversal and verticality in Horizon’s world.

The changes to gameplay systems in Forbidden West are also truly enormous. There are now weapon techniques, Valor Surges, big improvements to melee combat, and even consumable food that you can purchase from chefs in settlements. All these systems are fun, engaging, and add a nice layer of strategy to the combat. There’s even new elemental types, including Plasma, Purgewater, Berserk, and a few more variations. And a ton of new weapons like Drill Spikes, Shredder Gauntlets, Warrior Bows, and Boltblasters. It’s actually crazy how much they added to this game and how many tools Aloy has at her disposal to deal with combat encounters. They also took away some things from the first game that made the game a bit too easy, like the lure call feature to easily stealth kill machines from cover and the easily-abusable long dodge to avoid getting hit. They even took away my cherished Shield-Weaver armor (although it’s still available as a temporary buff in the form of a Valor Surge).

All these improvements are fantastic. I found myself frequently switching my Valor Surges to fit my objective at the time. One of my favorite things to do was to activate the Stealth Stalker Valor Surge, infiltrate a rebel holdout, stealth kill the leader without being spotted, and run out of there. Easy. Another common one I used a lot early on was Part Breaker to detach components from machines for upgrades. The weapons are all really fun and excellent too. Shredder Gauntlets became a staple in my late-game loadout, with their ability to deal a lot of damage at a long distance coming in incredibly handy. My go-to weapon techniques were Braced Shot on the Sharpshot Bow and Propelled Spike on the Explosive Spikes. The weapons are a huge step up from Zero Dawn, which only had a few options available.

Even the small quality-of-life improvements like being able to scroll through all the different parts of a machine and tag them are a big help in determining which parts you want to ensure not to destroy. The stash system is great and the removal of an inventory limit is a welcome change. I had many gripes with the messy inventory screen in Zero Dawn not categorizing everything into sections and being very messy overall, so I was glad to see that improved in Forbidden West. I’m a little surprised that they didn’t change the D-Pad menu much, though. You can now manually equip/remove items in slots and craft directly from there, but it doesn’t make interacting with it any easier. In the heat of combat, you still have to take your thumb off the movement stick to find a health potion, at which point you’re a sitting duck to be blasted into oblivion by a Thunderjaw’s disc launcher. I ended up just not using any potions due to this and just relying entirely on medicinal berries in my playthrough.

The new machines are all amazing. I thought they had run out of ideas after Zero Dawn, but they now have a compelling lore reason for why Hephaestus would need to make more combat machines, so they added a bunch of wild new machines. The Slitherfangs, Tremortusks, and Shellsnappers are truly difficult to fight. Then there’s Tiderippers and Slaughterspines, which are a new level of hell with their attacks. They added more “annoying” machines like Leaplashers and Clamberjaws, always found in packs of two or three who are very difficult to hit with arrows because they keep jumping around, so it forces you to whip out the new weapons and try a different strategy instead. There’s a bunch of new flying machines in addition to the old Glinthawks and Stormbirds, namely Skydrifters, Sunwings, and Dreadwings. Most of the Zero Dawn machines return, with the exception of the Strider, Broadhead, Trampler, and my personal favorite that I’m sad to see go — the Sawtooth. I guess it makes sense why they’re gone, since they’re too similar to some of the new weapons and Hephaestus is “evolving” in a way, but I do miss them.

One complaint I have is that the weapon management feels overtuned. There’s way too many variations of weapons with different ammo types and elemental effects. So many so that it’s really difficult to standardize a general all-purpose loadout for most of the game. The upgrades system is such that by the time you’re close to fully upgrading a weapon, you’re given the opportunity to buy a higher tier version of that weapon, rendering your effort in upgrading it useless. The higher-tier upgrade parts are also quite difficult to get, with legendary weapons often requiring multiple Apex machine hearts or difficult-to-obtain components like Sac Webbing. I appreciate what the game is trying to do, but it’s overdoing it, to its own detriment.

A big thing I appreciate about Forbidden West is everything it did to avoid open-world fatigue. The activities are all varied and interesting. The cauldrons and Tallnecks in particular are amazing and fresh every time. No two of them are similar and each one has different playstyles and objectives that you’re trying to accomplish. The cauldrons don’t even give you all the machine overrides, some of them are corrupted and you have to go out of your way to repair them with machine parts, which is a fun twist. There’s even more new activities like Survey Drones and Black Boxes, each of which are satisfying to collect. As if the game needed even more stuff, there’s now Gauntlet Runs (races) and a full-on Arena mode for challenges in addition to the return of the old Hunting Grounds. All great, all well done. There’s even a Machine Strike minigame, a chess-like board game that you can play with NPCs in the game. I played until the Intermediate level and sort of stopped after, but it’s a fun little addition to the game for sure.

The addition of puzzle-areas in the form of Relic Ruins are also so good. These take full advantage of Aloy’s new tools — the pullcaster and the grappling hook, to craft truly engaging puzzles with physics objects (primarily crates). These are also one of the few parts of the game where Aloy won’t outright tell you what to do next, so I really enjoyed piecing together the puzzles in these ruins. They felt like mini Tomb Raider areas or shrines from Breath of the Wild. And again, all of them are different and you’re never doing the same thing twice. They’re fun, unique, and moderately challenging.

Sidequests are also well done, with all of them having a compelling quest line and varied activities. Some of them are a lot longer than you’d expect and have decent rewards in store. I ended up completing all of them. The facial animations and voice acting does a lot to keep you motivated and see it through to the end, so hats off to everyone involved in these. The companions too are really great. This was something that’s sorely missing in Zero Dawn — Aloy was typically by herself the entire game. Now, there’s a full-on hub that serves as a base where people you recruit throughout your adventure hang out. The mix of different characters here is great. There’s typically one person from each tribe and they’re all learning about the old world together. The interactions between Zo, Varl, and Erend in particular are hilarious. In fact, any interaction involving Erend had me cracking a smile. I do wish they did more than just stand around in one place in the base, but I really appreciated seeing Aloy interact with her “friends” more regularly throughout the game. Most of the companions have great exposition dialogue where they acknowledge and comment on story events and even have their own questlines.

I loved that Talanah returned into the game, and how her story ties in to the events of the spinoff comic book. For some reason, I was expecting Aloy to recruit her as well to her base to help with the mission, but she doesn’t. I guess it would’ve make sense to have a Carja in the base, but also given that there’s Tenakth in the base, it probably makes sense why it wouldn’t be a good idea. Nevertheless, it was a little weird for Aloy to just say “bye” to Talanah after her quest while she could’ve used a good hunter to help her mission to literally save the world. Alva was also a really fun character to meet and recruit. Her personality and excitement to learn about the old world is truly delightful, and her beaming smile in every line of dialogue is infectious. Tilda also is a great character, unique and different from the Zeniths and yet a pseudo-ally to Aloy, at least temporarily.

As for the main story itself, I have to say it was a little underwhelming. Firstly, it nullifies the actions of the first game by essentially undoing the outcome of that game. Then, it introduces a not-so-interesting threat in the form of the Zeniths. Fans had speculated that this was what the game would be about, even going as far as to suggest that the name of the sequel would be “Horizon: Far Zenith”, and I was definitely slightly let down when I discovered that this was what the game would be about when the Zeniths appeared in the Death’s Door main quest. It’s just not that interesting to me personally, but it does affect Aloy quite significantly. She gets to meet and interact with Tilda, someone who personally knew Elisabet Sobeck, who Aloy has been holding up on a pedestal since she discovered the origin of her birth. The best part of the main story, in fact, is Aloy’s journey of discovering more about her personality through her interactions with Beta, another Elisabet clone. Aloy comes to realize the difference between nature vs. nurture in a unique way by contrasting her upbringing with someone who’s essentially an identical twin of hers. These were the best moments of the main story for me.

The ending of the game also feels extremely rushed. The Nemesis introduction felt extremely sudden and didn’t really have time to breathe or sink in. Horizon’s gameplay, in my opinion, is at its best when you’re slowly exploring a ruin or facility by progressively discovering information through datapoints and holograms. It tells the story through the eyes of someone who experienced the events and lets Aloy piece it together for herself. This was what made the reveal of Zero Dawn so impactful in the first game. There’s nothing in this game that quite hits that high, sadly. Getting to learn that Ted Faro’s greed and loneliness essentially ended up in him mutating himself into a monstrosity was a fun part of the main quest for sure, but not as dramatic as anything in Zero Dawn. The whole purpose of the Nemesis reveal is to clearly set up the third game to be an epic fight involving all the tribes, but I really wish it had more time to set in. Tilda’s “boss fight” in the end was also underwhelming. Like, she’s supposedly this extremely analytical and smart person who saw everything about Aloy’s life and was impressed with her feats. And then she completely underestimates her by fighting her and trying to take her along with her at the end. Very out of character, but at the same time, she’s also an egotistical Zenith, so that’s my headcanon. But hey, at least the final fight was a unique machine that we hadn’t already fought before in the story (unlike in Zero Dawn).

I haven’t even mentioned the mounts yet. This was another complaint from Zero Dawn. Players wanted to mount more machines. And now we can! Beyond the Charger (the “signature” mount), we can now mount Bristlebacks and Clawstriders. The Bristleback is a great mount. I frequently rode right into battle on a Bristleback that I had set to an “aggressive” override and watched it maul down machines while I was slinging shredders and spikes from a distance. I had some epic moments where the weather would change dramatically while I was doing this which made it feel incredibly cinematic, like a sandstorm or a blizzard. The Clawstrider is a bit of an awkward mount, it doesn’t go that fast and I primarily used it as a combat override when I needed a distraction for the large machine I was fighting.

And the best mount of all: the Sunwing. You don’t get this until very late into the game, but Guerrilla finally did it. Players have been begging for a flying mount, and here it is! It is truly surreal to soar around the skies on a Sunwing. Once I unlocked this, this became my primary mode of “fast travel” through the map, getting to appreciate the vistas and scenery in a new way from the sky. I love how the Sunwing grabs you and chucks you onto its back, and how you can grapple onto it as it’s hovering above you. It also has a great tie-in to the Tenakth tribes’ and their legacy. Soaring around San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge were truly some of my favorite moments in this entire game. I would frequently see a SF landmark while riding on the Sunwing and hop off to go admire it in-person. Really fun stuff.

Speaking of San Francisco, the “Isle of Spires” felt a little dead. The Quen, a new tribe from across the Pacific Ocean, made landfall there and setup a camp, but aside from that, SF plays almost no role in the main story aside from the Thebes bunker quest. I wish it felt more alive, but at the same time, it’s interesting how the tribes either couldn’t find a way across the water to get there or even if they could (like the Quen), they had absolutely no use for all these tall skyscrapers and buildings that we today hold dear with so much value as a symbol of progress and human achievement. Overall, the tribes were all really well done. I enjoyed learning about the Quen, the Tenakth, the Utaru, and the Oseram. Plainsong is such a beautiful location with its evolving score and state change throughout the game. The Tenakth settlements all look visually similar yet different to suit the tastes and styles of the clans. Lots of little outposts and settlements throughout really do evoke a “lived-in” feel to the entire world. Chainscrape offered a really nice feel to how the Oseram like to live, as I felt they were an underdeveloped tribe in Zero Dawn. All the little details in the tavern are spectacular. Seeing old characters like Petra was great too.

I’d be remiss not to mention my favorite quest in the entire game: “The Sea of Sands.” Everything about this is so well done, from meeting the three charismatic showmen the entire underwater sequence. The characters all have so much dialogue and exposition you can engage in, and it ties in to a permanent gameplay upgrade you can craft (the diving mask). Then you get into an underwater sequence with a rich backstory about Stanley Chen and the work he did to create the water filtration system in the Hot Zone Crisis which later results in a permanent state change to Dunehollow after you drain it of water. It’s so amazing to see the place all lit up in its glory, capped off with a Tideripper boss fight. I spent an hour just walking around and taking pictures in Photo Mode. The quest could’ve ended here and it would’ve been great, but it also results in a permanent state change in the overworld, where the Vegas ruins are lit up in lights which you can even change by turning in ornaments to add festive lights to the sky. And the whole place turns into a permanent settlement after this quest. Really, really incredible stuff. This was the highlight of the game for me.

I could honestly write forever about this game, but this feels like a good stopping point. After a hundred and twenty hours in the game, I’ve earned the Platinum trophy and done almost everything there is to do. I spent about fifteen hours in Photo Mode alone and captured over 700 screenshots, which is the most I’ve ever taken in a video game. I played this game religiously for a couple of hours every night since it came out for an entire month. Add some binge gaming sessions on the weekends and I easily clocked in over a hundred hours before I knew it. It’s just such a beautiful world to exist in and explore, in stark contrast to the gritty and dark feel of other open worlds. While many of my friends and peers are busy with Elden Ring, I just want to spend more time in the Forbidden West. I’m looking forward to the Burning Shores DLC that’s been so heavily hinted at in the datapoints (for which I’m certain that the Hoover Dam spot in the south side of No Man’s Land in the map is the entrypoint) sometime later. Until then, I’ll be taking even more pictures in Photo Mode of this beautiful, wonderful game. I’m thankful to Guerrilla that such an experience exists, and I’m compelled to get a PSVR2 solely for the Horizon Call of the Mountain standalone VR spinoff. Anyway, now begins the long wait for the final game in the Horizon trilogy!