Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West review

I Died and Went to Science Fiction Heaven

*from Playstation.com website. No copyright infringement intended.

January 15, 2025

Categorization: Science Fiction

Where played: Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West on PS4 and PS5, respectively

One sentence non-spoiler description: Heroine explores world discovering wonderful, interesting, and funny moments of history about how that world and its amazing robotic life came to be, and in the process, discovers her own mysterious origin.

Non-spoiler experience: I was mooching around at home during the pandemic, Google-researching desperately for something to play to keep my mind off the end of the world, the lockdowns, and the fear that everything would soon be nationalized and my country would revert into a post-revolution-type anarchy, when I came across this “Horizon Zero Dawn” in my search for my next game to play.

“Hello”, I said. “What is this?”

It has a terrible name, obviously, the kind that sounds like a first-person shooter (I despise first person shooters and first person anything). But as Google reassured me that it was not, I proceeded to download it onto my PS4.

And my world turned over.

This game is what I call a life-expander, where your life experience increases so much that you can never be returned to who you were before it. I have obviously gotten this concept from The Sims, where certain achievements give you “life experience” for being so groovy and fulfilling, and all these different life experiences accumulate to make up the final and best version of yourself.

(Conversely, there is also such a thing as “negative life-experience”, which I will take up another time.)

Anyway…

I could absolutely not get enough of exploring Horizon Zero Dawn’s true open world, which so effectively encouraged exploration with the mysterious and entertaining lore hiding in every rock, cave, and crevice. And this is indeed a true open world, where you can swim, dive, fall, climb, gather plants to make stuff, and fight (or in some cases, ride) nearly every creature you come across. Upon discovering a piece of lore, you would hear voices from the past talking about the scientific discoveries, culture, and the wonderful, small things that total (in a “more than the sum of its parts” sense) the life that came before the post-apocalyptic world Aloy (the Heroine) finds herself in. It isn’t a Skyrim or Baldur’s Gate level open-world (where you can interact on a number of levels with NPCs and random objects), but those are rare (in Skyrim’s case, once-in-a-generation rare) and special; this is close enough.

Moreover, all  the side quests are brilliant at world-building, contributing to making you care for the characters Aloy meets on the way and her (and your) own personal journey, as well as keeping you invested in the world’s diverse environments and immersed with the pervading feeling of needing to KNOW WHAT HAPPENED that created the beautiful desolation you find yourself in. There is just a wonderful sense of discovery with every new landscape and robotic animal encountered. The graphics are top-notch and every tree, metal giraffe, T-Rex and steel hidey-hole is fantastically rendered, to be better than my imagination when I attempt to conjure similar dystopia-type worlds from my reading.

The combat was fun too, of course, as I adored and derived a lot of satisfaction from stealth shooting from the tall grass with my bow and arrow (there are also traps but I am not clever or patient enough to be a trapper-rogue type, so those I only used when I had no other alternative or had died too many times with my default gameplay style – that is to say, being a rank coward) and picking off the heads of my distant enemies. I loved hearing their companions wonder aloud at the sudden disappearance of their clansmen then look around at each other in a puzzled way, which would then be my cue to finish the stragglers off by ambushing them from my hiding place!

I know, I know, I am not exactly the bravest of them all.

But lest you fear that this game would not appeal to, you know, non-cowards, let me assuage your fears by explaining here that there are many ways to approach the combat,  and for those who require a bit more mental stimulation than the brainpower required to aim an arrow (or two) at a unarmored, tattooed head, there are also Tomb Raider-type puzzles to solve, and fun humongous-type beasts that crush you while you are running around trying to simultaneously dodge and heal yourself with blades of grass or whatever. I recall spending a joyous afternoon (and when I say afternoon, I do mean the entire four hours of the afternoon) trying to kill a huge T-Rex type creature with all kinds of special elemental arrow ammunition from behind a rock on a distant hill. Since I was as usual being, err… what polite goblins would call “cautious”, it took ages to shoot off all its armour and nail its exact weak points. Of course, when impatience got the better of me and I would attempt to venture closer to the dinosaur, it would immediately spot me, run much faster than any steel enormity has any right to, and proceed to unceremoniously maul poor Aloy. Good times.

It only took me a bit more than a month to finish but I literally cried at the end of Horizon Zero Dawn, both for Aloy’s story– the journey and destination (Journey before destination!) - and I think, a bit for the fact that it was over. It was a tearful tribute to one of the most amazing science fiction rides I have ever been on (books and TV included).

Horizon Forbidden West is gratifyingly more of the same, but don’t bother playing it without playing Horizon Zero Dawn first.

horizon zero dawn review , horizon forbidden west review