"Zero Day--the day that life on Earth ceases to exist--is coming fast. It cannot be stopped."
--General Herres, Horizon: Zero Dawn
Exploring a world devastated by biofuel-consuming robots of a past epoch, Horizon: Zero Dawn presents a post-appcalyptic North America inhabited by tribes with their own philosophies and norms. Yes, there are only so many directions to go in when unveiling how machines almost eradicated humanity once and for all in a distant age, and Zero Dawn does a great job with its narrative execution, the aspect of storytelling which can always be implemented well even when there is little to no sheer novelty of core ideas. Full of hypocritical characters that think murder is worse than a prolonged, torturous execution in response, that unfamiliar technology is divine (when a material body could never be divine, as an uncaused cause, a true God, is immaterial), or that patriarchy or matriarchy are rational, the game features a protagonist that is supposed to be above such nonsense, but Aloy is far from a truly intelligent character, and she is not the figure of kindness and justice she is presented as (more on these things later). She does, however, have technology from the prior civilization, a Focus device which allows her to analyze environments and objects beyond the scope of her ordinary senses. With this item, she learns of the tragedy that befell the former humans and a plot that will eliminate all currently alive.
Production Values
As consistently smooth and clear as the character models, like that of Aloy, Rost, Vanasha, and Avad, and the machines typically are, the general graphical quality is not always unblemished. In one of the final story missions, after a Behemoth is defeated, the textures on a character named Helis and an arena crowd slowly appeared, contrasting with the rest of the game in my experience, where there was no such problem. The day/night and weather systems with the latter's dust storms and rain provide some environmental variety, but they are far from the incredible success of something like Dying Light, in which nighttime changes aspects of the gameplay dramatically. However, many of the cutscenes focus on the faces of characters, and, along with the voice acting (featuring the late Lance Reddick of John Wick), Horizon: Zero Dawn does shine here.
Gameplay
With the occasional sections of platforming and dialogue choices, the game largely focuses on exploration and combat. Zero Dawn forces players to gather resources in the open world to craft arrows and other projectiles or traps, yet there is the option of direct melee attacks instead of just relying on bows when it comes to fighting opponents. Scattered vegetation provides opportunities to strike up close for human or mechanical enemies, since hiding in tall plants obscures you from most nearby machines unless they already had noticed you, and certain outfits and modifications increase Aloy's stealth rating, allowing her to more freely walk or run in an open manner without risking detection as much. Up close, she can use her spear to inflict massive or even lethal damage on machine and human enemies alike. An icon with an eye and a noise indicator will alert you to your level of visibility and quietness. However, much of the game can be played with overt attacks using Aloy's bow, as well as special ammunition that deals greater damage, dislodges machine parts like mounted turrets (which can be picked up!), or detonates flammable materials.
Through the skill system, Aloy can also gain the ability to notch up to three arrows at once, aim her bow in slow-motion, override machines indefinitely (overriding is not applicable to corrupted machines), scavenge more resources and make more items from the same amount of resources, and so on. Along with the health bar that expands each time you level up and outfit and weapon modifications that enhance attributes like damage, this can make her quite powerful by the end of the game. That additional power and protection is very helpful when gradually confronting more aggressive or large machines. Eventually, crocodile (Snapmaw) and Tyrannosaurus-like (Thunderjaw) machines, the latter having a variety of projectile weaponry, along with other massive foes like the Stormbird, can be regularly found in specific areas, and early Aloy would have been almost totally helpless before them.
More weapons also become available for purchase, with different tiers permitting more modifications and ammunition types. The ropecaster is among these secondary weapons: it launches arrows into a machine that are connected by ropes to the ground, which lets Aloy trap massive or flying enemies in place temporarily. Stunned or confined, these machines are more vulnerable to having key components broken off. This and other weapons are put to the test in hunting trials scattered around the map, with challenges like using log traps to crush a certain number of Grazers within a time limit being rewarded with Blazing Suns that pertain to a location discovered partway through the main story. Along with these hunting grounds, optional missions take the form of errands, side quests, bandit camps, cauldrons, corruption zones, where Aloy can help miscellaneous characters, eliminate bandit groups, explore robot factories of sorts, and destroy altered machines.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
Centuries after a cataclysmic era that left only faint traces of the "Old Ones" (which might sound far more Lovecraftian than it really is in this context) like decaying buildings, a young girl named Aloy lives outside of the core settlements of the Nora tribe, cared for by Rost. When she accidentally falls underground, she acquires ancient technology that catalogues machines, identifies objects from a distance, and aids her investigative abilities. Shunned by the Nora as a "Motherless" outcast, she passes a tribal test to be welcomed, only to see the Nora get attacked by foreigners. Aloy embarks on a journey that takes her to the capital of the Sundom, the kingdom of the Sun led by the softer child of a "Mad King" who had other tribes sacrificed, enslaved, and tortured, as well as to the ruins of the Old Ones, where she starts uncovering evidence about what happened to these long-gone humans.
Intellectual Content
Aloy is not rationalistic, so she is not truly intelligent, and since she approves of or does nothing to outwardly object to the planned torturous execution of Dervahl, she is she is not ultimately kind or just in ways that truly matter. In part due to the enhanced perception from her Focus device, she is only prone to make observation-prompted inferences that happen to be true--if her senses are accurately perceiving things, which she never bothers to dwell on! She is absolutely not presented as someone who avoids assumptions and recognizes reason and its distinction from the senses and natural world, and she is even puzzled by the supposed "impossibility" of her seeming mother living many centuries prior. Since scientific laws and correlations are not logically necessary in themselves like axioms, they could be changed at any moment, and she pretends otherwise.
Aloy is not the only idiotic character, though Zero Dawn uses the characters to explore concepts of actual depth, like how technology could be mistaken for deities. The AIs themselves are delusional: for example, GAIA, designed to resurrect and foster life on Earth, says that in her creator Elizabet Sobeck, all things are possible, a laughably pathetic logical impossibility. Axioms cannot be false, along with any other contradiction; thus, neither Elizabet Sobeck nor God could do all things. From confusing subjective scientific perceptions for certain knowledge of how things objectively are to assuming that the sun is a divine being rather than a distant but probably natural source of light, characters like Sylens and Helix are little better than GAIA. Neither Aloy nor Sun-King Avad, the kindness-fixated ruler who has made progressive reforms after ending his father's tyrannical reign (including some that are Biblically valid), oppose plans to have someone tortured to death in a prolonged manner by another tribe because it will promote unity among the tribes.
There is a great deal that Zero Dawn touches on at least to some extent, like whether artificial intelligences like GAIA and the genocidal, malfunctioning HADES are actually consciousness--the game makes it seem as if they are. Likewise, it portrays both a society transitioning from patriarchy to egalitarianism (the Carja) and a matriarchal society that, while it has some sexist ideas about men and about the alleged glory of mothers, is functionally gender egalitarian on many levels (the Nora). The ways technology can be used to undo problems brought about by technology, whether or not emotional affection is important alongside rationality (not that anyone in the game is truly, thoroughly rational to any degree!), and the obvious fallacies in natural theology as commonly embraced all receive some attention as well. Some of these things and the way the game handles them are the subject of future posts, such as how the game promotes not only the error holding scientific familiarity is rationality, but also the error that without kindness, one's life is wasted.
Conclusion
Thematically, Horizon: Zero Dawn fastens itself to very emotionalistic and false ideas about sentiment, kindness, and intelligence, and practically every character is a total imbecile despite how some are presented as if the alternative is the case. This does not hinder the storytelling, worldbuilding, gameplay, and some of the philosophical concepts from reaching genuine heights. With at least 40-50 hours of content between mandatory and optional quests (along with collectible hunting), a cautionary narrative revealed through a slow burn mystery, an excellently-realized machine combat system, and great character models, Zero Dawn still has a lot that merits admiration. Perfection in art is not required for some parts of the whole to be masterful, and here, this is so. May Forbidden West, which I have yet to play at the time of writing this, be as excellent!
Content:
1. Violence: Fighting machines throws loose components off of their bodies, and shooting humans with arrows or attacking them with Aloy's staff briefly draws blood. There is no gore in the human combat.
2. Profanity: Words like "damn" and "bastards" are used sometimes.
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