We’re reeling off some of our favourite games of the last seven years to celebrate the eighth generation of consoles. Next on the agenda: tallnecks and revelations.
Released three days before cultural juggernaut The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn suffered a little by having its lunch eaten by Nintendo’s open world behemoth. Thankfully, players didn’t sleep on Horizon, one of the most enjoyable open world games in this console generation, and one of the best post-apocalyptic stories told in games.
Horizon Zero Dawn follows Aloy, a young girl living in a far future world where human civilization has fallen, leaving only tribes of people with no memory of the world that came before — and also, robot animals stomping all over the place, though no one is sure why. Aloy and her father live in exile due to ~mysterious events of the past~, and she vows to unravel the mystery of her absent mother, which leads to a vast map-spanning conspiracy involving warring factions, kingdoms going to war, and lots and lots of fighting said robot animals.
The world-building in Aloy’s era is fascinating and rich, with each group you meet having distinct fashion and cultural beliefs. This makes the post-post-apocalyptic world of Horizon feel well-realized and lived in. These civilizations haven’t just been sitting around twiddling their thumbs until the main character was born — they have rich histories and dense mythologies that make everything feel heavy with the passage of time.
Even better is the game’s depiction of the actual end of the world. Horizon Zero Dawn may well have the best audiologs/diary entries/strategically-placed exposition bits in any video game ever. The story that unravels in the past, about the fall of our own society and the drastic and terrible disaster that led to the world being what it is now, certainly hits a little differently in 2020, but it’s an absolutely riveting and gut-wrenching drama about unchecked ambition and the elite’s inability to take responsibility for their actions, dooming the rest of the world. Not that there’s any relevance in that today or anything.
The game’s art and character design all excel in telling the story and making the different cultures feel distinct. Every costume in the world is loaded with significant detail, and every setting, from the metropolis of Meridian to the alpine settlement of Mother’s Heart, is equally bursting with visual splendor. The game is just straight-up gorgeous and the overflowing amount of detail never makes it feel cluttered. Instead, it all feels more vividly real, especially when observing any of the complex machine animals up close.
Exploring the world of Horizon also just feels good. Even though the game gives you the ability to mount and ride certain horse-adjacent machines early on, I almost never did, because I preferred running around and exploring on foot. Yes, it took longer to get from place to place, but when the trees look this good, and everywhere you turn there’s a beautiful river or a submerged skeleton of a skyscraper, taking a little longer to get to the next mission doesn’t seem so bad.
Finally, all of the charm and detail of Horizon would not land nearly as well if Aloy, our main character, wasn’t a compelling entry into the world. Thankfully, she is, and a masterful performance by Ashly Burch elevates what could have been a typical avatar without personality into a nuanced, compelling character. Burch’s performance is genuine and heartfelt in the story’s emotional scenes, but with warmth and dry humor in the game’s sillier moments. Even incidental lines, like when collecting crafting supplies in the wild, never feel repetitive. Aloy is a protagonist you instantly want to root for, and that affection only grows deeper the further her story unravels.
Expectations are quite high for Horizon’s next-gen sequel, Forbidden West, and whatever surprises the people at Guerrilla Games have in store for us, they can rest assured they’ve already made at least one masterpiece of open world gaming, post-apocalyptic storytelling, and science fiction in any medium, let alone video games. No pressure.
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