Horizon Forbidden West

Just like its predecessor, Horizon Forbidden West is a perfectly decent open-world adventure game that excels when it comes to offering spectacle but suffers from a bland, predictable protagonist, and a world that, despite making a great first impression, lacks mystery and depth.

Aloy, the young outcast turned savior, is now looking for the backup of Gaia, an AI designed to control the terraforming process that is now destroying her machine-infested world. To that end, the now famous Nora hunter heads west, into Tenakth territory, tracking down her old mentor, Sylens, who has kept things from her and may know about Gaia’s location.

Now that she’s deemed a savior by the Carja people and even had a statue built in her image, Aloy is not the same outcast girl that left her village to avenge her adoptive father. She’s as driven as before – the typical lone wolf protagonist of modern gaming that lets no one stand in their way – but now she’s also confident and imposing. She single-handedly saved the world in Zero Dawn and is now very aware of her abilities. So, in the game’s first hours, we watch her frequently tell a stuck-up priest to shush, and one time she even ignores the orders of a captain and tries to burst a town’s gate open – challenging both religion and the law.

Aloy is quick to take the lead when any problem arises, for she often considers herself the only solution to these problems. She is confident that she can take on any machine, any rebel camp, any rogue faction, and all at the same time if it comes to that. She’s not insufferable only because Ashly Burch manages to imbue her character with a good sense of empathy towards others – Aloy seems to genuinely care about the people and want to help.

Aloy’s quite simple narrative arc, then, is about taming her arrogance: even though she believes she can do anything alone, that’s up to her and only her to save the world, she must learn to ask others for help and make some friends. Her first interactions with Varl and Erend, two friends she made in Zero Dawn, serve to reinforce how she’s the typical lone wolf: she not only tries to convince them that she must go after Gaia alone, but she even abandons one of them in the middle of the night.

One of Forbidden West’s strengths comes in how it explores this theme with Aloy’s base of operations. It works similarly to the protagonist’s ship in Mass Effect: as she starts to recruit people to her cause, the characters Aloy befriends all go to this base where they have brief interactions with each other, become available to have lengthy conversations, and eventually offer a specific sidequest to her.

The problem here is that, more often than not, these characters don’t have much to say that is really compelling or revealing, especially since they all share the same topics of conversation. They can either talk about their opinion of other characters – it’s usually “first impressions weren’t good but I have now warmed up to them” –, or talk about what they have learned about the old world – it’s usually “look how this specific technology is very curious” –, or about their thoughts on the villains – it’s usually “they really are bad people, aren’t they?” –, or about what just happened in the story – it’s usually just a recap of recent events.

This means that these characters are given little room to grow. They are rarely given situations where they can really interact with each other, and test and push each other, creating opportunities for conflict to arise and reveal new layers about them. Consequently, in the end, if we skip all these optional lines of dialogue, we won’t miss much about these characters, which is a shame.  Therefore, the base may even help build one of the game’s main themes – the idea that companions are necessary – but it had the potential to be much more.

Just like with Aloy, the actors do a lot of the heavy lifting here, managing to lend a bit of texture to these side characters – usually, a fatalist melancholy that is fueled by the idea that they are all going to die –, but this is hardly enough to make them complex or engaging. Varl suffers a lot from this, as he even lacks that one remarkable trait – such as Zo’s religion and Erend’s brute nature – that helps make a character stand on their own, and so the narrative must resort to shock value to make him memorable.

But it’s not just the actors that do a tremendous job in bringing these characters to life. Facial animations in Forbidden West are wonderfully expressive, too. There’s an early moment when Aloy wakes up in a foreign village and witnesses Varl reassuring Zo – who, at this moment, is a complete stranger to Aloy – that she couldn’t have done anything to save a sacred machine. After he insists that what happened is not Zo’s fault, there’s a brief instant of complete silence – a couple of seconds, really, just a pause – where Aloy gives a look that shows how she found Varl’s reassurances odd, as if noticing the romance brewing.

Despite these elements, Forbidden West ultimately fails to really capitalize on Aloy’s character arc. The issue here is that the gameplay really turns her into a one-woman-army who can take on any challenge alone and get out of any ridiculous battle unscathed. Aloy believes that she doesn’t need friends and the game proves she’s right: we are given the tools and power to take on any challenge alone without much of an issue. Even when the plot crafts a need for Aloy’s friends to be there, it’s usually just because she needs to create a distraction.

The most fascinating side character is also played by Ashly Burch – a woman named Beta – but only because she amplifies Aloy’s arc: with Beta, the protagonist’s strength and determination, and her unshakable will, are all framed as a source of a sense of superiority. When a villain tells Aloy that she’s superior to others because of her traits, they are tapping precisely into her arrogance to manipulate her, and they use a direct comparison to Beta to accomplish this.

Most of the villains in Forbidden West, however, are just as bland as the ones in Zero Dawn. The first one to show up is a Tanekth woman, Regalla, who hates the Carja and seeks to extend the cycle of violence and war between both peoples. We learn this as soon as she is introduced… and there’s nothing else about Regalla until the end – hence why not even the great Angela Bassett can save her from tediousness.

But the main villains are the Zeniths, a bizarre group of cartoonish and over-the-top characters that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Metal Gear game. One of them talks about enjoying the sound that people’s necks make when he breaks them, while another refers to the Tenakth and the Carja as “local vermin.” Just one of them is given any semblance of a complex personality, but unfortunately, this character starts to be developed too near the end of the game to have an actual chance to make an impact.

Aloy’s old “mentor”, Sylens, meanwhile, keeps shifting between ally and antagonist. He’s just like Aloy – he wants to save the world by himself but eventually realizes he needs help – and so he keeps sending Aloy cryptic messages, making her chase answers that he already possesses.  It’s one of those characters that could have saved everyone a good deal of time if they hadn’t decided to be secretive for no good reason. He tries to justify this behavior more than once, but the excuses never ring true: a puppet master like Sylens would not keep this one-woman-army wandering lost and unchecked in the wilds instead of manipulating her to help him – precisely like he did in Zero Dawn.

Speaking of Zero Dawn, the general narrative continues to build upon the themes of the previous game. One of the first sidequests, for example, is about a man that sees omens in perfectly explainable phenomena, endangering his people and himself in the process. “You’ve punctured a lung. You can’t heal it with prayer,” Aloy tries to explain. “The Sun will provide,” he insists, letting his faith bind him and prevent action.

The Tenakth are people who call holograms “visions” and treat AI as gods – and in the game’s first mission, Aloy continuously chastises Varl for doing the same. Tradition remains framed in a bad light, an abstract prison that shackles the people and prevents them from saving themselves. Some characters even plot assassinations to preserve it, while others call tradition a rot that harms society from the inside.

The previous game’s Achilles heel also remains: the fact that the ancient mysterious civilization that so eludes Aloy is basically ours makes it devoid of any actual mystery. The dramatic irony (when we know something the characters don’t) at play here is at odds with the unveiling of the unknown that should guide exploration: there’s no mystery when we’ve already got most of the answers.

This means that Forbidden West is at its most banal when it has Aloy exploring more ancient installations in search of answers:  they all look and function the same and the answers given all sound and function the same as well. There will be tons of holograms and data points offering exposition, revealing things that could have been inferred without them, especially since it always comes down to “rich people made scientists do this.”  The idea that the world can be destroyed by the hubris of a couple of billionaires is an obvious one, after all, and doesn’t warrant constant explanation.

Forbidden West feels very familiar to anyone who has played Zero Dawn. Its structure remains unchanged – even sidequests still have Aloy following tracks marked by her Focus –, the general themes are the same – revenge even comes back at some point –, and the characters are similar – the Tenakth are not that different from the Carja.

Gameplaywise, it hasn’t evolved too much either: the way we approach the world and overcome its obstacles has undergone very small changes. Climbing, for example, is supposed to be more seamless, as the climbable ledges are not marked with color anymore – at least by default. However, since Aloy still can’t climb anywhere, this just makes it harder to detect if a spot in a wall or mountain is climbable or not without using the Focus – Horizon’s version of the “special vision” so common in modern gaming. This forces us to spam the focus, which can get tiresome.

There’s a Breath of the Wild glider now, which works pretty much the same as in Zelda, and a grappling hook – with a ridiculous animation that is supposed to make Aloy look cool – that can be used only in specific spots. Stealth, meanwhile, continues to be goofy, as Aloy remains completely hidden in bushes that leave the upper half of her body exposed, while enemy AI has guards say “Oh, I guess it was a false alarm,” when standing over the corpse of two of their colleagues.

This means that the spectacle around its combat is still Horizon most striking feature: Aloy shoots arrows at robot dinosaurs, removing parts of them when her shots are carefully aimed. These creatures are fast and relentless, much more aggressive than in Zero Dawn, closing the distance to Aloy quickly, and dealing great damage with each of their attacks. Most fights are intense experiences and the whole thing is indeed visually impressive.

The recovery animation here, however, is a bit slow. So, when dinosaurs come for Aloy from all directions in small arenas – such as the actual in-game Arena – the fights become a chaotic mess, especially since enemies can stun-lock Aloy together in higher difficulties.

Puzzles, meanwhile, are few and far between and the answers are spelled out to us even if we check “minimal guidance” on the settings menu. There’s this one time when Alloy needs to find a passcode to open a door and there’s a log right next to it saying that this password is the month and year a certain company was founded. Right after we read the log, Aloy says its contents out loud – just in case we didn’t read it – and her companion immediately gives the answer: October, 2023. We didn’t have the means to find this information by ourselves in the game, so this part is necessary, even though it means it renders the puzzle moot. But, adding insult to injury, as soon as Aloy goes to the pad to input the answer, she says, “So the company was found in October…,” and the same companion shouts what could be only described as the most condescending piece of advice ever given in a game: “Which is the tenth month of the year!”

In the end, despite its spectacle and the occasional engaging battle, Horizon Forbidden West is dragged down by its big cast of underdeveloped characters and shallow, repetitive world-building.

April 21, 2023.