Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn is a competent open-world action-adventure that has a strong start and great art direction. If it doesn’t reach the heights of its peers, it’s mainly due to its disjointed narrative and serious dissonances between gameplay and story.

The world of Horizon Zero Dawn is full of bestialized mechanical monsters: robots that look and act like tigers, buffalos, alligators, and even dinosaurs. The protagonist is Aloy, a young female hunter that grew up as a pariah because of the circumstances of her birth. When the mechanical menace becomes unbearable, however, Aloy is finally welcomed to her tribe and is tasked to save not only her people but the entire world.

“We’re outcasts” is one of the first things her adoptive father, Rost, says to Aloy. She grows up mostly alone, having only Rost to talk to. When the people of her tribe speak to her, they do so in secret, since they can be punished for the crime: outcasts are to remain outcasts. Aloy’s first objective, then, is to finally belong: if she wins the aptly called Proving – a tournament that tests the strength and resilience of its young participants and works as a kind of rite of passage – she can become part of the very tribe that shunned her, and find out about her origins in the process.

She trains with Rost every day with that goal in mind, even though she knows that even if she wins the Proving, some people will still not accept her. For some, once an “other,” always an “other”: the need to transfer one’s frustrations to another human being, hating them to feel better about oneself, usually trumps empathy. Therefore, for some, Aloy will be always a curse, a bad omen, and the one to blame if anything bad happens.

The writing is far from subtle when it comes to establishing this theme: the idea behind “We’re outcasts,” for example, is repeated several times during the first few hours of the game. Aloy is frequently bullied for being an outcast and frequently reminded that she’s an outcast, that an outcast would never win the Proving, and that she will forever be an outcast. It’s repetitive, but precisely because of the repetition it builds an oppressive atmosphere: the entire world is against Aloy and she knows it.

These first hours mark the point in which Horizon is at its best, even though they still show some of the game’s biggest issues. There is an emblematic scene of ludonarrative dissonance right at the beginning, for instance. The scene is supposed to serve as a way to demonstrate how the device Aloy got in some ruins – called Focus – can help her while she’s hunting. There is a boy in need of rescue and a robotic beast prowling the area, but Aloy manages to avoid the creature and save the kid by using the Focus to see the path the machine always takes. The scene pictures the characters truly flabbergasted at how she is capable of predicting the creature’s behavior, but the issue here is that the pattern the player saw was a very simple one: the creature moved in a small circle. In other words, the protagonist needed a special device to see a very basic movement pattern and the other characters are astounded by her feat, making everyone in the scene sound profoundly stupid.

The Focus is a constant source of dissonance between gameplay and story, often making us question the protagonist’s abilities. The game is trying to sell us how awesome Aloy is but does not give us too many reasons to buy this idea. Aloy will eventually get the fame of being a skilled hunter, but most of the time she just uses the Focus to track her prey. The device highlights tracks that she can follow and even identifies some of the people she meets. With the Focus even a child could become a great tracker, but the game wants the player to believe that is Aloy’s skill that is at play.

To make matters worse, there are times when there’s no need for the Focus for us to question how great her abilities are. There is a mission, for example, in which a high official calls upon her tracking expertise to solve a murder, which is eluding the authorities. When she arrives at the crime scene, Aloy, with her great tracking skills, is able to spot… huge wheel marks on the ground that go on for miles.

The game’s mission structure is hardly innovative as well, copying the rulebook from games like Assassin’s Creed, the Arkham Series, and The Witcher 3. There are towers that need to be climbed to unlock parts of the map – now these towers move, which doesn’t change much since the player only needs to wait at a specific location to jump at them at the right time, but at least adds spectacle – and bandit camps that need to be cleared. There are dozens of collectibles scattered throughout the environments and hundreds of pieces of – mostly irrelevant – lore to be discovered.

Sidequests also follow the established rules of the genre. There is usually a person of interest that Aloy needs to find, and so she goes to the last spot they were seen. She turns on the Focus and proceeds to follow the tracks that are now highlighted on the screen. At the end of the tracks, she finds the missing person and either a battle or a conversation follows. The quality of the missions, then, depends solely on the strength of the combat and of the writing.

The latter is hit-and-miss. Sometimes it develops interesting characters based on moral conundrums. One of the most memorable sidequests follows a warrior named Nil, who helps Aloy clear bandit camps. However, he helps her not out of the goodness of his heart, but because criminals are authorized prey. He takes pleasure in killing others, and so sees in bandits the perfect way to make his sadism ethically hidden and justified. The motto “a good criminal is a dead criminal” makes his day.

But sidequests are rarely about such interesting figures. Aloy will usually have to find a missing daughter, sibling or loved one, or avenge their deaths. The usual enemies are the Shadow Carja, a tribe of endless irredeemable thugs. As one of the characters describes them: “The Shadow Carja are animals.” And they are indeed treated like that by the narrative: despite their huge numbers, rare is the case in which one of its members is portrayed like a real person. They are a “shadow cult” that worships a “devil”.  They can’t get more one-dimensional.

It’s a pity, then, that the main antagonists in the game are precisely from the Shadow Carja: its leaders and the “devil” they worship. They lack any personality whatsoever and hardly make for great or memorable villains. The only thing that makes them a bit interesting is their relationship with the so-called devil: most tribes in the world of Horizon see the machines in a religious light. After all, they don’t understand them. As Arthur C. Clarke’s third law states, any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic. Religion in Horizon Zero Dawn is depicted as a means of coping with the unknown, sometimes with good intentions, but sometimes – as is with the Shadow Carja – with bad.

The villains in the game, therefore, are all one-dimensional in their wickedness. There’s a moment in the game when Aloy stops a coup from happening and the game gives the option to talk to the enemy leader, who is now imprisoned. You may think that he’ll sound a bit more human now that he’s in a fragile, defeated position, but he’s still as evil as ever.

Despite that, the major problem regarding the narrative is that, after the Proving, the pacing comes to a halt. Aloy just goes from a ruin of the “old world” to the next and watches holograms of scientists explaining what could have possibly gone wrong with the state-of-the-art AIs they envisioned for their robot dinosaurs. Aloy no longer grows as a character: her quest now is just for knowledge and revenge. And killing hundreds of Shadow Carja minions mitigates the catharsis of the revenge plotline, as she has already murdered a lot of the people responsible.

The thing is: although the world of Horizon Zero Dawn is unique and very beautiful to look at, the story behind it is just cliché. Why are there machines running rampant? Anyone who has ever watched any Terminator movie has a very good idea: a dream of “self-sustained truly automated technology” gone wrong.  The story stops being about Aloy and starts to be about the lore of that “old world”. The player enters a room and there are four to six holograms, sound files, and text files about the “old world” waiting for them. Main questlines are filled with info dumps that don’t matter in the least since they can be summarized in two sentences: Aloy is a spoiler / machines have gone rogue and are destroying the world. We kind of knew that from the premise.

The question about Aloy’s origins is hardly important thematically: it doesn’t matter who her parents were. What matters is that, because of who her parents were, she was exiled as a baby. What matters is that her tribe treated her as sub-human simply because she was different. It’s the consequence that matters; not the particulars about the cause.

Now, when it comes to the gameplay, Horizon is your typical third-person open-world adventure. Aloy can explore a vast lush world and her main weapons are her spear and bow-and-arrow. There is an emphasis on crafting, which means Aloy needs to be constantly picking resources on the ground to make her arrows and potions. The mechanical beasts have weak parts that can be removed if damaged, and are generally fairly aggressive, making for adrenaline-filled fights. The human enemies are considerably less dynamic, though, firing weapons at Aloy at a safe distance or coming to hit her up-close with a spear. There are some additional weapons Alloy can buy, but she can safely ignore them and just stick with the main ones. And, when it comes to exploration, the game is pretty much quest-driven. If the player spots an interesting structure and goes there, normally nothing will happen if the quest about that place is not active.  Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn is not.

Horizon Zero Dawn never comes close to brilliance, but it’s a fairly good open-world game. Its protagonist has a strong personality and, during the first hours, a great narrative arc. Unfortunately, the game loses track of what’s important, putting the focus on story elements that are the most known tropes of science fiction.

October 21, 2019.