So I’ve Finished: Horizon: Forbidden West

I’ve finished playing Horizon: Forbidden West and its DLC Burning Shores after several dozen hours of playtime. It’s an open-world game of the first type— a world full of icons to go and remove — with characters and a story to propel the action within its open world.

This blog post contains mechanical and story spoilers.

Broadly, Forbidden West is Horizon: Zero Dawn version 2. Or, less charitably, at least like version 1.5. Traversal has improved with more mount options, climbing, and (late-game) flying. The world is certainly larger and so benefits from more variety and options for getting around. It is once again the prettiest thing I’ve played to date, which shows an impressive investment given the rate at which graphic fidelity improves in “prestige” video games.

But it’s still the same game as before. Good and bad. So I’ll stick mostly to differences as I talk about it.

It’s a sequel that serves the original well as a continuation of the themes (such as they are) and story and characters and so forth. Story-wise it holds together, but it feels… blander? Zero Dawn’s story and setting felt sharper. Keener. Like it had an edge it was trying to work into you. It probably came from the mystery of not knowing quite how everything went wrong in the past, which the sequel doesn’t need to re-solve.

It’s bigger. But it’s too much. I’ve got come completionist energy in me and I felt tired sometimes opening the map and seeing everything demanding my attention. I’d like less game next time, please.

It’s good at user choice, though. I loved being able to turn off most of the HUD. Even when I got flying in late-game and had turned off “buttons do what now?” displays hours previous and had to figure it out _on the fly_ (I will not apologize) it felt really nice to be figuring things out at the same time Aloy was. Or. Well. …she is rather instantaneously competent in everything, isn’t she. What happened to “Gosh, this is new and something I’ve never encountered: I’ll need to work my way through figuring out how to do things”?

And turning off resource pickup animations while leaving in the button press to choose to harvest? Interesting balance (God of War: Ragnarok had the inverse: no button press, but animation remained). I like it.

It does a decent job of suggesting a world that would exist without you (unlike Breath of the Wild which is clearly a playground built for you and doing nothing when you’re not playing on it. More on that in an upcoming So I’ve Finished for Tears of the Kingdom). The NPCs are in their daily lives, the monsters only autoscale minimally (you will be roflstomped if you step wrong), and vast tracts of the map are just irrelevant unless you have an itch to go there. But for a game so gosh darn pretty down to every detail, it really doesn’t hold together if you look at it?

Maybe they hot-swap their bunks. Maybe the only flirt over dinner by a campfire and not at a dinner table. Maybe every communal activity happens out in the open. But where’s the gorram sawmill? Where are the latrines?

And would it pain them to introduce a user choice mechanic that actually did something? Sure, I could save Regalla for like fifteen whole extra minutes from her possible execution for her crimes until she gets crushed by some rocks in one of the final battles. But don’t pretend that the Heart/Mind/Fist choices for dialogue mattered one whit.

And here’s where we talk about Burning Shores. I liked getting more Quen. I liked having a default secondary party member who was actually kinda okay at what she did. I liked the setting of Los Angeles. I liked the bombastic final battle where we finally got a Horus to move. I liked the stupid Jurassic Park stuff. And I liked Aloy’s and Seyka’s relationship evolving naturalistically over the (limited) runtime.

But putting in that Heart/Mind/Fist choice at the end about whether you reciprocate just to turn around and let Seyka walk off into the sunset? It’s a little bit of cowardice, isn’t it? Yes, there was precious little else they could do given the systems available to the game: but why was this relationship Extra Downloadable Content if it was important? And don’t tell me it’s not important when our heroine Aloy has been struggling for two games to connect with a species she’s been shunned from for most of her life _and_ is paradoxically committed to saving?

It made me mad. Well, not really, because the experience up until then had been so… rounded and bumpered and softened that I could feel it coming.

I was disappointed.

Which is a shame, ’cause I had some great fun with the game and I’ll totally be playing the sequel which will no doubt be called “Horizon: Nemesis”. This is just some weariness at “prestige” decisionmaking, I guess.

Anyhoo, if you’re in the mood for more Horizon: Zero Dawn then my opinion is that Horizon: Forbidden West is a lovely way to spend several dozen hours. I just hope they get a little more ambitious (and not in scale, please not in scale) for the finale.