Zero

Horizon Zero Denouement

Chris Leave a comment

I finally finished Horizon Zero Dawn. I took my time, doing most of the upgrades, finishing every side quest, doing almost every hunting trial with a complete success, collecting most of the outfits and weapons and all that. It was good, though I’ll be the first to say that though the text logs are super interesting, they’re a little too hidden away and difficult to find for any but the plot-centric ones to be worth getting. I thought I did a pretty good job of looking, but I definitely did not, seeing as I found maybe a third of the non-plot data logs. I could look up a guide and hunt them all down, but that just does not feel worth it when I could move on to other games, like playing Ghost of Tsushima again or playing The Witcher 3 for the first time (it was on sale!).

All said and done, it was worth playing. I had a good time, enjoyed most of the gameplay, and only got bored three times. And it wasn’t game-terminal boredom, just session-terminal. I was able to take a day or two off of hunting for raccoon pelts and bellowback hearts before returning to the game, refreshed and ready to hunt again.

While there were definitely some difficult parts early on, the availability of arms and gear meant that by the time I hit level thirty, fights weren’t a challenge anymore. It was only ever a question of how much time and how many resources it would take to finish it. The only times I died is when I fucked up a hunting trial and decided it was easier to just die since I spent too many resource to just try again. I even successfully killed a giant t-rex monster robot called a Thunderjaw way earlier than I should have been able to by cheap-shotting it with fire arrows from behind a rock it couldn’t path its way around. It took, like, fifteen minutes, but I brought it down.

The narrative was worth binging, though, so I’m glad I largely ignored it until I was mostly finished exploring and sidequesting through an area. It’s not that it wasn’t memorable, but that it had a degree of urgency to it that was difficult to ignore most of the time. While the robotic movements and painfully awkward expressions of the characters in cutscenes was difficult to watch, the plot itself was enough to carry me along. It twisted in not entirely surprising ways, but it gave me villains to hate, assholes to yell about, causes to believe in, and a twist I didn’t expect. I always thought it was going to be a global warming/environmental thing that wrecked the world, but that wasn’t it. Turns out that problem was solved. It was something else that revolved around the hubris of humankind that ultimately did us in.

That being said, I felt like there wasn’t enough plot. It felt like maybe ten hours of plot stretched into sixty hours of game by refusing you the information you want until near to the end, at which point it just dumps it all on you at once. There were a couple places where the protagonist, Aloy, interrogates another character about some big plot element (usually about a character) that is just a bunch of question prompts, the option to bail out of this massive dialogue tree, and an NPC just word-vomiting. It felt kinda of stilted, to have it all dumped out at these points. I’d have preferred never knowing to this kind of expository dumping.

While I’m super excited for the next game, and very interested in what might be going on in this next segment, I do feel a little restless. The final conclusion to the game wasn’t terribly satisfactory. Not merely because it was a setup for a sequel (as far as sequel bait goes, this was relatively mild), but because it just felt sort of abrupt. We’re chasing this thing down, fighting to save the world, and then we beat the big bad and it’s just over. No wrap up, no denouement, just a final cutscene to set up the next game. I know that unresolved plot is the key to a new story and that I literally just wrote a post about wonder and the space between certainties, but I don’t like it when it feels like those things were created by cutting holes in something.

I would definitely recommend the game and this is one gripe in an otherwise wonderful distraction and experience, but it is pretty heavily on my mind as I reflect on the conclusion to the game. There was just a world demanding so much of Aloy, a moment of victory, and then a lead-in to the next plot. Seriously, it just feels like they clipped the actual denouement out of the game. It’s a frustrating end to a lovely game.

Dawn of the Second Play

Chris Leave a comment

After over three years, I’ve finally returned to Horizon Zero Dawn. I bought it back in 2018, started playing it, and then stopped because of some overly critical comparisons to Breath of the Wild (which I had just finished replaying) and a significant frustration that it LOOKED like I could climb anywhere if I did it right, but the game wouldn’t really let me do that. I never really got back to it because one of my roommates played through it and I dislike playing anything that he’s played where he can watch because he is terrible at not spoiling things. Just the worst. He makes a lot of comments and they’re all revealing rather than clever, plus he has very particular opinions about plotting and world building that I don’t necessarily agree with.

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Horizon Zero Chill

Chris 2 Comments

I’m going to preface this by saying I really enjoy playing this game. No matter what else I say, and I’ve got a lot to say, I really enjoy playing this game and can’t wait to keep playing it once I’ve finished creating my blog buffer.  The combat is rewarding, all of the action moves feel incredible, and the lore is just waiting for you to stumble over it. The skills you can unlock by leveling up feel diverse and any one of them can have an incredible (positive) impact on my play style.

I’ll admit my first impressions weren’t super positive. Having never owned a PlayStation anything, I consistently bear a minor grudge against all exclusive games on a platform I never intend to buy. A grudge that grows in size depending on how cool the game looks. Sure, I have access to one now since one of my roommates owns a PS4, but the game looked so cool when it came out that I made myself wait about four months before I bought it. Somehow, I managed to avoid all spoilers for the game, so I was essentially going in blind other than what turned out to be a few unfortunate comparisons to Breath of the Wild.

I say unfortunate because the comparison does Horizon Zero Dawn no favors. HZD is much more focused on lore and story-telling. Characters will constantly tell you all sorts of really interesting information about the world and what has happened in its recent history. Also, and this was the biggest problem for me, you can’t climb everything. There were so many times I had to settle for hopping up a pile of boulders or finding a way around the cliff rather than just being able to scale it. It isn’t really a problem given HZD’s preference to make you feel like there’s danger around every corner, so being forced to walk around more requires you to get really good at sneaking or decent enough at combat that you can eliminate several robo-beasts as you’re trying to find a path that leads up to the top of the cliff. Or ruined skyscrapers (which are so freaking cool).

Probably the best comparison between HZD and BotW is in their atmospheres. I absolutely love the atmosphere of HZD. Both maintain an air of neglect, decay, and loss but BotW veers toward melancholy and then focuses on what is now gone forever while HZD turns toward attempts to understand the mysterious and forgotten past. Around every corner is some relic of a past that is slowly revealed through text or audio dumps that hint at what was going on in the world before civilization collapsed. Everything from the various machines you encounter to the remnants of cities or bases you can explore works to paint a picture of a world that was headed toward the collapse you know happened.

One thing that I’m still on the fence about, which is the reason for the title, is how every robo-creature you kill lets out a keening scream as it dies. It is a really nice effect, making each of the kills feel rewarding and real, but stealth kills also result in loud noises and nothing seems to notice the death cries of anything. If you stand around and gawk once you’ve killed something, THEN something might notice you. There seems to be almost no concept of noise and some of the line-of-sight stuff can be confusing, too. You can walk within a dozen feet of something and it won’t notice you, but it’ll watch you from a mile away if it noticed you and ran away, no matter how much you attempt to sneak or hide.

I have a few other gripes, but it’s mostly stuff about what I prefer in video games. Stuff like particular movements the character models make, word choices and personality stuff, the way they wrote some of the lore. Nothing of importance. Any negativity is far-outweighed by how much fun it is to sneak around and look for new lore. I can’t marathon it the way I could marathon BotW, but HZD is definitely something I try to play for at least a little bit every day. If you haven’t played it yet and have the means to do so, I suggest picking up the complete edition and playing your heart out.