Why Horizon Zero Dawn is My Favorite Game of All Time and it’s Not Even Close.
Spoiler Warning, but that should be obvious.
I feel it necessary to preface this piece. I wasn’t so fortunate to play the tent pole games that people may consider all time greats. The Portals, Half Lives, Spyros or anything. I grew up with Nintendo and didn’t dream of asking for a 2nd console from my parents, so I missed out on the big titles. Plus, RPGs were never my thing back then but I’ve seen the light since then.
That being said, Horizon: Zero Dawn is my favorite game of all time. It met and surpassed the hype leading up to release. When I played the game, 7 hours felt like 2. I’m not even being dramatic. I spent so much time exploring the world, finding out its mysteries, and dying from Ravagers that I never looked at my phone or the time. From the moment the opening cut scene finishes, you have questions: Where is Aloy’s Mother? Why is this ceremony being done in secret? Where is this game set? Who taught these people how to braid hair?
The first time you fall into the first ruins you instantly get immersed in the mystery of the game. The people above ground live a simple hunter/gather life, but in the ruins, there are holograms and audio files of a different era. As the story is continues it becomes a story of vengeance as well as discovery after the major antagonist, the Eclipse, kill Aloy’s adopted father.
The world is full of machines based on animals from horses to freaking T-Rexes, all of them deadly and hard when you have basic armor and weapons and low health. You descend into ruins and cauldrons with puzzles that test your patience (I’m talking about you Cauldron Rho) to gain the ability to control these beasts and find other areas that give details of what happened in the world. HZD finds a way to invoke emotion into you with the dialogue they wrote and written into the lore of this post-post apocalyptic world.
You find out that the time that Aloy exists in is almost a millennia removed from when runaway machines that run by converting biomaterials (trees, water, etc) affected by a virus set off accelerated climate change. You learn of the world before hand where the humans left were unknowingly fighting a lost cause to buy time while the greatest scientists create a system to rebuild the world when everything and everyone has perished. You learn that the system that these scientists built created Aloy for a specific purpose for a future threat and guides you through why these things are done this way.
Toward the end of the game, it reaches the obvious climactic end fight but it meshes with the rest of the game because every large machine fight feels like a major boss battle. In the end you give a damn about the story and its setting and the amount of mysteries it still left unsolved. I would’ve been fine with no sequel to this game but an end credit scene is placed at the end that doesn’t feel as if they’re forcing a sequel. No other game I’ve played has ever left me wanting more and I cant wait for the Frozen Wilds DLC.