I played a lot of Horizon Zero Dawn now that it’s on PC and they finally patched out all the crashes (it didn’t crash on me yet). Thanks @daphaknee for the recommendation
The game is slightly less than the sum of its parts but basically robot hunting in a really pretty version of a postapocalypse is the formula I needed to actually get into the whole Monster Hunter/Witcher type of game (I tried both of those and bounced off quickly). It’s transparently an amalgam of other highly popular games from the last 5-10 years but it feels to me more like a new synthesis than a derivative.
The robot beast premise is fundamentally clever and solves a lot of game design problems all at once. Above all, it justifies and makes natural the objectifying relationship that the player has with the beasts. There are horse-like “mount” robots and you can either slaughter them for parts or make them your ally and ride them around. It doesn’t force you to name them like in BotW and it’s not weird to leave them alone in the middle of the desert while you fast travel elsewhere.
And of course, there are gigantic beasts minding their own business and you challenge them and whittle them down with a hail of arrows and traps, but there’s not that undertone of malaise that SotC leaned into and Monster Hunter tries to sweep under the rug. Yes, this is the “easy” solution and SotC’s contradiction-maintaining one was more profound. But it’s perfect for comfort food in the middle of a year where I want comfort food and have my fill of ethical ambiguity.
The writing is overall workaday but there are occasional real highlights. I was impressed by the intro script which initially felt to me like it was doing something very subtle and clever: sounding like a translation of untranslatable future-nomad language into English, and therefore necessarily stilted. I still think this is a little bit of what’s going on, but it quickly became obvious that I was also giving it too much credit. It’s mostly that the writing has no concept of prose style and no real idea how to engage with the cultural chasm it sets up. Especially as the game advances it increasingly conflates Aloy’s perspective and culture with the player’s – Aloy seems to basically understand the recordings from thousands of years in the past, and the script is mostly a giant missed opportunity for sparks or play with the theme of time.
The one place that does have such sparks is in the inventory item names and descriptions of ancient artifacts, with their wild misinterpretations of everyday objects. The use of metal shards as currency is also the smartest currency concept I’ve seen: particularly the fact that all arrow crafting eats up shards because of course it does: it’s the arrowhead!
Mostly though the game stands on its art direction. It’s peak Western conventional high-detail/slightly-cartoony style, and though that’s not the sort of thing we generally praise around here, it’s the result of both mastery and love on the dev’s part, and I really enjoy it just as I liked TLOU’s style. It manages to be so pretty in so many different lighting conditions, and there are lots of little touches to appreciate everywhere like the recurring visual motif of mountain streams, Aloy’s armors inspired from different indigenous traditional dress, and the climbing sequences which are there as showcases of kinematic animation as well as character-building moments for Aloy (her vigor, pride and recklessness).
I said it was a bit less than the sum of its parts and the main reason is that it sometimes feels like just a lot of pretexts for engaging in the same 5 or so activities. Little ever feels like a unique setpiece or particularly richer challenge, and the game feels the same in the late game at it did in the beginning. My one tactic of slamming 3 of my strongest pure physical damage arrows at the enemy’s weak point works on pretty much every enemy, and although I’ve started to use elementals and traps a lot more as I understand the enemy types, that still doesn’t feel actually necessary (on Hard). Still, the 5 same activities are good enough I keep playing. Also I’m now at the point where I can start hunting the optional endgame megabeasts (I took down my first Stormbird yesterday), and that might feel meaningfully different.
I occasionally took screenshots in the game’s “photo mode” when what I was looking at struck me as especially pretty, and just now I realized photo mode leaves in the UI unless you explicitly press X to hide it?? Wat
