Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn is a competent open-world action-adventure that has a strong start and boasts some great art direction. If it doesn’t reach the heights of its peers, then it’s mainly due to its disjointed narrative and stiff quest design.

The world of Horizon Zero Dawn is full of bestialized mechanical monsters: robots that look and act like tigers, buffalo, alligators, and even dinosaurs. The protagonist is Aloy, a young female hunter who 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 finally become part of the very tribe that shunned her, and find out about her origins in the process.

To that end, she trains with Rost every day, 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,” for the need to transfer one’s frustrations and failures to another human being, hating them to feel better about oneself, usually trumps empathy. That’s the rub about human beings. Therefore, for some, Aloy will always be a stranger, 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, however: the idea behind “We’re outcasts,” for example, is repeated several times during the game’s first hours. Aloy is frequently bullied for being an outcast and is frequently reminded that she’s an outcast. People say to her that an outcast will never win the Proving, and that she will forever be an outcast. It’s repetitive, yes, but precisely because of the repetition, it builds an oppressive atmosphere: the entire world is against Aloy, and she knows it.

These first hours are Horizon at its narrative best, even though they still display some of the game’s biggest issues. There’s this early scene, for example, that made Charles, the snob, pause the game and write “ludonarrative dissonance” several times in his notebook like a deranged critic. The scene is supposed to demonstrate how the strange object Aloy got in some ruins – it’s an AR device called Focus – can help her while she’s hunting: there’s this boy in need of rescue and a robotic beast prowling the area, so Aloy uses the Focus to visualize the path the machine always takes and avoid it. Characters are truly flabbergasted at how she could predict the creature’s behavior, which is a problem, as the beast always moved… in a small circle. In other words, Aloy needed a special device to see a very basic movement pattern, and the people around her were astounded by her incredible feat, which makes everyone in the scene… sound profoundly stupid.

The Focus is a constant source of dissonance in the game, making us question Aloy’s abilities and Charles, the snob, buy three notebooks just to write those same cursed words. Horizon is trying to sell us how awesome Aloy is while giving her a tool that would make anyone awesome. She’ll eventually get the fame of being a skilled hunter, for example, but most of the time she just uses the Focus to track her prey, as the AR 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 us to believe that it 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 her abilities. There is a mission where a high official calls upon her tracking expertise to solve a murder that 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. A real Sherlock Holmes.

Horizon: Zero Dawn, then, really struggles in making us play as Aloy and creating situations where her skill and ours are in harmony. It prefers to dumb down Aloy for our sake, believing we wouldn’t be able to do anything – either tracking or investigating – without help. Truly, the Focus is for us and us alone. Aloy didn’t need it, and she’s worse because of it.

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 bandit camps that need to be cleared and towers that need to be climbed to unlock parts of the map – now these towers move, which sounds like a great change, but just amounts to waiting at a specific location to jump at them at the right time, although at least this adds a bit of spectacle to the proceedings. There are dozens of collectibles scattered throughout the environments and hundreds of pieces of – mostly irrelevant – lore to be discovered.

Sidequests are equally generic. 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 for us. 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, for example, follows a warrior named Nil, who helps Aloy clear bandit camps. However, he doesn’t assist her out of the goodness of his heart, but because criminals, for him, are authorized prey. He takes pleasure in killing others, and so he 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 as such by the narrative: despite their huge numbers, rare is the case in which one of its members is portrayed like a real, proper person. They are a “shadow cult” that worships a “devil,” being the type of one-dimensional criminals that we’re supposed to find cathartic to murder: they are Alloy’s authorized prey.

It’s a pity, then, that most of the game’s main antagonists come precisely from the Shadow Carja – its leaders and the “devil” they worship – for this means they lack any personality whatsoever and hardly make for great memorable foes. There’s this moment when Aloy stops a coup from happening, and the game gives us the option to talk to one of the enemy leaders, who is now imprisoned. You, optimist as you are, may think that this evil man is going to sound a bit more human now that he’s in a fragile, defeated position, but he’s still as evil as ever.

The only thing that makes the antagonists a bit more interesting is their relationship with the so-called devil: most tribes in the world of Horizon see the machines under a religious light. After all, they don’t understand them. Charles, the snob, was quick to cite Arthur C. Clarke’s third law in his notebook, which states that 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.

But the game’s main narrative problem is that, after the Proving, the pacing comes to a halt. Aloy just goes from one 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. I bet you’re thinking right now, “robot dinosaurs powered by AI sound like a stupid idea,” but look at the people in charge of big tech companies right now and ask yourself if stupid ideas are not their stock and trade.

Yeah, anyway, although the world of Horizon Zero Dawn is unique and very beautiful to look at, the story behind it is just a sci-fi cliché. Why are there machines running rampant? Anyone who has ever watched any Terminator or Jurassic Park movie has a very good idea: a dream of “self-sustained truly automated technology” gone wrong.  The story, then, stops being about Aloy and starts to be about the lore of that “old world”, the circumstances that led to the robot dinosaurs being built.

Sometimes, we come into a room and there are four to six holograms, sound, and text files about the “old world” waiting for us. And here’s the thing: they’re basically all variants of the same message. Main questlines are filled with these info dumps that don’t matter in the slightest, since they can all be summarized by the fact that there are now rogue robot dinosaurs running rampant. And we kind of knew that from the start, didn’t we?

The question about Aloy’s origins is hardly important thematically, either: 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. What matters is that she’s an outcast. It’s the consequence that matters, not the premise, and Horizon Zero Dawn’s story gets carried away with the latter.

It’s not a coincidence, then, that Aloy stops growing as a character: her quest for knowledge and revenge stagnates, as the former is a collection of genre staples and the latter is mitigated by the fact that, throughout the course of the game, we go on to kill hundreds and hundreds of Shadow Carja, making Ellie proud.

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. There is an emphasis on crafting, which means we need to be constantly picking resources on the ground to make her arrows and potions. Meanwhile, the mechanical beasts have weak parts that can be removed if sufficiently damaged – kind of like in Monster Hunter, but even more gratifying – and are generally fairly aggressive, making for adrenaline-filled fights.

The human enemies are considerably less dynamic than the machines, though, firing weapons at Aloy at a safe distance or coming to hit her up close with a spear. There are some additional weapons we can buy, but we can safely ignore them and just stick with the main ones, as the game doesn’t push us to strategize too much.

And, when it comes to exploration, Horizon is pretty much quest-driven, which means if we spot an interesting structure on the… horizon and go there, more often than not, absolutely nothing will happen when we arrive if the quest about that particular place was not already active.  Breath of the Wild, Horizon Zero Dawn is not.

But, despite its many issues, Horizon Zero Dawn it’s still a good open-world game. Its secret is that it feels a lot like comfort food of open-world design, with your standard “follow the arrow” quests, a decent, if fairly predictable and disjointed story, and some engaging fights. It’s fine in the same way that a cheeseburger is fine – and sometimes, it’s just what you need.

Review originally published on October 21, 2019.

November 22, 2025.