Horizon Zero Dawn
Horizon Zero Dawn is a 2017 action role-playing game developed by Guerrilla Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The first instalment in the Horizon video game series, it is set in a post-apocalyptic United States where large robotic machines dominate the Earth while humans live in primitive tribes with varying levels of technological development. The story of the game follows Aloy, a young hunter who sets out to uncover her past. The player uses ranged weapons, a spear and stealth to combat mechanical creatures and other enemy forces. A skill tree provides the player with new abilities and bonuses. The player can explore the open world to discover locations and take on side quests.
Horizon Zero Dawn was Guerrilla Games' first intellectual property since Killzone in 2004 and its first open world and role-playing game. Development began in 2011 after the completion of Killzone 3, with director Mathijs de Jonge considering it the riskiest idea pitched at the time. The game engine, Decima, was developed for Killzone: Shadow Fall and altered for Zero Dawn. Despite being in a post-apocalyptic setting, the game used vibrant colours to depict its world and was designed to evoke a sense of adventure and hope. Anthropologists were consulted to authenticate the world's decay over a millennium, while experts in robotics were consulted to develop realistic machine designs. Non-fiction books by Jared Diamond, as well as futuristic fiction such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke influenced the design of the game's setting and narrative. The game's cast included Ashly Burch and Lance Reddick, while the soundtrack was composed by Joris de Man, featuring contributions from The Flight.
Released for the PlayStation 4 in February 2017, the game was ported to Windows in 2020 as the first in a series of PlayStation exclusive video games arriving on personal computers. A remastered version of the game, developed by Nixxes Software, was released in October 2024. Zero Dawn received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised its setting, story, visuals, and combat; however, its role-playing mechanics and lack of originality in its gameplay design received some criticism. The game won numerous awards and sold over 24.3 million units by April 2023. An expansion, The Frozen Wilds, was released in November 2017. A sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, was released in February 2022. Events in the game are reinterpreted comically in Lego Horizon Adventures, which was released in November 2024. A film adaptation is in the works by PlayStation Productions and Columbia Pictures.
Gameplay
Horizon Zero Dawn is an action role-playing game played from a third-person view. Players take control of Aloy, a hunter who ventures through a post-apocalyptic land ruled by machine creatures. These machines, as well as human enemies like bandits and cultists, are the game's main types of enemies. Aloy can dodge, sprint, slide, or roll to evade her enemies' advances. She can use a variety of weapons to defeat enemies. In addition to a spear for attacking enemies in melee range, Aloy can also shoot them with arrows, set up traps such as tripwires using the Tripcaster, harpoon them to the ground to restrict their movement with the Ropecaster, or slingshot explosives at them. Different ammunition types offer specialised utility. For example, some arrows help players dismantle a machine's offensive capabilities by tearing off specific components and disabling weapons. Others inflict elemental status effects, such as burning or stunning enemies. A special type of ammo named Corruption causes a machine to attack everything around it, including its allies. Weapons can also be customized with mods, which enhance their qualities such as increasing their damage output or improving its handling. Aloy wears a Focus, a small earpiece that scans machines to identify their location, susceptibilities, level, and the nature of loot they will drop. Information about these machines will be then stored in an in-game journal. Players can also utilize stealth tactics, hiding in foliage to ambush nearby enemies, and whistling to draw enemies' attention.As players explore the game's world, they will collect natural resources and parts dropped by the machine to craft additional ammo, traps and potions, which can restore Aloy's health and increase her resistance to elemental effects. Hunting animals also provides materials to expand Aloy's inventory, allowing her to carry more arrows and consumables. Players can visit merchants to sell unwanted scraps, and purchase additional weapons and outfits. Aloy earns experience points by completing quests and engaging in open-world activities. While individual kills provide a baseline amount of XP, the game rewards skillful play, such as stealth takedowns or headshots, with bonus XP. Once enough XP is accumulated, players earn Skill Points for upgrading Aloy's abilities. The skill tree has three categories: "Prowler", which concerns stealth, "Brave", which improves combat, and "Forager", which increases healing and gathering capabilities. Through upgrades, Aloy can perform additional feats such as aiming a bow in slow motion, shooting multiple arrows at once, or collecting more resources from each defeated enemy. Also, players will receive rarer variants of the same weapon as they progress the game, allowing access to more ammo types and providing more modification slots.
Horizon Zero Dawn is an open world game with a day-night cycle and dynamic weather system. The map is composed of forest, desert, and snowy mountain regions. Mountainous terrain is traversed with the employment of parkour, and aided by the use of zip lines. Save points and fast travel can be accessed by interacting with campfires, once discovered. Aloy can scale and override large giraffe-like machines known as Tallnecks to reveal locations of interest around the map. She is able to hack a selection of machines with the Override Tool on her spear, some of which can be turned into makeshift mounts. Explorable ruins called Cauldrons unlock additional machines to override. The quest structure is divided into side quests, which are designed to flesh out the world's culture and answer smaller questions, while the main questline handles the major mysteries regarding Aloy's origins. A dialogue wheel is used to communicate with non-player characters, allowing players to choose different dialogue options to shape Aloy's personality and social interactions. Aloy can also complete optional open world activities, such as clearing bandit camps, completing hunting challenges, and clearing Corrupted Zones, which constitute areas of heightened difficulty and are populated by corrupted machines that behave with more aggression. Players can also find collectables such as vantages that offer visual information of the Old World, metal flowers that contain poetry, and old relics, such as ancient mugs and tribal artefacts.
Synopsis
Setting
The story is set in a post-apocalyptic United States, between the states of Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah, in the 31st century. Humans live in scattered, primitive tribes with varying levels of technological development. Their technologically advanced predecessors are remembered as the "Old Ones". Large robotic machines dominate the Earth. For the most part, they peacefully coexist with humans, who occasionally hunt them for parts. However, a phenomenon known as the "Derangement" caused machines to become more aggressive toward humans, and caused larger and deadlier machines to appear. Four tribes are prominently featured: the Nora, the Banuk, the Carja, and the Oseram. The Nora are fierce matriarchal hunter-gatherers who live in the mountains and worship their deity, the "All-Mother". The Carja are an empire of desert-dwelling city builders who worship the Sun. The Banuk consists of wandering clans made up of hunters and shamans who live in snowy mountains and worship the "blue light" of the machines. The Oseram are tinkerers and salvagers known for their advanced weapons, metalworking, brewing, and talent as warriors.Plot
Aloy is cast out from the Nora tribe at birth and raised by a fellow outcast, Rost. As a child, Aloy searches a forbidden "place of metal" and obtains a "Focus", an augmented reality device that gives her special perceptive abilities. Curious about her origins, Aloy learns from Rost that if she wins the "Proving", a yearly tournament between the young hunters of the Nora, the tribe's Matriarchs might concede this information. Aloy throws herself into years of hunting and survival training, becoming a skilled huntress.After coming of age, Aloy participates in the Proving; she wins the competition, but masked cultists attack the Nora. Rost sacrifices himself to save Aloy from their leader, Helis. When Aloy awakens, the Matriarchs explain that Aloy was found as an infant before a sealed door within the Nora's sacred mountain and that these suspicious origins were the reason for her being an outcast. The Matriarchs name Aloy a "Seeker", allowing her to leave their lands in pursuit of the cultists. Aloy eventually learns that the cultists are part of a splinter Carja faction called the Eclipse and that Aloy was targeted due to her resemblance to an Old World scientist named Elisabet Sobeck. Aloy locates the ruined corporate campus of Faro Automated Solutions and discovers that the Old World was destroyed nearly a thousand years ago after Faro lost control of its automated peacekeeper military robots. The robots, which could self-replicate and consume biomass, overran the planet and engulfed the biosphere, stripping Earth of life. Zero Dawn, a project spearheaded by Sobeck, was initiated to create an automated terraforming system to eventually deactivate the Faro robots and restore life to Earth over a period of centuries.
Aloy is contacted by Sylens, a secretive Banuk figure interested in uncovering the fate of the Old Ones. Aloy learns that Sobeck was sent to a decommissioned Orbital Launch Base to complete Zero Dawn, located under the Citadel, the centre of Eclipse power. Inside the base, Aloy learns that Zero Dawn was a vast underground system of databases, factories, and cloning facilities controlled by a single artificial intelligence, GAIA, and her subsystems. Once all life had been extinguished, GAIA developed a countermeasure to deactivate the Faro robots and build her own animalistic machines to restore the Earth's biosphere. Once the planet was habitable again, GAIA's next goal was to reseed life on Earth based on stored DNA and teach the first human clones not to repeat their predecessors' mistakes. However, Faro's founder and CEO, Ted Faro, sabotaged APOLLO, the subsystem containing humanity's history, because he didn't want people to know he was responsible for the Old World's destruction. The new generation of humans was consequently reduced to a tribal, subsistence society. The Eclipse are secretly controlled by HADES, another of GAIA's subsystems designed to enact controlled extinction if the outcome of Zero Dawn was not favourable for human existence. Reaching Sobeck's office, Aloy obtains a registry to give her access to the door beneath the Nora's mountain. She is captured by Helis and sentenced to death at the Citadel, but escapes with the help of Sylens. Aloy helps the Nora fight off the Eclipse and unlocks the mountain's door.
She finds a recording from GAIA, revealing that a signal of unknown origin caused HADES to activate and seize control of her functions; as a last resort, GAIA attempted to stop HADES by self-destructing, but failed and lost control of the other subsystems. Without GAIA to maintain the terraforming process, the entire system began to break down, leading to the Derangement. As a contingency plan, GAIA created a clone of Sobeck in the form of Aloy, hoping she would find GAIA's message, destroy HADES, and restore GAIA's functions. Aloy learns that Sobeck sacrificed her life to ensure the Faro robots would not find GAIA. Aloy manages to obtain the master override to destroy HADES. Sylens reveals that he founded the Eclipse, initially tempted by HADES' promises of knowledge when he discovered it. They surmise that HADES intends to send a signal to reactivate the Faro robots to extinguish life on Earth. Aloy kills Helis and helps fight off machines before stabbing HADES and activating the master override, ending the war. She journeys to Sobeck's old home, finds her corpse, and mourns her predecessor. In a post-credits scene, HADES is trapped by Sylens, who intends to interrogate HADES to find out who sent the signal that activated it.