Horizon: Zero Dawn was my Christmas present to myself, and I spent a lot of time playing it. By a lot of time, I mean about 40 hours in a single week.

It’s an interesting game. I got it because it was on sale, and I know a person who worked on it through my work on another project. It’s not really my cup of tea as far as genre labels go, but I loved it. I also had weird graphical glitches for the first 50% of my play through, with awful muddy textures. It turned out this came from running the game in 4k resolution. Not sure if it’s universal or if I was hitting VRAM limits, but it was good enough that I didn’t stop playing for long enough to look up a solution until it became really noticeable in Meridian.

I’m peculiar with game tastes. I like Doom (2016 and OG), but not Doom Eternal. Hearts of Iron, but not Europa Universalis. Grim Dawn, but not Torchlight. It’s not so much the genre of a game that makes it or breaks it for me, but the complete presentation. With that said, I think that there are reproducible things in Horizon: Zero Dawn that made it click with me.

Note: Although I plan on focusing on primarily the story of Horizon: Zero Dawn in this and will probably write a second piece discussing the storyline of Horizon: Zero Dawn, there will probably be some spoilers in this piece.

Gosh, this game has some pretty scenery, and the photo mode is a goldmine.

The Good

Horizon has a lot more good than bad. That’s a consequence of some really talented design, and probably a lot more stuff that I can’t pick up even though I’ve got some experience in the field.

The two things that stand out are a perfectly tuned gameplay loop and a remarkable story-gameplay link.

A Gameplay Loop of Sublime Quality

Horizon stresses Aloy’s background as a hunter throughout the game, and it delivers in gameplay. Scavenging and hunting are 90% of the open world activity and play a pretty big role in the scripted story missions.

Ammunition is all crafted, and it’s plentiful enough that you never feel anxious while also keeping decisions important. Later in the game you unlock the ability to craft more expensive arrows, but I still used the cheap basic arrows for hunting things I knew I could take down with them easily and saved the expensive arrows for hard fights.

Likewise, combat had a familiar but interesting rhythm.

Open with a precision shot from stealth. If you’re lucky, you can take down a machine with a single hit. Human enemies have smaller weak-points, but less health and you can almost always take them down with a single arrow.
If the initial salvo doesn’t get the job done, keep firing away, this time using positioning to avoid taking damage while wearing down your enemy.

In a worst-case scenario, resort to spear-fighting.

Sometimes something impedes this, like terrain not permitting an approach (most machines have ranged attacks), or the enemy getting the drop on you. An invisible machine features in some sections, and it feels thrilling to get the drop on it (and marginally terrifying to get stalked by them until you get the hang of listening for them).

Resource management, combat, and exploration all come together across the game, and it makes for some wonderful experiences.

Exploring a Living World

The exploration is great, and it’s just worth pointing out that the usual phenomena in a good open-world game are here as well.

First, you have lots of found artifacts. Audio logs (many of which are emotionally
moving), written sections, souvenirs, the usual. The density of these is pretty high throughout the story sections, and there’s just enough of them in the open world to take away some of the tedium.

Each area of the game feels distinctive. The graphics are phenomenal, which is something you should expect from every AAA title these days, but they’re not just phenomenal for the fidelity. The thematic lighting and biomes give each section of the world its own touch, and it adds a lot to the feeling of going from place to place (even though I’ll whine about it a little later on).

Optional Encounters

I don’t think there was a single time in Horizon where I felt like I had only one path forward, except for scripted boss-fights. Only one of these forced me into an open arena. That was because I focused too much on the boss to evaluate the terrain until after the fight, though I’m not convinced there was really anything other than a straight slug-fest that you could do in that fight.

Stealth was almost always an option, which is probably a good idea in a game where ammunition can be such an important part of resource management. I didn't really use this myself (for reasons I'll discuss later), but I could see lots of options throughout the game for people with less of a singular focus on incredible violence to be sneaky.

Indulgent Difficulty with Skill Rewards

As I went through Horizon, I spent about half my time on Easy difficulty and half my time on Story difficulty. It determines how much damage you deal, and combat encounters took too long for me in the open world (more on this in a bit).

However, I could always feel rewarded because the game gave great feedback for skilled play. Shoot a longleg in the sack that it uses to suck in air for breath attacks and you get a nice green triangle next to the damage report and a fun explosion.

It’s perfect. You know you’re doing a good job. There’s little risk to playing on Story mode, but you can still challenge yourself to show skill, which is where you want to be as a developer.

The first time I went through this jungle at night it took my breath away.

The Bad

There were things I didn’t like, of course, but they were minor. I’ll keep my whining brief, but it is something to note when you want to talk about an experience.

A Good Open World is Still an Open World

Horizon has the best open world for open world things of any game. Aloy is acrobatic and moves around well, and it’s beautiful enough that you can always look around.

But there’s a lot of walking, especially if you miss a fast-travel campfire. Yes, you can get a mount. No, it’s not really a major improvement to the experience. And despite having wonderful audio and text artifacts scattered throughout the world, there is a limit to how much wandering feels fun.

Yes, you can hunt machines almost anywhere, but I had a feeling reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid V where I often just ran around encounters to avoid dealing with them, which feels more odious when it’s a large zone with flying enemies.

At least the counterpart of instances where things don't feel distantly spaced enough was absent throughout the game.

Great Design Highlights Missed Opportunities

Horizon suffers from its success. The mobility system just works, but it doesn’t synergize with things. All the weapons look interesting, but they devolve into “soften up the enemy” or “kill the enemy.” This is, of course, what weapons do.

But it would have been nice to see more of the systems interact.

A weapon that let you move enemies around (or quickly approach enemies) would have been an interesting addition, for instance, highlighting Aloy’s mobility by letting you pull enemies off ledges or into hiding spots for easy disposal.

Three Option Dialogue

If you have branching paths where the character gets to choose between three options, you’re probably going to ruin more choices than you improve.

There’s a lot of points where Aloy can do a heart-brain-brawn approach to dialogue. Having only played through once (I’m too busy to do a second run through the game, but it’s in the cards), I went for the heart options because I’m much nicer in games than I am online.

A couple times, the results felt off (kudos: never Aloy’s statements, only the responses from NPCs), and I suspect that most of the results would have been the same either way. I get that the illusion of choice is a design strategy, but several of these felt like places where the writers could have developed Aloy or other characters instead of pausing for a decision.

This is a place where the textures glitched out at 4k. Running at 1080p, it's got the same visual spectacle as the rest of the game.

The Ugly

One Thing to Rule Them All

I played through 90% of the game with a Hunter’s Bow and a strategy that would make Doomguy question my lack of subtlety. Sure, I played on less than hardcore difficulty modes, alternating between Easy and Story mode depending on how much I wanted to have a power fantasy (answer: most of the time).

Now, this isn’t a problem so long as your player isn’t getting bored. In fact, it is part of the satisfying gameplay loop that the three arrow types gave enough variety for me to be entertained.

But it raises a question: since I basically used the Hunter’s Bow and Marksman’s Bow, I didn’t even get to see if they balanced the game for multiple styles of play. Some of this could be down to playing on lower difficulties and not needing to overcome it, but it would have been nice if the other weapons had given me enough of a thrill for me to choose them outside a short trial period before returning to what I knew.

Progression Walls

One thing felt very “gamey” and unrealistic to the point of almost breaking my immersion as I played through the game.

I had reached the limit of achievable gear as soon as it unlocked in shops at almost every stage of the game. Likewise, for carrying capacity, I fully upgraded everything that I used pretty early on, which had the ironic effect of calcifying my play-style further.

One factor here might be that I played the PC version with Frozen Wilds built-in, and I bought the Traveler skill tree that gave bonus harvesting before realizing this. But I also found that the skill tree ran into this issue where I'd purchased everything relevant to my playstyle long before I finished gaining skill points.

This could also be an issue with completion runs. I hit basically everything in the base game except one quest with the Hunter’s Lodge within the base game before doing the last mission. The one mercy was the weapon upgrade system, which had enough oomph to make you feel improvement. The armor system didn’t feel as good, in part because there wasn’t the same tactile feedback as you got from hitting things (getting hit doesn’t feel fun, even if you do it better!).

Conclusion

Horizon: Zero Dawn is great, and there are lessons to learn from it. One is that there’s a power to rhythm. Make a game feel like everything comes together coherently, and it’s 90% done.

There’s a great genre-gameplay match here. Everything feels post-apocalyptic and tribal, except where you’re supposed to get a different feeling (like the ancient ruins, which are post-apocalyptic and futuristic).

It also lets players have choices without giving up on the linear designs that enable deep and moving narratives that actually focus on the character the writing team developed. That’s a lesson all designers need to learn.