Horizon Forbidden West’s opening is almost comical in its simplicity. A brief recap runs down the past game’s events while looking forward to the future, making sure to emphasise the coming threat of Zero Dawn at every possible moment. The planet is being overwhelmed with a weird red weed and Aloy is the only one capable of putting a stop to it. Her destiny is set in stone, a shackle to her own existence that dictates her every possible action.
I’m only a couple of hours into this gorgeous adventure, and have been told that she’ll come to confront her own existence away from being a saviour to humanity later in the story, which is a huge relief, but it doesn’t mitigate a set of stakes which can never escape their own vastness. I understand that a blockbuster of this magnitude needs to be big in almost every regard, making sure the characters, locations, and motivations on the line are worth fighting for. If they aren’t then we might stop caring, or become lost due to a lack of focus driving us forward. Yet the same can be said for stories that go too far in this direction.
Forbidden West beats you over the head with how each little thing Aloy does is everything or nothing, and even the slightest deviation away from her quest will see this planet crumble away into nothingness. Even her own narration is filled with a tiresome determination, casual japes from close friends being brushed off as she makes it clear why she can’t stop moving even for even a single moment, or she risks letting everyone who depends on her down. It’s an admirable outlook, but one the writing isn’t nearly strong enough to support.
Ashly Burch’s performance is tremendous, but dialogue that paints Aloy as committed to a fault results in a heroine who just isn’t that interesting to root for. But she easily could have been with a few changes. Unless you were already taken with Zero Dawn’s narrative – which I wasn’t – the opening of Forbidden West is lacking intrigue, expecting you to be taken with the idea of saving the world from Zero Dawn without asking a single question. After a brief stop at Meridian to tangle with some robotic rattlesnakes, we’re thrust into an entirely new region. It isn’t the Forbidden West, but an unusual in between where the lofty stakes being held over our heads throughout the main narrative are brought to a standstill.
Aloy’s quest demands she save humanity with no time for detours, which is at odds with the driving force of this genre: exploration and a constant encouragement to abandon the beaten path in search of new characters to meet and quests to embark upon. We are all but asked to ignore the main quest in service of our own enjoyment, but the tone and delivery of Aloy’s character never seems to take a moment to breathe, to consider her place in this world beyond a clone of a woman who has been dead for centuries. It’s a fascinating way to develop her character that I’m excited to see unfold, but part of me wishes Forbidden West gave it a rest every once in a while, since the imagination across its beautiful apocalypse feels almost stifled by a narrative that feels too afraid to indulge in the little things.
This problem isn’t specific to Horizon, but it’s certainly the biggest outlier when it comes to depicting a story where saving the world feels like a shoehorned ultimatum as opposed to a natural destination for our heroine to stumble upon. Aloy is a clone of Elisabet Sobek, brought into this world for one singular purpose that, after finding out the truth, she has no choice but to follow. Yet if her upbringing saw her trajectory change even slightly then none of this would have happened, she would have never come to terms with her own destiny or come to realise the role she had to play in it all. The Hero’s Journey always wins out, because it provides the player with a goal they can easily understand without ever being lost, but I think the audiences of such games deserve more credit when it comes to creating their own stories, by putting aside obvious guidance and walking away from the battlefield.
Zero Dawn and Forbidden West are filled with vast cities, smaller towns, and other locales that could have been populated by immersive side quests fueled by personal motivations and smaller stories that give its post-apocalyptic world a more cohesive identity. It has never had anything to say, both in its intricate details and wider themes when it comes to why this world looks and behaves in such a specific way. It operates on the rule of the cool and that is more than enough for a mainstream audience to sign up and lose themselves for hours.
But it wasn’t enough for me, tried-and-true open world design revealing a mechanical cynicism underpinning everything that makes these games so special. Imagine if Aloy could explore her world like Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2, having brief interactions with every single NPC or stumbling upon procedural stories that make every playthrough feel entirely distinct. The bigger picture could still focus on her saving humanity, but she’d have time to breathe, an opportunity to craft worthwhile anecdotes to help her character shine.
Like I said before, I’m still only a couple of hours in, so with any luck, this perception will change into something far more positive long before the credits roll.
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