Since I last wrote about Horizon Forbidden West,[1] I’ve had the honor of joining the elite club of gamers who have played the game’s story through to its conclusion…even if I did turn the difficulty way the fuck down and then “forget” to adjust it back up. Who cares that I got to the end the easy way? It’s not like the absolute lack of challenge diluted my experience (it totally diluted my experience). I’ll get to that. First up…

The Story Was Good…Mostly

Happily, I can report that Forbidden West’s campaign did a passable impression of the middle entry in an ambitious sci-fi trilogy. It’s no Empire Strikes Back, but what is? Using Empire as the standard is more unfair than taking a Furry to the zoo and telling them they can’t touch anything.

Most of the characters making their first appearances in Forbidden West are pleasant but forgettable: the equivalent of store-bought vanilla ice cream. I found the introduction of Far Zenith (a group of humans who survived the initial robopocalypse by fleeing into deep space) to be further out of left field than Vladimir Lenin, but their presence didn’t overwhelm the plot.[2] The members of Far Zenith didn’t get a ton of onscreen development (apart from protagonist Aloy’s on-again, off-again ally Tilda Van der Meer, voiced by Carrie-Anne Moss), but I can’t knock the game for that without being inconsistent. After all, if Tilda and her fellow travelers had gotten more screentime, I would have whined about the tonal clash between the established world of Horizon, with its scattered tribes and limited technology, and and Far Zenith’s clean, futuristic aesthetic. Moss’ (excellent) performance as Tilda demonstrates that Guerrilla made the right choice emphasizing her character’s place in the story; her conversations with Aloy provide many of the narrative’s high points and serve as a (relatively) sympathetic window into Far Zenith’s machinations. Besides Tilda, the best new introduction to the cast is the timid but well-meaning Beta, who (like Aloy) is a clone of scientist Elisabet Sobeck, just without Aloy’s, uh…well, I guess “spunk” might be the best word to use here, even if just typing it makes me cackle like a hyena in a Slim Jim factory. Aloy doesn’t have much of a character arc left to experience – she’s gone through Campbell’s whole cycle by this point, dead mentor and everything – but Beta provides an interesting opportunity for Guerrilla to build something new on a foundation the audience is already familiar with.

Unfortunately, Aloy and co.’s final showdown with Far Zenith proves to be more visually impressive than practically engaging, and the way everything panned out felt like something of a return to the status quo – minus a few characters and plus some knowledge about the approaching threat of a malicious AI known as Nemesis.

The Side Quests Were Mediocre

Remember Mass Effect’s side quests? They were great, even if you didn’t have the privilege of viewing a relatively chaste sex scene afterwards. In my playthrough of the Mass Effect trilogy, most of my side adventures concluded with Commander Shepard kneecapping an alien like they were Nancy Kerrigan at skating practice. Your experience may have differed, depending on your fondness for patella-based maimings, but part of what made the quests so memorable was the agency they gave players in terms of their execution.

In Horizon: Forbidden West, players will have essentially the same experience with every side quest, usually of the “finding and activating some bullshit” variety.[3] Sure, Horizon has never advertised itself as being a role-playing game, but this entry has cloaked itself in many of the trappings of the genre: a massive skill system, crafting, dialogue choices, loot divided by tiers of rarity, etc. That probably explains my disappointment with the straightforward nature of the game’s side content; the gorgeous visuals couldn’t really make up for the sense that I was just running along completing checklists. Completing checklists can be satisfying in the right context, but the stakes for Horizon’s side content never felt high enough (in terms of either gameplay or plot) to really feel worthwhile. Even the missions that focused on Aloy’s group of core companions aren’t that great: the characters aren’t bad, but, as noted above, they’re bland enough to blur together. It’s like putting Ritz crackers and water in a blender: sure, the resulting slurry would be edible, but…why would you do that?

The Crafting System Still Sucks

I’m not much of an outdoorsman[4] but I guarantee I could make a fanny pack faster than Aloy. Tape a bag to a belt, right? Boom, done. Horizon doesn’t play that shit, buddy. If you’re going to try and craft in this game, you’re going to damn well do it the way Guerrilla intended, and that way sucks. For fuck’s sake, just let me shoot a couple of beavers and sew them together to make a backpack, don’t make me undergo a biblical journey across the map and kill a robot hippopotamus only to realize that it didn’t drop the rare machine scrotum I need to build a goddamn quiver. Why do I even need a scrotum for that? It’s a bag for arrows! Fuck! I’m getting steamed just thinking about it.

Difficulty, and the Self-Imposed Lack Thereof

I mentioned earlier that I mashed the difficulty down to the lowest possible setting. This means that my version of Aloy can survive a worse beating than Anthony Weiner’s public image; she eats arrows for breakfast, spears for lunch and energy blasts for dinner (you wouldn’t know it just from looking at her – she burns the calories with all the murder).

It would have, perhaps, been more satisfying to inhabit the shoes of a virtual ginger terminator had I been able to take on a series of assassination quests. Just imagine Aloy knocking on the entrance to some poor neolithic fuck’s mud hut and asking for “Saruh Connuh” before turning the occupant into charcuterie with a spear.

Unfortunately, Horizon is not that kind of game. My “fine-tuning” of the difficulty made things feel almost unfair, as if I were an NFL linebacker stomping through a third-grader’s sandcastle in a fit of misguided pique.

The appeal of effortlessly becoming an apex predator within the game’s ecosystem wore off relatively quickly; I kept the difficulty down for some time to power through some slower story beats, but finally elected to delve once again into the title’s accessibility settings. I found that combat was much more satisfying when the damage inflicted by both my character and the game’s enemies was cranked way the hell up. Sure, in order to stay alive, I had to eat enough foraged berries to make Christopher McCandless jealous, but I was no longer thoughtlessly running roughshod over every foe, which served to lend a greater sense of satisfaction to each victory.  

If this section of the article had to have a point, I guess it would be that Horizon’s accessibility options are great, but its default difficulty is annoying, and it’s entirely possible to render the experience monotonously undemanding if you’re overly generous with your own tweaks to the settings.

The Future of Horizon

So…what’s next? The next title will, barring some sort of mind-blowing plot twist, center around Aloy & Co. battling the villainous AI Nemesis. How will they do this? With arrows and shit, presumably. It’s not like they’re going to invent fucking guns in between titles, although I wish they would.[5] My primary hopes for the sequel are for Guerrilla to streamline the overstuffed crafting system and make both Aloy and her opponents a bit less squishy and more fragile. It doesn’t have to be Dark Souls, but I think there’s a happy medium to be found where every hit given and received feels impactful. Either way, I think we can count on the graphics and voice acting being stellar…but those alone don’t make a great game. I’ll certainly be following the development of the series’ next entry, but without the same enthusiasm I had prior to Forbidden West’s release.

Oh, yeah. Last thing: the rating.

Score: 6.5/10 (-0/+2)

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[1] Available here: https://scrubreport.com/2022/05/30/on-the-dangers-of-over-iteration-in-gaming/

[2] I’m talking about Far Zenith, here. Not Lenin.

[3] Or the slightly more exciting “finding and killing some bullshit” variety.

[4] Not since The Incident.  

[5] There are, technically, machine guns that you can loot from larger enemies and carry around for a bit, but I’m talking about, like, Glock 9’s.