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She is a complex, compassionate, sympathetic character that earns admiration by walking the walk every step of the way.Īloy never plays like a point of view or a character sketch inhabiting an artfully designed skin. Her unrelenting drive to do the right thing is always tempered by deep empathy for the difficulty and loss others have endured. Her strength of spirit, courage, and refusal to quit in the face of crushing disappointments are inspiring. The main character Aloy Credit: Horizon Zero Dawn/YouTubeĪloy is one of the most fully developed and compelling characters I’ve come across in a video game. Horizon Zero Dawn ’s world is so well realized it feels like a real place. I had the same experience 50 years later while playing HZD. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy in 1966. My first experience of entering into a fictional world that seemed more real than the one I lived in every day occurred when I first read J.R.R. The result is a level of immersion that feels like living in a fully realized alternate reality. Like the story, the world all fits together because the details have been carefully thought through. The animals you hunt live in expected environments and behave in expected ways. The character you play is a hunter, and she is so fully realized that the idea of having her pay someone for supplies seemed as foreign to me as paying someone to chew your food before you swallow it. The different plants you need grow in areas of the world where you would expect plants of different types to grow. HZD permits buying supplies from vendors for players who come to the game with this mind set. I never bought from the vendors, however, because hunting and gathering fit so well in HZD ’s world and felt so right for the character you play. In many games, the need to gather and craft necessary supplies is a tedious chore. The hunting, gathering and crafting system illustrates the organic nature of HZD’s world. Hunting machines Credit: Horizon Zero Dawn Both the dinosaur machines and the hunting and gathering activities that replenish your character’s supplies are organically connected to the natural environment. The building technologies they use fit the materials in their environment and their culturally-embedded skill sets. The inhabitants of HZD's world are members of distinct cultures with architectural styles that fit their lifestyles and belief systems. HZD’s world feels like an organic whole where everything fits together seamlessly. Some game worlds feel like patchwork quilts with cool stuff stuck here and there but little overall coherence. Grinding through a game that intensely and that fast can suck the life out of games like HZD that richly reward taking the time to slowly sink into their world.
Horizon zero dawn main character professional#
Professional reviewers are often faced with the difficult and sometimes impossible task of having to race through long, complex games in the unreasonably brief period of time between the arrival of the review copy and the lifting of the the review embargo.
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Horizon Zero Dawn is a perfect example of why I’ve bypassed several opportunities to professionally review video games. It’s brilliant.Īn organic and beautiful world Credit: Horizon Zero Dawn/YouTube Horizon Zero Dawn's story is a nuanced, complex and detailed exercise in world building that rivals the very best in science fiction and fantasy. They worked out the consequences of those decisions and how the people who were affected by them coped with the consequences. They thought about the situations people found themselves in when faced with critical problems and difficult decisions that had a profound impact on life as we know it. They thought through how the world must have been for each of those beats to occur.
Horizon zero dawn main character series#
The reason the story is so good is that the writers did more than string together a series of main story beats. What happened to our world? How did it happen? Why is it so terrifying? How did people try to stop it? What did they have to do to carry out their plan? What sacrifices did they have to make? How were the people who carried out the plan affected? It’s all there to be discovered in the game. HZD’s world is the way it is because of the steps taken to preserve life in response to that event. The demise of our world was precipitated by a terrifying event that put the existence of life on earth at risk. Making sense of the machines is just the beginning.