I finished this game, for all intents and purposes, nearly a month ago yet have struggled to determine when and how I'd write about it. It's felt doubly weird because of how passionately enthusiastic I am about Zero Dawn, a game with proficiencies so extreme that in the four years since its release (and over two additional playthroughs) I've only felt emboldened in my take that the game was always unworthy of being "overshadowed" by Breath of the Wild, not least of which because the game is just clearly better at a foundational level.
Doubly weird because, purely on facts, Forbidden West is everything you'd want a video game sequel to be: that old thing you already liked so much made more complex and varied. More ammo types, more weapon types, more armor varieties, more types of side quests, more characters influencing and moving the story forward, more ways for the player to engage with the story in the first place, more enemy types and more variations on the common enemies you remember from the first go around...it's truly the platonic ideal of a video game sequel.
And yet there are so many moments while playing this game in which the player is encouraged to ask...why did this happen? Why is this happening? It's trivial bits, like the fact Aloy has a three-tier inventory: her "pouch" for items actively in her inventory, her "inventory" for items she can pull into her pouch from the ether while in the field and finally her "stash" which is where the items that don't fit in her inventory (or have an inventory allocation in the first place) get sent, to be collected at bases and special campsites placed throughout the world. Again, trivial, and yet it takes a paragraph to describe the solution Guerilla Games had for Zero Dawn's previous inventory, with Aloy not being able to carry an infinite amount of the crafting materials she could and would find on her journeys through the world.
Likewise, the story bloats to the point it's really hard to ever gain a feel for where one is at in the grand narrative. The game's initial Big Bad, Regalla, is met early but then can become as essential as a ghost for nearly 20 hours of gametime. Likewise, a new and seemingly immortal group of superhumans are introduced that seem aware of exactly what Aloy's goals are...only to also potentially disappear from the game's individual beats for 15 hours or more if the player is of a completionist, overpowering the player character persuasion. In the middle of it all, this lends Forbidden West a truly exciting, anything can happen and this game I'm really enjoying may never end quality, but in the rearview it's increasingly clear how distracting this is.
In the same vein, Forbidden West recognizes that many players were enthused by the original's story because of its characters firmly rooted in a previous era of human civilization. It corrects this in many ways with amazing sound design, clever conceits surrounding new and far more technologically engaged civilizations and a general boost in much of the game's incidental and minor character writing...but it also keeps the past in the foreground to such a degree that can leave the player feeling a little embarrassed for Guerilla. Never does this feel more apparent than whenever the player remembers that the quest to restore the systems keeping Earth's climate from spiraling into chaos is by far a compelling enough excuse for a sequel, and yet by the time credits roll it's entirely possible to have forgotten that was Aloy's primary objective for these 60-100 hours.
This is where I need to emphasize that Horizon's combat is still incredible, and while the skill tree can feel a bit convoluted it allows for players to find a lot of interesting ways to mold and even break that combat to suit their whims. Likewise, the new enemies can take a bit of memory jarring to figure out (prominently, the AI introduced in the DLC is producing purely antagonistic machines as a result of a corruption in its core logic processes) but are incredibly fascinating to watch animate and decompose in their fights. It is always the moment when Aloy strikes an exposed tendon, chips off a key upgrade resource, gains access to a new elemental damage or special skill that you have to take a step back and think, man, Guerilla is really gleaming the cube here.
Likewise, while the magic can certainly wear off after hours and hours of dialogue wheels, for something like 30 or 40 hours it is truly amazing the tech at work during even the most obscure conversations in this game. I'll admit that it eventually became clear that much of this animation was canned and at least somewhat (if not entirely) AI driven, Horizon represents a huge leap forward for what it means to have a character stop and chat with another in an open world video game. While undeniably front loaded with impressive interjections from otherwise inconsequential NPCs and background scene work, Forbidden West evinces a stark and necessary new way forward for players who obsessively exhaust dialogue for more world building, lore and character detail. It takes for-eeeeeever to realize each conversation is not a bespoke set of animations and camera angles, no matter whether that chat leads to the next main questline or some minor, tit-for-tat errand the likes of which video game heroes have long been tasked with in the middle of their universe-saving exploits. It's truly without peer, in the same way The Witcher 3's camera cuts and voice acting made players feel we'd moved on from the Bioware/Bethesda formula seven years ago.
And then there's just the damn art of the world itself, not necessarily surprising but so explicitly lush and unattainable at every turn that you feel a need to gawk. No matter if its a sly eyebrow raise from Aloy during a cutscene or the moment you realize chipping a piece off a machine has changed the way it navigates its environment, Forbidden West is intoxicating to watch unfold. Marry some intriguing fakery around its not-quite-real-time lighting system, many varied biomes and vastly increased verticality to that core bit of gameplay and, dude, you've got a video game that's a singular pleasure to fire up. There was a novelty to fidelity/performance modes in the initial years of the PS5, but Forbidden West makes a significant argument for how fidelity modes could eventually win out among primarily console gamers.
There's so much more to praise and diminish about this game that I feel it's important to wrap up here before I get too in the weeds, though I will summarize with a specific interest that may eventually explain why I'm sure this will be my favorite game of the year but will certainly explain why this a four-star review: in the mid-game, you're faced with a Normandy-like hub area in which you accrue trinkets, NPCs and activities that increase your engagement with the wider world. This should be pretty fucking cool, especially since there's still a scant number of games (Wolfenstein: The New Colossus comes to mind as an outlier) have figured out how to make these situations feel of a piece with their worlds. And yet it quickly begins to feel like you're checking off a number of completionist boxes, or in other words, making it so the icon disappears from beside the character's head. On the one hand you want to see Aloy spend more time with these characters, but on the other the way she's enabled to do so is one of the story's rare relapses into early 2010s structure. Which in turn opens the player's eyes to all the ways in which Forbidden West, in attempting to solve for modern open world dilemmas, either creates new ones or simply muddies the water even more.
Ah, and a number of story beats are incredulously insane. There's definitely that. But that's an actual essay about how and why video games are made, and that's not this. As long as Horizon plays the way it plays I am here for this franchise, but Forbidden West is a baffling mixture of perfect and flawed so impressed by the structure of a waffle iron it's impossible to anoint as a seminal game in the same way as its predecessor. I suppose I can't wait to see if Aloy herself can fly and shoot lasers from her hands in season 3.
Doubly weird because, purely on facts, Forbidden West is everything you'd want a video game sequel to be: that old thing you already liked so much made more complex and varied. More ammo types, more weapon types, more armor varieties, more types of side quests, more characters influencing and moving the story forward, more ways for the player to engage with the story in the first place, more enemy types and more variations on the common enemies you remember from the first go around...it's truly the platonic ideal of a video game sequel.
And yet there are so many moments while playing this game in which the player is encouraged to ask...why did this happen? Why is this happening? It's trivial bits, like the fact Aloy has a three-tier inventory: her "pouch" for items actively in her inventory, her "inventory" for items she can pull into her pouch from the ether while in the field and finally her "stash" which is where the items that don't fit in her inventory (or have an inventory allocation in the first place) get sent, to be collected at bases and special campsites placed throughout the world. Again, trivial, and yet it takes a paragraph to describe the solution Guerilla Games had for Zero Dawn's previous inventory, with Aloy not being able to carry an infinite amount of the crafting materials she could and would find on her journeys through the world.
Likewise, the story bloats to the point it's really hard to ever gain a feel for where one is at in the grand narrative. The game's initial Big Bad, Regalla, is met early but then can become as essential as a ghost for nearly 20 hours of gametime. Likewise, a new and seemingly immortal group of superhumans are introduced that seem aware of exactly what Aloy's goals are...only to also potentially disappear from the game's individual beats for 15 hours or more if the player is of a completionist, overpowering the player character persuasion. In the middle of it all, this lends Forbidden West a truly exciting, anything can happen and this game I'm really enjoying may never end quality, but in the rearview it's increasingly clear how distracting this is.
In the same vein, Forbidden West recognizes that many players were enthused by the original's story because of its characters firmly rooted in a previous era of human civilization. It corrects this in many ways with amazing sound design, clever conceits surrounding new and far more technologically engaged civilizations and a general boost in much of the game's incidental and minor character writing...but it also keeps the past in the foreground to such a degree that can leave the player feeling a little embarrassed for Guerilla. Never does this feel more apparent than whenever the player remembers that the quest to restore the systems keeping Earth's climate from spiraling into chaos is by far a compelling enough excuse for a sequel, and yet by the time credits roll it's entirely possible to have forgotten that was Aloy's primary objective for these 60-100 hours.
This is where I need to emphasize that Horizon's combat is still incredible, and while the skill tree can feel a bit convoluted it allows for players to find a lot of interesting ways to mold and even break that combat to suit their whims. Likewise, the new enemies can take a bit of memory jarring to figure out (prominently, the AI introduced in the DLC is producing purely antagonistic machines as a result of a corruption in its core logic processes) but are incredibly fascinating to watch animate and decompose in their fights. It is always the moment when Aloy strikes an exposed tendon, chips off a key upgrade resource, gains access to a new elemental damage or special skill that you have to take a step back and think, man, Guerilla is really gleaming the cube here.
Likewise, while the magic can certainly wear off after hours and hours of dialogue wheels, for something like 30 or 40 hours it is truly amazing the tech at work during even the most obscure conversations in this game. I'll admit that it eventually became clear that much of this animation was canned and at least somewhat (if not entirely) AI driven, Horizon represents a huge leap forward for what it means to have a character stop and chat with another in an open world video game. While undeniably front loaded with impressive interjections from otherwise inconsequential NPCs and background scene work, Forbidden West evinces a stark and necessary new way forward for players who obsessively exhaust dialogue for more world building, lore and character detail. It takes for-eeeeeever to realize each conversation is not a bespoke set of animations and camera angles, no matter whether that chat leads to the next main questline or some minor, tit-for-tat errand the likes of which video game heroes have long been tasked with in the middle of their universe-saving exploits. It's truly without peer, in the same way The Witcher 3's camera cuts and voice acting made players feel we'd moved on from the Bioware/Bethesda formula seven years ago.
And then there's just the damn art of the world itself, not necessarily surprising but so explicitly lush and unattainable at every turn that you feel a need to gawk. No matter if its a sly eyebrow raise from Aloy during a cutscene or the moment you realize chipping a piece off a machine has changed the way it navigates its environment, Forbidden West is intoxicating to watch unfold. Marry some intriguing fakery around its not-quite-real-time lighting system, many varied biomes and vastly increased verticality to that core bit of gameplay and, dude, you've got a video game that's a singular pleasure to fire up. There was a novelty to fidelity/performance modes in the initial years of the PS5, but Forbidden West makes a significant argument for how fidelity modes could eventually win out among primarily console gamers.
There's so much more to praise and diminish about this game that I feel it's important to wrap up here before I get too in the weeds, though I will summarize with a specific interest that may eventually explain why I'm sure this will be my favorite game of the year but will certainly explain why this a four-star review: in the mid-game, you're faced with a Normandy-like hub area in which you accrue trinkets, NPCs and activities that increase your engagement with the wider world. This should be pretty fucking cool, especially since there's still a scant number of games (Wolfenstein: The New Colossus comes to mind as an outlier) have figured out how to make these situations feel of a piece with their worlds. And yet it quickly begins to feel like you're checking off a number of completionist boxes, or in other words, making it so the icon disappears from beside the character's head. On the one hand you want to see Aloy spend more time with these characters, but on the other the way she's enabled to do so is one of the story's rare relapses into early 2010s structure. Which in turn opens the player's eyes to all the ways in which Forbidden West, in attempting to solve for modern open world dilemmas, either creates new ones or simply muddies the water even more.
Ah, and a number of story beats are incredulously insane. There's definitely that. But that's an actual essay about how and why video games are made, and that's not this. As long as Horizon plays the way it plays I am here for this franchise, but Forbidden West is a baffling mixture of perfect and flawed so impressed by the structure of a waffle iron it's impossible to anoint as a seminal game in the same way as its predecessor. I suppose I can't wait to see if Aloy herself can fly and shoot lasers from her hands in season 3.