An impeccable story trapped in a modern open world game.

Zero Dawn hooks you on it's main story from the get go, the mystery of Aloy's heritage has intricate twists and turns that culminate in a beautiful story about the persistence of human nature, and how simply the care of one person can take so many so far. I wish that I could gush about the rest of this game like I could the narrative, but it suffers from so many problems that can be found in tons of other modern open world games that, toward the end, I just wanted to play the main story and ignored most everything else.

First off, the world itself. It's beautiful, the environment team did a spectacular job of bringing the landscapes to life, it is a crying shame that the design doesn't encourage exploration whatsoever. EVERY LITTLE THING has a big, obnoxious marker on it that you can't turn off, which meant most of the time I wasn't paying much attention to the world around me and instead just kept following markers. Which is infuriating, because the world is BEGGING to be explored, and yet the mood only took me once or twice.

Case in point, there's a part in the story where you're meant to rendezvous with a contact, you find them dead, and they have drawn a map in their blood to where you need to go, in their dying moments. "Oh cool!" I thought, expectations suddenly rising "A puzzle! I need to decipher the map and figure out where to-" and then the cutscene ended, and a big, obnoxious marker popped up on screen, always there, always demanding my attention, always telling me where to go.

Now, this isn't entirely Zero Dawn's fault, these quest markers are a plague on the modern AAA gaming space, but what frustrates me is Horizon is SO CLOSE to being such an incredible, perfect game but it so frequently succumbs to these dull design decisions that it doesn't stick the landing. Side quests are dull and result in "go here, scan thing, talk to person, fight machine" ad infinitum, so I just stopped doing them. Gathering resources in the world is pointless because most shops will just sell them to you and you amass currency so fast that you might as well just fast travel to a merchant rather than go out and gather the things you need.

With just a few changes to its core design, even optionally (no quest markers, limited merchant stock, harsher resource restrictions) then Horizon could really encourage you to explore its world and get engrossed in it. And you should! Fighting machines out in the wild is SO immensely fun, so much thought has been put into each enemy and taking on any of them feels so good, in between fluid, well designed enemies and Aloy's razor-sharp control.

Horizon Zero Dawn is worth your time for the story alone, but it could have been so, so much more.