"I would have wanted her to be curious. And willful,
unstoppable even, but with enough compassion to heal the world."
Hello everyone!
You're probably wondering how this all makes sense. After all, I may have mentioned in some other post (or two) that I'm not actually a gamer, strictly speaking. I don't have a computer that could handle that type of graphic, and I definitely don't have a gaming console at this moment in time.
But what I DO have is access to Youtube, and you can find pretty much any game played from start to finish on there, if you know which gamers to follow.
I've been following Tmartn for a few years now, but I've equally been subscribed to Tetraninja, and it was the latter's gameplay of this masterpiece that I ended up going through.
And man, did I power through it. I just couldn't stop watching!
I've seen some gameplays in the years since I started watching, and all of them have a story worth following, but I don't think I've ever run into something as insanely awesome as Guerilla Games' production of Horizon Zero Dawn.
Even more exciting, probably, is the fact that this year SHOULD mark the release of the much-anticipated sequel, Horizon Forbidden West - and if you understand the meaning behind the first title, chances are you'll be guessing that Forbidden West probably has something to do along those same lines, as it gets name-dropped during the first game.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Horizon Zero Dawn begins in the middle of nowhere (literally), in the snow, where what looks to be a native, tribal individual, named Rost, heads up a mountain with a baby strapped to his back. We learn they're both outcasts, but that he's going to respect the tribal rules and speak her name that morning in a very Lion King moment (if you're lucky enough to watch the correct gamer, they probably sing the song at that time, NAAAAAAAAAAAAANTS EEN-VWEN-YAAAAAAAA!).
We learn through the course of these early interactions that Rost and Aloy (the before-mentioned baby) as outcasts are forbidden to speak to any of the other tribe members, nor can the tribe members speak to them (though some break those rules, like traders, etc.). Aloy yearns for acceptance, and most importantly a mother as she only has Rost, and in the process of her early adventures she stumbles into an underground chamber filled with broken and overgrown machinery.
She takes a small white triangle from a skeleton and attaches it to her own ear; this is her Focus, a device that presents an augmented reality by scanning the environment, identifying threats and paths and other useful things, and which Rost initially dismisses, until she rescues a young would-be brave from certain death later.
See, the tribe, called the Nora, are hunter-gatherers who worship a goddess called the All-Mother (basically nature, from what I can understand), and they co-exist in the world alongside machine entities that look a whole lot like our animals today (for example a buck, a raptor, a bull of some sort, maybe even a jaguar, etc.) but are made out of metal and wire (there's also ACTUAL animals in the game, but they seem like more of an afterthought).
The machines and humans have managed to co-exist mostly peacefully (with humans occasionally stripping one for parts) until something called the 'Derangement' which caused the machines to become wilder, more dangerous, hostile towards humans, and hell-bent on killing them on sight.
This, then, is Aloy's training ground for the next decade or so as Rost trains her to take part in the Nora ceremony of the Proving, wherein any prospective brave (even an outcast) may run the gauntlet, so to speak, and if they're successful, they become braves. Specifically, if SHE is successful, she will be welcomed into the tribe as a member, no longer an outcast (not that anyone seems eager to follow their own rules, which I find kind of hypocritical, but ah well).
Things might have even ended well - Aloy finishes first and becomes a brave - if not for an ambush on the youngsters at the Proving, which kills them all - and might have killed Aloy too, if not for Rost entering the equation, saving her, and then sacrificing himself so that she might live ... and if you don't feel bad about him dying at this point you have a heart of stone. STONE I'm telling you.
Aloy is taken into the heart of the Nora sacred mountain to recover, where one of the matriarchs (in case you haven't noticed, the Nora are a fiercely matriarchal society) who's been on her side all along tells her both what happened, and that she was found as a baby in front of a large metal door which the Nora believes leads to the All-Mother.
Aloy's Focus tells her it's something else, but that she can't enter because of a corrupted registry, however she does find a name - Dr. Elisabet Sobeck - and an uncanny likeness to said name which she then goes on to explore.
The matriarchs confer the rank of Seeker on the young woman, allowing her to leave the Nora Sacred Lands to follow the trail of the assassins and to find the answers she seeks. So off Aloy goes into the great, big world, headed first to Meridian, the capital city of another tribe running amok in the land, the Carja - city-dwellers and lovers of fine things, and also completely bonkers because they worship the Sun (I'm not joking, Louis XIV would have LOVED THEM.).
Aloy follows a lead about a man who has a Focus like her own, getting tangled in a lot of side-quests in Meridian while hunting down information, and learning that the sister of one of the men she met back in the Sacred Lands, Erend, has been killed. She and Erend undertake the mission to uncover the truth for the Sun-King (who had a thing for this sister and who later thinks he has a thing for Aloy which she shuts down REAL fast), and find out that his sister is actually still alive ... until she really dies later on from her wounds, but that's beside the point.
See during all of this, not only do Erend and Aloy forge a lasting friendship (Erend might want it to be something more but he's actually smart enough to understand it's not happening, which gives him extra credit in my book, and I am totally a shipper), but Aloy discovers the man she's after is of Erend's merry tribe of Oseram, tinkerers, merchants, mercenaries, and all-out brawlers.
Said man is also being blackmailed by a Carja cult, who she later learns belong to a rebel group that broke off from the main Carja nation after the death of the previous, utterly mad Sun-King (who thought painting his lands red with the blood of actual people was going to purify something or other, you can tell how popular THAT was). The group itself is called the Eclipse, and its leader, Helis, is responsible for the death of Rost and all the other young braves, so you can bet he has Aloy's mark on him now.
More importantly, however, Aloy gets contacted through her Focus by a mysterious man named Sylens, who then helps and guides her along her journey (or well, annoys her, mostly, she has to do all the dangerous stuff herself anyway). Sylens is also curious about the Old Ones, the people who came before them all and who left behind all the ruins and technology that can't be used anymore, then mysteriously disappeared.
No one knows what happened, but his guess is it has something to do with Elisabet Sobeck, who is the reason that an entity called HADES, whom the Eclipse serve, issued a kill-on-sight order for Aloy, whose resemblance to Sobeck, as said before, is uncanny.
With Sylens in her ear, Aloy goes on the hunt for answers (after freeing the man who originally betrayed her from his bondage), working their way through Cauldrons where she learns to override the machines roaming the lands, getting embroiled in different quests (from gathering herbs to machine parts to actually hunting down humans), and heading for a big underground facility that only Aloy may unlock because of whatever relationship she has with Sobeck.
And this is the story they eventually uncover, through many trials and tribulations:
nearly 1000 years ago, the world as WE know it came under threat when the Faro company producing military grade robots lost control of said robots, who then turned on the very entities they were supposed to protect (aka humans) and consumed biomass as fuel, reproducing and replicating too fast to be shut down. Dr. Elisabet Sobeck and her team of scientists established a system of underground facilities called Cradles, and a solution for after the robots ran out of biomass to consume.
This was called Project Zero Dawn - to develop a terraforming system, and repopulate Earth.
Because yes, essentially, they couldn't stop the robots - but they could, with the help of an AI called GAIA, basically reform Earth after the robots were finally shut down with nothing more to lunch on, and finally repopulate Earth from the DNA stored in these facilities. GAIA would have multiple subsystems, all named after different Greek deities (from APOLLO to HEPHAESTUS to HADES), all responsible for a different sector of the rebirth.
Unfortunately, Sobeck's plan went a bit off the rails when Ted Faro, the idiot who initially lost control of the robots, decided that the humans who would be born AFTER this disaster didn't need to know anything the Old Ones knew before, and sabotaged the APOLLO system of learning designed to teach all of them, thus leaving them in their primitive, tribal state.
At this point, after learning HADES was actually the system responsible for a second human extinction in the event that Earth couldn't be repopulated safely, Aloy is captured by the Eclipse and their leader, Helis, sentenced to death in their crazed Sun Ring (gladiator style), but is rescued by Sylens who directs her back to the Nora lands and the mountain she was born in.
She also wants to hurry back because Helis ordered an attack on the Nora anyway, and arrives just in time to help repel it, then manages to fix the registry at the door so she can finally enter the facility beyond, where she finds a message from GAIA.
See for some unknown reason, HADES received a signal that activated it much earlier, breaking the main GAIA system apart, and so in a last resort, GAIA self-destructed so that she could stop HADES (I say 'she' because during the course of the game you learn that Elisabet taught GAIA to not only think, but to feel), which in the real world translated into the mountain where the prime facility was located cracking in two like an egg.
However, without GAIA to control the terraforming, the whole system began to fragment, and HADES was still running amok, so as a last-resort in case her sacrifice didn't work, GAIA created a clone of Elisabet Sobeck in the form of Aloy, in the hopes that she would be able to not only find the message, but destroy HADES and re-launch the entire process. Aloy also learns that, not only is she a clone, but Sobeck sacrificed herself to prevent the swarm of Faro robots from finding GAIA, and thus armed, she hunts down the master override needed to destroy HADES once and for all.
With her allies by her side (these include all the random characters you help throughout the game as well as the main Oseram and Carja forces), Aloy heads into battle with HADES to stop the system from reactivating the Faro robots so they don't start consuming the Earth again, eventually defeating all the machines sent to stop her and killing the system with the master override (and if you're wondering where Sylens stands in this whole thing, well, he was the one who founded the Eclipse and initially served HADES on a quest for knowledge, but ran off when HADES decided to kill him).
That said and done, Aloy then travels to Elisabet's home where she actually finds her corpse outside, as if she had been sitting there waiting for the end to come, and has a moment with her predecessor, essentially the mother she's never known, taking a small orb representing the Earth with her as memento. There's no way to get APOLLO back online (Faro deleted it all, the moron), but there could be a chance to restore the rest of GAIA's functions to continue the process.
But even as we leave Aloy with her more-or-less happy ending, we head back to HADES' corpse ... and learn the thing STILL ISN'T DEAD, but ends up captured by Sylens, who wants to know who the heck sent the signal that activated it in the first place.
DUN DUN DUNNN!
Whew. WHAT A GAME.
What a story!
I honestly can't even believe I was so hooked on a GAME that ran so smoothly and had a story that's better than most movie plots nowadays. Plus it was made back in 2017, it had a strong, independent female character who didn't need a romantic subplot (even if it would have been sweet), the voice acting was ON POINT (looking at you, Ashly Burch), and I swear I cried at multiple points during the game.
I mean what other game DOES THAT???
The idea that some asshat lost control of his robots and they became intelligent enough to overrun Earth is absolutely terrifying, because I could totally see it happening, so what happened seems entirely plausible. Hopefully we have our own Dr. Sobeck to help out, too!
I loved the mysterious aspect of it, uncovering pieces of the puzzle as you go along, but I equally enjoyed the side quests too, even if some were completely insane or funny to no end. But they were all entertaining and somehow never got boring, which is more than I can say about several other gameplays I've watched thus far!
And the characters. THE CHARACTERS. Either it's the Sun-King Avad, the clumsy but endearing Erend, the quiet, stoic Rost, or Aloy our heroine, every single one of them brings something unique to the table. Even Helis, the bad guy, not to mention Sylens!
Aloy obviously stands out though. She's so practical, independent, and no-nonsense it's incredibly funny to watch her stumble into situations she has no clue about. Rost could teach her a lot, but he was a bachelor (well, widower, as you learn through the story) and some things were beyond him, too. But at the end of the day, if you don't fall in love with Aloy, I don't know what character would be better.
I'm SUPER stoked for the sequel to see what's next for Aloy and Erend both (we know from the early previews that they're returning), and I wonder if we'll ever learn who sent the signal to HADES.
I swear it's bound to be Faro again. The jerk messed up Earth the first time around and then messed up the process the second time with the APOLLO stunt, so I wouldn't put it past him to enact a safety measure to activate HADES just in case there was an inkling of the human race trying to go down the same route as before, though how you'd deduce that is beyond me ... then again right around the time when the machines started going berserk the war with the Carja empire ended, so there'd been a lot of killing by then.
Who knows?
My money is on Faro though. Not that I'm sure we'll get an answer, but ...
Bring along the sequel, anyway!
xx
*images and video not mine
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