Horizon Forbidden West Review: A Triumph of Feeling and Interactive Storytelling

Perhaps the greatest problem plaguing open world games is a certain desperation to be all things to all players. Many of the great ones are able to dodge that trap by doubling down on gameplay, but it’s becoming a rare thing to see a game truly emphasize its characters above all else. That by itself makes Horizon Forbidden West a stellar outlier, as Guerilla Games treats the diverse NPCs that fill the game’s vibrant world with a care and consideration that most developers do not dream of bestowing on their open world titles.

That primacy is evident in everything from the way that the NPCs look to the way they act and sound. It’s also in the way that Aloy, our flame-haired heroine, slowly comes to terms with the beauty of life and sets out to defend its integrity. The game evolves a few of Horizon Zero Dawn’s mechanical ideas in organic, enjoyable ways, but they aren’t why you’ll want to return to the game long after the credits have rolled. It’s Aloy’s allegiance to the preservation of life.

In the game’s menu is a laundry list of NPCs who need Aloy’s help, and whose stories—even late into the campaign as you’re unlocking new weapons and facing down heretofore unseen mechanical monstrosities—you’ll want to see through to the very end. That alone attests to the depth of feeling and purposefulness demonstrated by Horizon Forbidden West’s interactive storytelling. On a very fundamental level, the game is devoted to making the player believe that its world is worth saving and that its people are worth knowing.

Aloy’s world is in danger, under siege from a deadly red weed called the Blight, a rogue tribe of warrior zealots led by a hardline separatist named Regalla (voiced by a mildly underutilized Angela Bassett) going on a country-wide murder spree, and a group of bastards called Far Zenith who, as they essentially consider themselves a kind of master race, are seemingly bent on wiping the Earth clean. That’s all in addition to the devil we already know from the first game: massive robot dinosaurs who are still roaming the land, and who are much more fun to deal with this time around thanks to a series of thoughtful quality-of-life gameplay tweaks.

Many of the first game’s higher-end upgrades (calling a mount from anywhere, free fast travel from campsites, basic creature overrides, slow-motion when firing arrows) are unlocked at the outset and joined by other welcome improvements. For one, melee combat has a combo system that adds complexity to face-to-face skirmishes. Elemental weaknesses on mechanical enemies can be exploited to do damage, strip parts off, or cause explosive overloads.

Climbing, in particular, seems to have taken a page from Death Stranding, with a Focus function that now allows players to see which surfaces and objects are traversable. The gameplay mechanics that inform the robot-hunting, while not as complex as those in, say, the Monster Hunter games, are at least varied, allowing players to approach problems in their own way, where Horizon Zero Dawn tended to simply funnel players into preset killzones.

If there are moments throughout Horizon Forbidden West where you feel the linearity of the adventure a little too much, it makes up for that by endearing us to its characters, to the bite-sized episodic stories that fill its vast, startlingly detailed open world, and by making every activity have meaning to someone within it. Even the Tallneck tasks—this series’s version of the typical open-world “climb a tower, reveal the map” trope—have been crafted not just as self-contained action set pieces that are more thrilling and adrenaline-pumping than most full games, but as one more occasion to tell us stories of the world that was and how it collapsed.

That connection to the past is also this game’s ace in the hole, giving us a parallel story to Aloy figuring out how to save her world, filling in the blanks left unanswered by Horizon Zero Dawn. As in that game, these stories are captivating, sad, and, at times, terrifying. There’s a story mission late in the campaign that starts as a sneering allegory of primitive people trying to emulate the CEOs and tech bros of the 21st century that slowly curdles into outright horror story, suggesting a mix of Claire Denis’s High Life and a no-holds-barred Mummy remake.

There are dozens of stories across Horizon Forbidden West that are every bit as cool, engaging, and thoughtful as that one. That makes it somewhat disappointing that the main story doesn’t quite hit the same heights in the end, as there’s a sagging middle that takes a little of the wind out of the finale. But it’s not something that’s worth sweating over, as the company that Aloy keeps consistently makes the trek work taking every step of the way.

This game was reviewed using a retail copy purchased by the reviewer.