Forget Horizon Forbidden West, try the Horizon Zero Dawn board game instead

techradar.com:

Horizon Forbidden West is all the rage. The most recent Sony exclusive to hit PS4 and PS5, Aloy’s latest adventure has been heaped with praise across the board. Its story is rich, its world is beautiful, and its technical design is just dazzling. In our review of the game, we reckoned its facial animations alone were worth shouting about, and said it’s a video game that looks lovely and plays brilliantly. 

That’s especially true if you’re booting it up on a PS5. While the PS4 version will see you right, you’ll only be able to fully appreciate the detail of Horizon Forbidden West’s gigantic robotic dinosaurs or the speed at which you can fast travel across the map when playing on a next-gen system. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart might have used the PS5’s speedy SSD for some impressive dimensional shifting, but Horizon Forbidden West feels like the first game to truly push the whole system to its potential.

That’s both exciting and a bit of a bother. For those of us that haven’t yet been able to grab a PS5, the game’s next-gen features are all but redundant, standing as a painful reminder of what we’re missing out on. If you’re like me, when you play a game, you’ll want to play it in the best state possible, with no shortcuts and no missing features. That means Horizon Forbidden West’s PS4 version doesn’t look too appealing, what with its graphical downgrade, slower loading times, and lower framerate.

So, what should you do? How can you get your Horizon fix while avoiding Forbidden West as you wait to get hold of a PS5? The answer is simple. Don’t turn to video games at all, but instead look to the tabletop in the Horizon Zero Dawn board game.

Kickstarted back in 2018 and released for retail last year, the Horizon Zero Dawn