Horizon Forbidden West Is Too Obsessed With Saving The World

thegamer.com:

Horizon Forbidden West’s opening is almost comical in its simplicity. A brief recap runs down the past game’s events while looking forward to the future, making sure to emphasise the coming threat of Zero Dawn at every possible moment. The planet is being overwhelmed with a weird red weed and Aloy is the only one capable of putting a stop to it. Her destiny is set in stone, a shackle to her own existence that dictates her every possible action.

I’m only a couple of hours into this gorgeous adventure, and have been told that she’ll come to confront her own existence away from being a saviour to humanity later in the story, which is a huge relief, but it doesn’t mitigate a set of stakes which can never escape their own vastness. I understand that a blockbuster of this magnitude needs to be big in almost every regard, making sure the characters, locations, and motivations on the line are worth fighting for. If they aren’t then we might stop caring, or become lost due to a lack of focus driving us forward. Yet the same can be said for stories that go too far in this direction.

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Forbidden West beats you over the head with how each little thing Aloy does is everything or nothing, and even the slightest deviation away from her quest will see this planet crumble away into nothingness. Even her own narration is filled with a tiresome determination, casual japes from close friends being brushed off as she makes it clear why she can’t stop moving even for even a single moment, or she risks letting everyone who depends on her down. It’s an admirable outlook, but one the writing isn’t nearly strong enough to support.

Ashly Burch’s performance is tremendous, but