Horizon Forbidden West's Mad Max-Style Gauntlet Runs Deserve More Attention
In Horizon Forbidden West, players continue Aloy's quest to protect the balance of technology and nature that helped revive planet Earth after a rogue swarm of military robots wiped out all life some centuries prior. Yet, as in most open-world games, there's a sort of ludonarrative dissonance at the core of the experience given Aloy is able to ignore her world-saving quest in favor of collecting Black Box recordings or helping various tribes through their day-to-day woes.
Developer Guerrilla Games was smart enough to give nearly every side-activity a purpose at least tangentially related to the main quest. Helping various characters through their hardships may gain Aloy allies for future altercations, and things like completing Horizon Forbidden West's Cauldrons sometimes affect the larger world on top of giving Aloy new machine overrides. Much of it is just good worldbuilding though, and a great example is the Gauntlet Runs that establish an extreme sport reminiscent of the post-apocalyptic desert car races in Mad Max: Fury Road, or the more aptly named Death Race film series.
In Defense of Ubisoft's Open-World Formula
The overarching plot of Horizon Forbidden West sees Aloy travel into the titular Forbidden West to bring back an AI named GAIA which runs a now-rogue terraforming system. Despite the stakes of accelerated climate disasters, the Nora warrior has to content with the warrior-like Tenakth at every turn in order to reach her objectives. After the brutal Red Raids instigated by Horizon Zero Dawn's Carja united the Tenakth decades prior, a civil war threatens to tear the region apart now that Tenakth Chief Hekarro argues for peace.
Aloy visits all three Tenakth peoples during her adventure: the Desert Clan, Lowland
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