"The strength to stand alone is the strength to make a stand. To serve a purpose greater than yourself."
Horizon Zero Dawn is a game by Dutch developer Guerrilla Games, makers of the Killzone series (and one other game called Shellshock: Nam '67). In a world populated by machines and humans in a post-apocalyptic Earth, Aloy is a young girl of the Nora tribe, a small hunter-gatherer group who lives and worships under the guise of the All-Mother. Raised under an outcast named Rost, Aloy grows up in the wilds devoid of any contact with the Nora. And just outside the safety of the Embrace, the Nora homeland, machines roam the landscape, aggressively targeting any and all humans who get in their way.
But it didn’t always used to be this way.
Long before, humanity existed like we do today, but something happened to erase them off the face of the Earth, leaving behind only the largest of their structures. No one really knows what these Old Ones were like or why their time of the "Metal World’ ended, but humanity’s had to start all over again.
Click here for the original write-up about the LP's format.
This is my first attempt at a Subtitled LP, and I wanted to go this route with Horizon because this is quite a dialogue-heavy game when you’re not out fighting machines. There is also a certain flow and atmosphere to the game that I don’t believe constantly talking over it to explain more of what is going on is the right approach. And since this is the first time I’m tackling such an LP, there may be a few hiccups along the way. Especially since this is the first console game that I’m capturing gameplay for, but we’ll see how it goes.
The story behind this game has a ton of potential to be spoiled, so keep that stuff under wraps until the time comes.
If one were to play this game normally, the story would unravel rather slowly, but edited down, I think I can quicken the pace quite a bit. So even though it took me 40+ hours to beat the first time through, most of that was just wandering around looking for stuff. Side quests and “errands” will have their own separate videos in case you’re just here for the story.
I will definitely be taking care to show off the wide array of combat mechanics in this game. There are at least twice as many ways to deal with machines as there are machines themselves, so I’ll be trying to show them all off. When the combat is done right, it has a really good feel, both visually and gameplay-wise.
I will also tentatively be doing bestiary-type bonus videos for the various machine enemies out there, because in the heat of battle, it can be hard to explain everything that I would want to. And, if I can, I will be doing extra videos about each of the tribes in the world, as there’s a bunch of cool stuff there as well. These bonus videos will not be subtitled, but rather voiced.
There are also quite the number of collectibles in this game, and I won’t be getting all of them, and the ones that I do get will mostly be off camera, so as not to pad out the run time with more of the same.
