This week, the clan finally gets to their review of Horizon Zero Dawn. Enjoy!
Horizon Zero Dawn is an action role-playing game developed by Guerrilla Games, and published by Sony. You may remember Guerrilla from their work with the Killzone series. The game was released on February 28th, 2017 and has become the best selling original IP on the PS4 console, selling 3.4 million copies as of June of this year. Development for the game began in 2011, and the director has been cited as stating it was the “most risky of the proposed projects”. The game won Best Original Game at the Game Critics award in both 2015 and 2016.
Story:
The game is set approximately a thousand years in the future. Mankind has been reduced to primitive tribes as a result of an unknown calamity. The technology spread across the land is reffered to as belonging to “The Old Ones” Large robots known as machines now dominate the planet. They, for the most part, peacefuly coexist with humans. However, a recent phenomenon knond as the “Derangement” has cuased them to become more agressive towards the humans, and larger, more deadly machines have now begun to appear. The three main tribes in the world are The Nora, the Carja, and the Oseram. Nora re nodic people who worship “All Mother”, the carja live in the desert and worship the sun, and the Oseram are tinkerers who brew beer and do a lot of metalworking.
Aloy was cast out as a young child, due to her being born from a machine. She obtains a Focus that gives her special abilities, including the ability to interact with machines. Aloy, once she comes of age, enters a competition called the Proving to become a Nora Brave, and no longer be outcasted. She wins the competition, but is soon attacked by cultists. Aloy survives, and learns that the cultists had control of corrupted machines. We learn, through an old man named Olin, that the tribe who attacked us are the Eclipse. They worship a demon known as Hades, who allows them to corrupt machines.
Aloy enters the Faro headquarters and discovers that the calamity mentioned before was due to Faro losing control of the peacekeeper robots. However, the world was saved due to an emergency project known as “Zero Dawn” which was created by Dr. Sobeck. Sylens contacts Aloy and lets Aloy know the location of an AI base. We journey to that factory, and learn that Zero Dawn was a vast underground system of databases, factories, and cloning facilities run by and AI known as Gaia. Once life had been extinguished, Gaia developed a countermeasure to deactivate all the Faro robots, and then build it’s own to recreate Earth’s biosphere. Once the planet was once again habitable, Gaia reseeded life on earth based on stored DNA, and taught the first human clones not to fuck up again. We also find out about Hades, who was created to enact controlled extinction if Zero Dawn was not worthwhile. Aloy is able to reach Dr. Sobecks office due to her being a clone of her. She also enters the door to “All Mother” and finds a recording that a signal activated Hades, who took over Gaia’s functions. As a last resord, Gaia self destructed to stop Hades. Aloy was created as a contingency plan with Sobecks DNA in the hope that she would find Gaia’s message, destroy Hades, and restore Gaia. Aloy learns taht Sobeck sacrificed herslef to ensure that the Faro swarm didn’t find Gaia. Aloy overridesd the system, and destroys Hades. We then find out that Sylens was the original founder of the Eclipse and was tempted by knowledge. Aloy finds out that Hades is trying to send a signal to release the Faro robots to end life on Earth again, and Aloy overrides and destroys Hades with Sylen’s lance, ending the great war. We venture to Sobecks home, find her corpse, and Aloy gets all emotional over her “mother”. Post credits shows us a scene where Hades is still alive, but trapped by Sylens. He wants to interrogate Hades to find out who sent the signal that reactivated him in the first place.
