I had a lot of motivation to write about politics and social media, but I think that will be very angry so I decided against it. If you’re curious, it would have amounted to:
-Organizing and understanding issues at hand => Good!
-Sharing angry headlines and loudly shouting at the injustice of the world while plainly not understanding what you’re talking about => Bad!
So we can move off of that.
---
Horizon Zero Dawn Review
I recently played Horizon Zero Dawn. It was very good. The Plot goeth thusly:
Civilization as we know has ended a very long time ago. The remnants of humanity now live in tribes much less technologically advanced than modern day. However, along with animals and the ruins of the world’s cities, they also share the world with Machines, large animal-like robots that are hunted for parts and for some reason have become more and more dangerous and aggressive as time goes on in what is called ‘the Derangement.’
Our protagonist is Aloy, a girl of the Nora tribe that’s been raised as an outcast for reasons neither she nor her guardian know, and she’s not allowed to ask. She gets an opportunity to find out, only to be drawn into a larger adventure to save the world, discover her origins, and find out what exactly happened to human civilization that the world got into the state it is now.
I got to this game after finishing Assassin’s Creed: Unity, a frustrating morass of a game that made me want to die. And playing Horizon was fantastic because it was a game that worked, was challenging but not infuriating, and made me enjoy playing games instead of just trying to get them done with.
Despite it being technically a post-apocalypse, and the premise being that you fight robot dinosaurs, it’s not a visually dull game. Every area is full of color and vitality. There is a tendency in visual and interactive media of late to make the worlds presented therein with a gray and brown pallet. I love Skyrim, but look at the colors of the game next to the colors of the previous game in the series. Yes, it’s a country based on Northern Europe, but not all of Northern Europe is that muted in color. Not so with Horizon! It’s a beautiful game that splashes color everywhere.
The visual design is also fairly impressive. Each tribe generally sticks to different colors and outfits so that you can easily tell them apart just by looking at them: Nora wear a lot of skins and leathers, Carja wear more finery and less layers for their sunny Sundom, the Oseram have a lot more bits of metal in their clothing, and the Banuk are covered in heavy furs. The outfits look distinctive and they generally make sense.
Gameplay is also fantastic. There are some hiccups; sometimes Aloy won’t fire her weapon when you tell her to, especially if a Machine is running straight at her, or sometimes the prompt for Silent Strike will go away at just the worst moment. But it mostly works! There’s a lot of combat, but when it comes to Machines there’s a huge focus on stealth and tactics; using traps, gadgets, and strategic attacks rather than just filling the thing with arrows.
The expansion The Frozen Wilds amps this up with a couple of new Machines, but overall I wasn’t that huge a fan of them--they tend to be tanks full of health and taking very little damage, all while being of a variety that renders all supposed weaknesses almost moot. These new Machines get in your face and don’t give you much opportunity to do anything other than get spammed with hit after hit and frantically try not to die.
Human enemies are much simpler, and generally very stupid. Which is a bit of a failing, I guess, but after taking on a giant robot T-Rex that’s packing explosive disc launchers and lasers, I suppose it would be a little silly if a human enemy was more overtly dangerous. And in straight-up fights the human enemies can outnumber and overwhelm you--which again, encourages you to take stealth tactics.
Traversal is simple enough. Ledges are mostly clearly marked, and climbing surfaces are helpfully made bright yellow so that they stand out. It’s very rare that you climb up a wall and you have no idea where you’re going.
Helping you throughout your quest is your Focus--a little device on Aloy’s head that lets her scan and notice things in her surroundings, highlighting enemy weaknesses and points of interest. You’ll be using it a lot; and every time you do, your controller will make a noise, which was very unexpected but incredibly cool.
I had some trouble with levelling; you don’t need that many experience points to level up. And because I messed around a lot, with side quests and hunting on my own, I levelled up pretty quickly, so that by the time the Plot really got going, and it was giving me Level 12 missions, I was already past Level 20. I generally stayed well above recommended levels. Which wasn’t bad, but it felt a bit awkward, like the game didn’t account for you doing extra tasks.
The story is where this game really shined for me. It felt, in some ways, rather like Avatar: The Last Airbender, in that there were different tribes with different cultures and that they all had to unite in order to defeat a greater evil that was born from the extremists gaining power in the Fire Nat--I mean, the Sundom. In the actual shape of the Plot, it doesn’t really fit the mold, but the similar notion of tribes and a world-saving quest reminded me of the themes Avatar brought up.
Aloy is a fantastic character. Apparently Sony had some apprehension about a female protagonist, but it worked very well. She is not given a love interest (though several characters flirt with her), and she is not ever sexualized or belittled. Her quest is her own, and she doesn’t take crap from anyone.
What makes Aloy’s journey interesting is that it’s kind of a straightforward Chosen One narrative, despite the post-apocalyptic science-fiction setting . And it works. It makes sense in the narrative, and at no point do you feel as if she’s not the hero. Several other Chosen One narratives make you question, intentionally or not, the worthiness of the protagonist and whether he or she should be considered as important as all that. Horizon gives you a protagonist who is always likable and sympathetic, while making her strong and believable.
You don’t see that in a lot of science-fiction that’s not of the Space Opera variety. And I think making a great Hero’s Journey in this type of story, with a female character, in a video game that’s fun to play, is one of the best things that’s happened to video games. I’m curious to see if they make more games out of this, and if they do, where they’ll go. I’m optimistic that they’ll be great.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment