Picking up 6 months after the era of Horizon Zero Dawn this new journey finds our hero Aloy and her fellow Nora, Varl, setting out West of the homeland to a different territory in search of a backup of GAIA, the AI that will help them fix the dying world (should you haven’t literally first game or it’s been some time I’d urge a quick refresher before jumping into this). That goal quickly reveals itself to become more involved than expected though once the warring Tenakth tribes from the Forbidden West, mysteries surrounding an old world corporation called Far Zenith along with a poisonous red blight around the vegetation all try to complicate the mission.
To state that Forbidden West’s narrative ups the ante in the groundwork that Horizon Zero Dawn laid would be a severe understatement. The sequel manages to search hard below surfaces the original only scratched to locate a plentiful wellspring of lore and world building which had me enamoured from start to finish. The challenging part is referring to any one of it – you will find way too many crucial narrative beats and revelations that would be a shame to spoil, the reality is that Guerrilla has again done an extraordinary job of exploring an enormous range of themes in this fantastical world. This can be a game that tackles ideas of purpose and legacy, religion and government, freedom of knowledge, colonisation, race, technology, loss, pride and a whole lot and deftly delivers them in magnitudes both grandiose and miniscule.
One of Forbidden West’s biggest successes, and one that reveals itself almost immediately, is really a far more convincing cast of characters which are better written, better rendered and animated and more pivotal to Aloy’s journey than ever before. Gone are the original game’s stale and stilted conversations as well as in their place probably the most jaw-dropping character models and motion capture I’ve ever seen running in real time. This is along with top notch writing, supporting a really wise commitment to the game’s cast of secondary characters.
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Some of the best moments in Forbidden West come from Aloy’s interactions with others, the brand-new world and deeper development of side characters naturally leading to more engagement and search for her very own thoughts and emotions. Every new human money is filled with engaging and well-rounded stories that add depth to both Aloy and also the world round her. The stuff that could be considered filler, the stuff on view world that would typically be content for content’s sake, is often neatly woven into the world state or feeds into minor narrative beats making careful exploration a much more compelling prospect.
The newfound feeling of companionship in Forbidden West’s narrative is bolstered by the structure of its open world too, which starts with basics of operations for Aloy and her steadily-growing party. Grounding what eventually turns into a branching set of objectives in a convenient location that grows and changes as players achieve goals in the world makes a marked effect on a feeling of progression with the game’s story and allows a lot of here we are at Aloy to possess those meaningful and well-written conversations together with her companions that I’ve already praised a lot. Between your base and also the other major settlements hanging around there’s a better sense of place that was missing in the lonely wandering from the previous game’s world and it is comparatively soulless centres of population.
Similarly, where Zero Dawn made dungeons and unique gameplay experiences from the ruins of scientific bases and sprawling landmarks, Forbidden West gives players plenty of opportunity to explore smaller slices of the world as we know it now. Overgrown and dilapidated homesteads and town squares from the pre-apocalypse routinely become miniature puzzle sequences that flex the possibility in Aloy’s new abilities and equipment such as the Pullcaster.
