Horizon Forbidden West – Zero Punctuation

I did extract some amusement from the way all the characters are dressed like an abandoned farmer’s market in a high graffiti neighbourhood and then in conversation just awkwardly stand around sweating under ridiculous headdresses, fidgeting and mumbling like a bunch of teenagers chatting outside a cinema where none of them want to be the one to suggest they go home ‘cos it’s a school night. Anyway, back in the post-reboot mumblecore future of Horizon, Aloy, having spent the last game learning how to transcend her outcast status and learn to work with other people, promptly chucks all of that development in the bin so fast it makes the lid spin around. When it transpires that all the shit she did in the last game to save the world didn’t actually save it properly and she has to journey to the titular forbidden west to save it for realsies, she is fucking chomping at the bit to get away from everyone she knows. Oh but don’t you see it’s too dangerous for them. She is the only one who can shoulder the burden of saving the world, and it’s not like anyone else has an investment in helping her succeed in that goal. What a selfish fucking bint.

Aloy comes across like she holds everyone who doesn’t have her old world technology cheat sheet in total eye-rolling contempt. Whenever questgivers are telling her the problem, she’s like a disgruntled computer science teacher’s assistant watching an old person type. “Urgh, get out of the way, I’LL do it.” It’s the classic problem of an overly competent protagonist who’s already had their character development wedged into the middle of the story like a fucking unmoving tree trunk with half the charisma. But here’s the punchline that makes it twice as obnoxious: she’s not actually competent. Or at least she doesn’t come across as such in gameplay. She swans about the cutscenes going “Yeah no worries I’ll just go overcome the current adversity in my unflinching ginger finery, want me to pick you up some baby wipes while I’m out?”, and then she runs out into yet another fight with robot dinosaurs and gets screamingly batted back and forth between two giant metal Thagomizers for five minutes. While having to constantly scarf down healing berries like a Sony QA tester with a bottle of caffeine pills.

At least she does when I’m controlling her. I was a bit underlevelled ‘cos I was trying to rush through critical path for the review. I did try a few random sidequests but all of them were variations on “Oh please rescue my close friend stroke family member who went alone to confront a robot stroke group of bandits in order to prove themselves and didn’t realise you need protagonist status to get away with shit like that.” So direct combat with robots was mostly me getting nine tenths of my health blasted off by an unexpected tail whip or missile barrage and having to frantically roly-poly into cover to suck down three acai smoothies. But I can only assume that’s how it’s supposed to go because all the combat areas are absolutely carpeted in berries. It’s like the haemhorroid ward synchronized swimming team out there. Oh no I’m out of berries. “Don’t worry! Just press a button to refill your berry pouch from your stash!” Well what’s the point of even having a fucking stash mechanic if we can just teleport stuff out of it whenever? Are we trying to smuggle shit through airport customs? Oh no I’m out of berries for real. Not to worry, there’s a small health potion in my consumable quick select, just have to scroll through to find it.

Trap, trap, trap, stamina potion, trap, medium health po – I haven’t got any medium health potions, why is the icon still cluttering up the fucking quick sele – oh, I just got thagomizered again. See, this is what’s driving me nuts about Jiminy Cockthroat games – always bloated with game mechanics layering over each over and getting in the way, none of them with enough focus to provide a solid core to the experience. It’s like trying to appreciate your spouse’s naughty underwear while they’re also wearing baggy pyjamas and a sou-wester and the back half of a pantomime horse. Go to the upgrade menu and the game proudly unfurls multiple distinct gameplay styles with separate upgrade trees – warrior, trapper, hunter, dozy, beaky, mick and titch – but on closer inspection half the upgrades feel kinda inconsequential – add 30% damage to ranged combat while critically low on health as long as it’s before 9pm and you’re wearing a sombrero – or just add more exotic combat moves I’m never gonna remember that I have in a pinch. I was trying to focus on stealth ‘cos surprise attacks do ridiculous damage compared to whaling on dudes head on, it’s the difference between throwing knives at a condom full of guts and flicking gumballs at a breeze block.

But mandatory combat kept coming up so I looked at the warrior upgrade path and the first thing was “Gain the ability to hit an enemy to build up energy, then tap a button to infuse them with energy and then shoot an arrow at them to do extra damage.” Anything else I need to do for this process, game? Take down their names and addresses, perhaps? How about just More Damage? Or a standard melee attack that doesn’t look like we’re trying to forcefully eject our own spine? So Horizon Forbidden West wasn’t the best. The highest praise I could offer is that its world offers frequently quite spectacular visuals somewhere behind all the GUIs and objective markers and omnipresent tutorial text that seems eternally worried I’ll forget where the quick berry refill button is. I note the visual spectacle gets brought up a lot in other people’s positive reviews, and to those people I would like to pose a small question: Have you ever tried pressing on your eyelids? If some pretty shapes and colours really can sell the experience for you then you might save a bit of money in future if you just sat on the couch pressing on your eyelids. Also you can add the experience of listening to Horizon’s dialogue by doing it while pouring cold porridge down your ears.