E3 Highlights: “Horizon: Zero Dawn”
Horizon: Zero Dawn Takes a New and Innovative Stab at the Post-Apocalyptic Genre
Nicole Smith ’18 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
During Sony’s E3 press conference, Guerilla Games announced its brand-new franchise, Horizon Zero Dawn, with an announcement trailer and about three minutes of gameplay footage captured directly from a PS4. Horizon Zero Dawn is a third-person action RPG that follows the stories of many tribes inhabiting the world after a mysterious race called “the Old Ones” have fallen, their sprawling metal cities and skyscrapers now standing as gargantuan relics commandeered by nature. While the setting hasn’t been confirmed, Horizon Zero Dawn could very well inhabit a post-apocalyptic Earth, with hunt-and-gather tribes surviving in the wilderness and decaying urban goliaths becoming home to lofty treetops, waterfalls gushing out of tower windows. The environment showcased in the trailer is lush and gorgeous, and this game could easily succeed on its charismatic setting alone, focusing on the political and social relationships between the many different tribes that live within it, but Horizon Zero Dawn has an extra special element that makes it all the more exciting.
This world is completely inhabited by robot dinosaurs.
While they aren’t officially referred to as such, these “mechanical beasts” are essentially just that—robot dinosaurs. In the game, you play as a hunter, allegedly named Aloy, as she tracks down and kills these motorized monsters in search for parts and resources for her own weapons and survival. The gameplay footage shows her wielding a bow and a spear that can both pierce the armor of and kill these creatures, a crossbow with tether arrows, and she even repurposes one of the machine’s own guns to use it against them. Aloy can be heard talking to herself throughout most of the trailer, most likely to give us an early taste of her character, and the way she apologizes to one creature as it dies implies that her relationship with these strange machines is not one of fear or hatred, but rather respect and cohabitation.
Guerilla Games has stated that Aloy’s journey will help her solve the many mysteries surrounding her and the world she inhabits while she braves the perils of this futuristic cybernetic wilderness. Seriously, a giant bird robot shows up in the middle of a thunderstorm, how cool is that?