I’m gonna level with y’all – I am undeniably obsessed with Horizon Zero Dawn. 

When Forbidden West was released, I sulked a little bit in my non-PS5 owning misery and promised I would really start saving for one this time. And, to satiate the need for a new game I’ve been wanting to play since I heard of its release, I started replaying Horizon Zero Dawn (again). 

Where we began

Horizon is a weird situation for me, because I know the start of the game like the back of my hand. For some reason, I’ve seen other people play it like 50,000 times, and I’ve obviously also started it myself a few times after that. This is just a weird anecdote, but I honestly so clearly see Aloy as a tiny little girl getting hit in the head with a rock, running through the ancient ones’ cave to find her ever-important focus and being a little nonsense to Rost. It’s in my head forever, I dream about it, I know it better than my Masters thesis topic. 

Besides this weird recurrence, Horizon Zero Dawn became one of my favourite games of all time for a few reasons. To start with the obvious one, you get to fight giant robot dinosaurs, dragon-like things and big animals with fire, ice, explosions, corrosion and whatever else you could imagine. I’m a simple gal at the end of the day – give me things to shoot in the most impressive ways and I’ll be happy. 

But behind the really addictive gameplay, I irrevocably fell in love with the world of Horizon (if you haven’t played it, major spoilers ahead).

The first time I played this game, I thought it was a ‘our past reimagined’ type of story. I suppose, in a way, it is – but not directly. They settle you in with the first ancient cave – the metal world – from the get go, and you find recordings of people talking as if the world is ending. But it clearly didn’t, so what the hell?

Where we went 

Yeah, well, it did. The world ended. It ended in an extravagant humans-are-always-going-to-be-this-stupid way. The excellence of this game for me came in with how they reveal that to you – and how they take you through a journey leading to the scientist Elisabet Sobeck and GAIA Prime.

In what is implied to be our time, a nonsense human by the name of Ted Faro created a super-army of robots that thrive and replicate by consuming biomass. Why did he think this was a good idea? Who knows, we have idiots in power in the real world too. Essentially, you can imagine what eventually happened, and Elisabet Sobeck created an AI – GAIA Prime – in an effort to rebuild the world after it was destroyed. 

Besides the other quests that Aloy finds herself on, she is on a search to find her mother. Outcast as a child because she is ‘motherless’ – as we are led to believe – she fights to find her way back to the Nora tribe, where matriarchal power is of utmost importance. As we go on, it’s implied that her mother may be behind a door, a relic from the Metal World. As we go on… we find out that Aloy is essentially a clone of Elisabet. 

Malfunctions and a rogue AI meant that GAIA Prime needed to bring Elisabet back some 1000 years after the Faro Plague. 

So she did, in the only way she knew how. 

There’s obviously way more to this – and the world allows you to explore ours from a different perspective. The story magically unfolds as you experience the current environments you live in, and besides being a pretty as hell game – you are always hungry to know more. 

The comfiness 

This is one of my comfy games because, in my opinion, it is an homage to the strength of women and motherhood.

It is quite rare to find video game stories that speak to my sentiments as a woman, and Horizon Zero Dawn hit the nail on the head over, and over, and over again. Even when I’m not sulking about the momentary lost opportunity at playing the sequel, I return to it often for a comfort in my soul I struggle to find elsewhere. 

It speaks to the true allure of video games. A way to feed your mind and make you feel warm, and this despite the story of our fate being a little tragic, if not despairing.