This is part of a continuing series of old rants/essays/snark/thoughts/etc/etc/etc from years back that I figured I might as well throw somewhere other than a decrepit and deleted Discord server. This one comes from a “video game book club” that I played with some fellow traveler nerds (thought I believe I solo’d this one).

As Always, Assume Spoilers

Having beaten Event Horizon: Zero Dawn (the main game, just barely started the DLC), I have assorted opinions for people to chew on if they give a damn (alternately, someone tell me to shut the fuck up). Not sure if they come to anything collectively.

  • Firstly, I thought it was very good. Gotta say this up front. Best Ubisoft-like I’ve ever played. Gonna be confusing the shit out of some of my friends throughout these points.
  • The lead writer also worked on narrative design in New Vegas. This explains some shit.
  • Sylens is fucking amazing as a character and just keeps stealing the show. Beautiful pulp shit. I love him, he just can’t manage to do a single good or bad thing without having another ruthless agenda that blurs the line. Might have entered my canon of “great wild card bastards of media history.”
  • The narrative style is . . . oddly bifurcated?
  • In the present day it’s very “by the numbers hero’s journey, come here Daddy Campbell let me suck your dick” (Joseph Campbell, that is) with big fantasy trope melodrama. Outside of Sylens and Nil, there are really only a lot of good people and a few bad people (the bad guys need an army of robots because most people are decent in this universe). Moral clarity to an absurd degree. But every cutscene is overwrought as shit - even as the plot literally downplays what happened as “you morons are worshipping a machine Mad-Max style.”
  • But in the backstory there are nothing but psychologically complex people and choices. Even the original villain has a very sympathetic psychological evolution. The events are big, but everything is extremely grounded and almost downplayed in parts. You spend a lot of time on the small and personally reactive. There are no big cutscenes, only small human insights.
  • To be clear, the writers actually managed to get these to not feel like they’re at odds. I think they strain it as far as it can go without feeling at odds with itself, but if I was a teenager I wouldn’t notice. I can’t help but confess that with every character feeling like they could break the tropes they’re enacting any second, it’s sad when they never really do. I respect the impressive execution, although I wish they had pushed .
  • I do love the dialogue writers. Even very flat, simple characters get some lines and presentation that give them the illusion of depth and let the voice actors have fun. The lines are often sharp and even more often soulful (except my boy Sylens, who rejects that nonsense).
  • I do kind of wish they’d just made a one-and-done game - they really do cover 95% of setting potential in one game, and the sequel hook while broadly fine probably can’t sustain a series and I worry it can’t cover even another whole game.
  • I’ve seen people talk about the ecological themes of the game, which are there if extremely simple, but the real theme seems to be “Faith, despite all the many, many, many ways it leads human beings astray, is still necessary and our greatest strength.” It is inherently a game about unconfirmable belief in something outside one’s self - and all the permutations of correctness of fact vs result that entails.
  • I’d prefer to see this writing quality freed of the shackles of expected genre beats. But if you’re gonna go Hollywood, this is how you go Hollywood.
  • The gameplay is a tough beast to discuss. There seem to be three focuses: stealth, combat, and exploration.
  • Prereq: I love the component system. If there’s a core idea in Zero Dawn that is genius: it’s the sheer variety of ways to focus on an enemy and weaken them and cause side effects (I call this “fuck that herd of deer”). It means there’s a ton of ways to approach a problem and if someone gets lazy, you can throw in an enemy that counters it.
  • Stealth: The stealth is at best okay. Open world stealth is super hard, but there’s really one hiding mechanic here and that’s bushes. Especially in the early levels, breaking stealth is asking for hell - but also once stealth is broken it’s very hard to go back into stealth mode. The game does a LOT to push you out of stealth, though - enemies hone in on where your last shot came from and the higher level enemies basically can’t be stealthed do to their design. However, the game gives you a lot of toys to play with. Combined with the fact that different enemies have different ways to be targeted and there’s a huge amount of depth in the system to execute plans. (My personal favorite is to bait Ravagers, knock their gun off, and then switch to Heavy Mode™). There’s a great system here to build on, basically they just need more options than random bushes for stealth.
  • Combat: Straight combat is rougher. It feels like they bashed together Dark Souls and Monster Hunter with archery and the results are mixed? The boss monsters don’t follow Soulslike rules (like clear readable attacks, the UI is trash for that). I like the idea of having to go fight big scary things with good prep - literally every boss seems like it’s designed for you. But here the systems that are good for stealth (like sudden dangerous attacks without warning) are bad for boss fights. I mostly had to bring a shit ton of healing to every boss fight because no matter how good I was, sometimes you just get hit (some attacks are unavoidable unless you buy a certain ability). Bonus points for the final boss, who make me just soak damage over and over because it destroys all the cover in the arena and has an undodgeable chip damage attack. Good ideas, but wobbly execution.
  • Exploration: It’s pretty standard for an open world game these days, but much better executed. I had reasons to go exploring to get parts for better gear. It only has 5-6 of each challenge area type, so they don’t get stale. It does have too many collectables, but at least they just bring in fun storytelling. Admittedly, I didn’t gear churn as often as I think they expected me to. I should have turned up the difficulty for the stealth but then the bosses would have been too punishing.
  • All together now: Every system feels 80+% there but lets you mix and match. If I compared any of these to a dedicated game off the genre, it would come off wanting. Compared to an Ubi game or a Skyrim? It’s pretty amazing. I would love to see a sequel bring some polish to the systems into something genuinely tight.
  • The game could use like a 15% slimming of size though. The back half of the story missions feel overlong and extra reliant on combat instead of giving stealth or exploration options. Especially when it feels like a boss rush because you’ve fought every enemy in them at least once, and the boss monsters don’t really work outside of “big open plain” so it’s always the same fight. This isn’t really unique to them, and if you didn’t do any side missions it would be fresher.
  • Poking fun at one of my friends (you know who you are): man, there are a LOT of abs in this game . . .