Author: Simulacrum  <nub>    205.209.243.42 Use this link if you want to link to this message and its entire thread of discussion. Post a Msg
Date: 4/23/2023 11:02:43 AM
Subject: Horizon Zero Dawn ruins you

I stand by everything I said in my review post below. However, this is one of those games that creep up on you. It has a lot of flaws, but without meaning to, you begin to fall in love with the main character. Not in a creepy way but more like how the parental boosters of a high school sports team develop an unreasoning affection for everything the team does because they've known all the players since they were little kids.

This kid, Aloy, goes through a terrible childhood. From infancy, she's spurned by her tribe as a cursed outcast. The tribe is thoroughly matriarchal with a lore and wacky religion that are awash in mother worship, but Aloy has no mother. You would think they'd embrace her and try to compensate with surrogate mother figures, but instead they revile her every time she approaches them, reminding her that she's a monster because she's motherless.

The only thing she wants in life is to find her mother or at least find out why she was abandoned. Her surrogate father, who himself is an outcast and has been illegally tasked by the tribe's ruling matriarch to look after Aloy, is the only person who doesn't reject her. He tells her about a very unlikely way to get what she wants -- unlikely because it will take thirteen years of training. She spends the rest of her childhood and all of her adolescence doing nothing but working toward this goal, which she eventually achieves but immediately has it snatched away. And after that, she gets gets her throat cut.

It's the way she picks herself up again and again, after suffering so many denials and reversals, that makes her seem relatable and real. She's a persistent example of the "what doesn't kill you" adage, which makes her, in my limited video game experience, an unusual character. She doesn't gain her "super powers" by falling in a vat or being exposed to radiation or by being whisked from Kansas to Oz. She works for everything she has and makes great sacrifices. Ultimately, she meets her "mother" and realizes that she's not a daughter but a science project, which turns her personal matriarchal endgame and everything she's been doing into a grim joke. And still she picks herself up and goes on.

I have never seen or heard of a video game character like this, although some of you probably know of similar examples. Anyway, she becomes a kind of investment whom you don't want to abandon.

Which puts me in a kind of pickle now because I have done everything there is to do in Zero Dawn and I don't want to buy a PS5 just to play Horizon Forbidden West. I can't use a controller anyway. So I'm trying to transition to Deus Ex Mankind Divided (thanks ILA), which I enjoy, but I'm like that divorced dad who sneaks in to all of his daughter's soccer games and recitals even though he's under a restraining order because he's repeatedly violated his visitation rights.

So basically, I advise against playing this game if you have the slightest trace of sentimentality. Now feel free to make fun of me. I'm going to eat my Jimmy Dean English muffin thing.