Horizon Zero Dawn Makes Stealth Fun (a video game review)
Welcome to Burning Books. I’m Caleb, and I want to help you love video games even more. Sometimes I do that with game reviews, which is what you’re here for today. This is Game’s Over, a series where I give a few thoughts on a game as soon as possible after playing it. This video is short, quickly thrown together, and certainly rides emotional high or low of whatever game I just finished. If you are new to the channel, I offer plenty of longer, more thought-out videos, so subscribe to stay updated.
The credits are rolling on Horizon Zero Dawn. Yes, I’m late to the party. This game was released about a year and a half ago, but being late to a game doesn’t make the experience or the game any less amazing. And Horizon Zero Dawn is amazing.
I had been meaning to play the game for a while, but I stayed resistant based on my understanding (false understanding, I know now) that the game was heavy on stealth. I’m not a fan of stealth games. I don’t comprehend fun in a game forcing the player to set up an elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque series of events in order to take down an enemy without being seen only to inevitably screw up the entire plan because you’ve accidentally wandered one pixel into the enemy’s vision cone. This sort of thing happens to me all the time. Likely because I’m just bad at stealth games, but no matter where the fault lies, suffering through is not fun.
But I’m happy to report that Horizon Zero Dawn isn’t that kind of stealth game. There are stealth elements, sure, but this game makes stealth fun. In one word, the stealth is forgiving. You’re not screwed when you screw up. Should you collide with the enemy’s vision cone, that’s fine. Retreat and try again. Enemies have established territories meaning there’s almost always an opportunity to run away until the enemy loses interest. Some players may say this ability to capitalized on an enemy’s predictable loss of interest takes away from the immersion, but I say this is a necessary part of the game. It keeps the game fun. See my previous videos on this topic of Ludo Anthropomorphic Dissonance to learn more about why this immersion break is actual a good thing.
But that’s not the only way Horizon zero Dawn makes stealth fun. Another example is that the game marks safe zones using tall, red grass. Picking out these tufts of grass becomes a really fun strategic first step to ambushing the enemy. Just map your path from red grass to red grass. You can practically squint your eyes, let the colors blur, and see the best path forward. And though the grass is red, it’s not distracting. The entire world is exceptionally colorful.
The ability to mark the enemy paths is also a wonderful tactic when strategizing.
Because this game isn’t abusively hard on the player in terms of stealth, it may not be a good game for those who love the rigors of most stealth mechanics. But I’m confident there’s still plenty for you sadists to love.
The combat is exceptional, offering plenty of cinematic parry and attack options, letting players choose between straight forward melee combat or a more strategic slow-motion attack, both options being strong options in most cases.
There’s no mini map to distract the player from looking at the amazingly rendered vistas. This game is beautiful.
Aloy is never sexualized. We get a few comments about her being pretty, but thankfully nothing too gross.
You get to interact with genuinely good characters. It’s become a trope in story-driven games that early-game friends will inevitably become late-game enemies, and there are a couple of characters here that seem suspect of that reversal. Early friend Erend and mid-friend the Sun King Avad are both contenders. But, they stay good. I’m happy about that.
About the only negative think I can say about this game is that I feel Ashly Burch’s voice work doesn’t do what it needed to do. She approaches the role of Aloy with a sort of subdued action hero gruffness, but it comes across as too flat, too whispery, and too soft with not nearly enough nuance. The developers at Guerilla games say they knew Burch was perfect for the role the moment she began reading Aloy’s lines, and I trust them, but her voice didn’t work for me, personally. I love a lot of what she does (the Metal Gear Solid book she wrote with her brother is a standout project), but her work as Aloy just didn’t do it for me.
Horizon Zero Dawn is amazing. Play it. Don’t be dumb and wait a long time after release like I did.
Mentioned
- What if Your Favorite Video Game is Bad?
- The Unfun Plateau – When Video Game Characters Act Too Real To Be Fun
- A Few Books About Ninjas From My Childhood
Music Credits
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
