When freed from the confines of caves and laboratories, Forbidden West thrives - especially when Aloy flexes her skills as a hunter. Image: Guerrilla Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment With Forbidden West’s better fast travel system - it’s free to travel between discovered campfires, while traveling from anywhere to a campfire costs one fast travel pack - this all weaves into a rich exploration experience, whether you’re fast-traveling or running from place to place, enjoying the abundance of the world around you. I’ve spent hours watching swimming machines, and exploring the richness of marine life clinging to crumbling buildings. Swimming is also a singular joy, once you’ve unlocked a tool that allows for infinite underwater breathing. In Forbidden West, Aloy can scale mountains, the peaks of which offer grand rewards: a gorgeous view, a height advantage against enemies, and the opportunity to glide over ravines and rolling pastures alike. The developers took obvious cues from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, adding a glider to Aloy’s toolkit and more handholds for her to climb on. The off-kilter system has created unstable weather patterns, blighted farmlands, and polluted waterways - and Guerrilla Games’ overgrown rendition of the West Coast is a plausible projection of our real-world climate degradation.Īloy’s expanded traversal tools, while flawed, greatly aid the player in exploring this world. Though the last game ended with a battle against the rampant AI Hades, humanity’s victory did not repair the lethal machines that were originally part of a terraforming project meant to save the Earth. These landmarks punctuate Forbidden West’s story about climate crises and the excesses of the ruling class. Joshua trees and scrub-speckled flatlands give an immediate sense of place - and Forbidden West even lets players explore decaying ruins of actual American cities. This gives players incredible freedom in their journey westward, exploring gorgeous vistas bursting with giant sequoias, expansive lakes, and crumbling ruins swallowed by desert sands. On PS5, you can regularly walk from interiors right into the wide world, without loading screens.

Horizon Forbidden West, especially on the PlayStation 5, is breathtaking it’s one of the most impressively realized wilderness games I’ve ever played.

Image: Guerrilla Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon That said, Aloy is still a character I love, and her world is one I enjoyed spending time in - and one I plan to explore indefinitely. Both mechanically and narratively, it suffers under the weight of its sequel ambitions, trying too hard to be grand, and sometimes losing sight of its strong world-building and storytelling heart. But Forbidden West also stumbles over this “more is better” ethos. The game’s many expanded traversal tools and combat options deeply enrich the time you spend in this gorgeous, nearly photo-real wilderness. It’s a buffet you might graze on forever, filled with quests, characters, encampments, environments, and collectibles - and battles against new deadly machines. Horizon Forbidden West has delivered on the promise of more on just about every level. Three years later, I went on a road trip through Utah and Colorado, to see this part of America myself. I played every quest, completed every Hunting Ground I got the Shield Weaver armor, and collected most of the metal flowers I played through the Frozen Wilds expansion. All of it was filled with robotic foes, which I fought with just bows, arrows, and a spear. I went slack-jawed as I roamed red rock plateaus, admiring the topographical fidelity to the natural world.

I still remember the moment when Horizon Zero Dawn opened up past Nora territory, and I took my first steps into the vast wilderness.

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