Quick addendum to my last post. I did end up playing through The Frozen Wilds (which I was calling the Frozen North in my last post). It had a better story than I remember, dealing with a project that actually pre-dates Zero Dawn. I know I played through it back in 2017 but I had completely forgotten about it.

I also then discovered a bunch of quests I had never played, and these introduced me to some of the characters that, in Horizon Forbidden West, spurred me to do a replay of HZD: I didn’t remember these characters because I’d never met them because I’d left quests unfinished!

So that was good. At the same time, I feel like the actual gameplay of Frozen Wilds isn’t as good as the main game. The machines are tougher but in a way that, for me at least, feels tedious and annoying. They have a lot of hit points and some really cheap attacks. For example one of the apex machines can cause the ground under your feet to erupt with fire and will do so even while facing away from you or even being on the other side of a hill and out of line of sight.

Still, I’m glad I got through it. At this point I have 100% of the trophies for the main game, 100% of the quest trophies for Frozen Wilds. I’m missing a handful of other trophies though. One is a “Kill X beasties” which would mean finding that kind of beastie & killing them. I could this fairly easily I suppose. Another is repairing 5 different types of machine. Again I guess I could do this but I’ve never repaired a machine. And last it to kill X machines by launching off a mount: that’s a skill I never unlocked even though I am at level cap (60). I did not 100% the main story this time around and I guess I missed some Cauldrons that give skill points. So I would have to go find & solve the Cauldrons, unlock the skill, then tame a mount, then kill enemies by launching off it. As I’ve already put 73 hours into this replay I don’t think it’s worth it for a Trophy.

Additionally there are 2 New Game+ Trophies, one just for completing a New Game+ game, and the other is for completing New Game+ on Ultra Difficulty. That is definitely NOT my jam so I’m never going to get 100% trophies in this game, which makes skipping the handful of others a lot easier.

So I think I’m FINALLY ready to re-start Horizon Forbidden West. I cannot wait to see what happens now that I am fresh from the amazing lore of Horizon Zero Dawn.

When Horizon Zero Dawn released in the winter of 2017 I was obsessed with it. I played through it, then got the Platinum Trophy, then told everyone who would listen that they had to play it. It is one of my all-time favorite gaming experiences and one of my favorite sci-fi stories across any medium.

When the Frozen North expansion came out I played through it, too, but I didn’t enjoy it as much. In fact as of right now I can’t remember what it was about, but I remember a lot of fights against powerful machines. Challenging but not as fun as what I’d experienced in the main game.

After Frozen North, I left Horizon Zero Dawn behind.

Five years later Horizon Forbidden West released and I jumped straight into it, but something was missing. Not something in the game itself, but something in my experience. It was that after 5 years I’d forgotten so much about the story from the first game that I didn’t feel like I was getting all I could out of Forbidden West.

I decided to set Forbidden West aside and replay Zero Dawn. Three months later, I’ve finished that replay. And it was wonderful.

Not that it took 3 months to play it. I kind of dipped in and out of it for like 11 weeks, then hit the part where the story really ramps up and finished the second half in about a week. I had worried that, knowing all the twists to the story, I wouldn’t find it as good the 2nd time around but in fact it was like re-watching The Expanse or any other great sci-fi show. Knowing what you know, the 2nd time through, you pick up on all kinds of foreshadowing and details that you missed the first time.

The only catch with Horizon Zero Dawn is that a LOT of the story is told via audio journals, text files you recover, and holographic projections and many of these can be missed or skipped. I am a fairly fastidious gamer and tend to move slowly and explore everywhere and read everything but there are still some missing entries in the log files. For gamers who are more about getting back to the action as quickly as possible I wonder how much of the richness of the story comes through. (There were times I spent over an hour exploring and reading and never fighting.)

So now I have to decide, do I want to replay The Frozen North or should I just restart Forbidden West. I think I’ll putter around in Zero Dawn until the long weekend starts, then switch to Forbidden West. There’s nothing like a 3-day weekend to kickstart playing through a new and much anticipated game.

I’d love to write at length about Horizon Zero Dawn: for me it is that rarest of breeds, a game that lives up to the hype. I played at bit when it launched at midnight, and as much as I could yesterday. All told I have about 9 hours into it and I’m loving it. Sadly for me, you’re spared from my walls of text because I have to go to work very soon. Still I needed to say SOMETHING about it.

I also don’t have a lot of good media to share. I’m playing HZD on an HDR TV and it looks absolutely stunning, but the downside of HDR (on the PS4 anyway) is that something goes wonky on the trip from live gameplay to screenshot or video cap. The color palette gets munged up and screenshots tend to look too dark (though not always), and video look like you’re watching them through a colored filter. I’ll have to turn off HDR to capture some good media but man, I don’t want to. The lighting in particular is amazing. Sometimes a sunbeam slices through the trees and is so bright that your instinct is to shield your eyes.

So if I only have time to talk about one thing, I’m going to talk about the health system because it feels a little unusual. Protagonist Aloy (brought to life by the talented Ashley Burch and of course Guerilla artists and animators) has a health bar. Below that health bar is another bar representing her medicine bag. As you travel around you’ll forage for plants. Some of these have medicinal value and they go into the medicine bag, which causes that second bar to fill up. At any point you hit Up on the D-Pad to heal yourself. In non-lore terms, the medicine bag bar represents a reserve of hit points that you can use to refill your health bar. The catch is that it takes time and you have to hold that button down while [I don’t know how I’d convinced myself you have to hold the button down but today I tapped it by accident and my health bar filled up, so scratch that ‘hold the button down’ bit] while the health flows into Aloy. It can be hard to find time to heal this way in battle.

But there are also health potions. While not instant, these are a lot faster to use. They reside in the tools menu. You push left< ->right on the D-Pad to select an active tool, then Down to use that tool. Aloy will pause briefly to quaff the potion so you still need to pick your moments, but generally health potions are for in-combat healing and the medicine bag is for out of combat healing.

Health potions can be purchased from vendors or crafted from meat that you get from hunting organic wildlife (so far I’ve hunted raccoon, fox, rabbit, turkey, fish and boar) and there are not only health potions but elemental resistance potions and things of that nature. Initially you can only carry a couple of each type of potion and of course they require the prep time of remembering to buy or craft them. (Being prepared for combat is a big part of HZD.)

So there you have it, one tiny aspect of the game that struck me. As I said, I could go on and on, but duty calls. Loving the game so far, though. It gets a big thumbs up from me.