the feminist action game we've been waiting for

Horizon Zero Dawn – the feminist action game we've been waiting for
Guerrilla Games’ have created a brave, independent, multi-dimensional heroine to lead this highly satisfying mission

Of all the ways Horizon: Zero Dawn could have begun, we certainly weren’t expecting a Lion King tribute. This is, after all, a far-future, post-apocalyptic adventure set in a brutal world populated by monstrous robots – hardly Disney material. But sure enough, the game opens with Aloy, the flame-haired warrior who has become a fixture of Sony’s PlayStation 4 marketing, as a baby, carried on the back of her mentor, Rost. When he reaches the edge of a cliff, he holds the child aloft to the Goddess, screaming her name into the abyss.

He doesn’t then break into The Circle of Life, but it’s clear Aloy isn’t just any old futuristic warrior. Last month developer Guerrilla games held a preview event for the game, providing hands-on time with its opening hour. And it’s clear what the team is envisaging is actually a very modern heroine; a Lara Croft designed for the 21st century, meant to inspire gamers not only with her strength, complexity and ferocity, but with her femininity. However, for what feels like the first time in years, we’ve got a female lead who isn’t sexualised at all.

Horizon Zero dawn takes place 1000 years after an apocalyptic event almost wipes out humanity in the mid-21st century. The civilisation we know is long gone, and all that’s left are the ruins of our advanced technological society – or what the current inhabitants call the Metal World. “There are really profound buried secrets out there, and the story is going to lead you towards them,” says lead writer, John Gonzalez. “I don’t think they’re going to be what you’re expecting.”

The only hint of the high-tech world left behind are the giant robotic creatures that roam the lands, forcing humanity to exist in scattered tribes. Aloy’s group is known as the Nora and it’s a matriarchal tribe where parenthood, particularly motherhood, is sacred. In this society, having no mother is practically a sin, and unfortunately for Aloy, it’s something she’s been marked with since birth.

As she grows into a child, she fights for a legitimate position in the tribe, trying to play with the other Nora children. But as the people make her outcast status clear, she flees the group and is dropped – literally – into the Metal World far earlier than expected. It’s here, deep in the ruins, where Aloy stumbles across the remnants of our civilisation, dozens of ashen corpses huddled together in what appear to be bomb shelters.

There’s a moment here where the concept of the game clicks into place. Aloy discovers what can only be described as a wearable smartphone from the future, which eventually becomes one of the many aspects that sets her apart from the other characters of Horizon. With some trepidation, she fixes it on her ear and is presented with a holographic video recording of a man wishing his son a remote happy birthday. Aloy mimics his words, clearly feeling an urgent need to be part of a family. It’s a very moving and emotionally complicated moment.

Later you watch her experiment with the newfound tech, scrolling through screens that mean nothing to her, but that players themselves will recognise as settings menus and volume controls. It’s just one of many touching human moments that litter the game.

From here, Aloy is focused on finding out where she comes from and according to Rost there’s only one way to do that: be found worthy in a special Nora event called The Proving. But to win that, she’s going to be spending the next few years learning how to hunt and survive against the robotic beasts. Cue an epic training montage that takes you from child to the young woman who’s more than fit to be Horizon’s heroine.

“Somehow, she just jumped out of the concept art,” explains Guerilla Games managing director, Herman Hulst. “She was already there when we set out this story, this world. We wanted a fierce hunter in there and she kind of just appeared. We then spent six years crafting her and making her what she is today.”

“It’s really important that we didn’t look for a woman and that turned out to be Aloy. We had Aloy and one of her very many attributes is that she is a woman. She’s also an outcast and a very fierce person. She’s brave and independent, but why I like her so much is that she’s also kind-hearted and she has every right to be really upset with the tribe, yet she still has it in her nature to be kind to them, to help them out.”

During our demo, we played the opening three missions, a couple of side quests and a point later in the game to see some different kind of robots. From this snapshot, though, it’s clear Horizon Zero Dawn is launching at the perfect time in our own history, with a heroine to match the prevailing mood. Lara Croft emerged as a highly sexualised entity into the era of lads’ mags and Page Three pin-ups, her feminism buried beneath swathes of marketing focused on her other assets. Aloy arrives into a culture where Everyday Sexism and online bigotry are being called out and tackled, where gender and mental health issues are being framed and discussed.

Horizon Zero Dawn manages to hint at all this. In the opening 15 minutes, there’s an LGBT reference that caught us pleasantly off-guard, while an early side quest has Aloy dealing with a man who has mental health problems and you’ll have to decide what happens to him and the way you handle the situation.

“I would say that it’s important that a game is relevant and there are many aspects of Horizon [that are relevant], not just the identity part of it in that it’s a young person, who’s independent and resourceful,” says Hulst. “There are big themes in there. It’s not a story we’re telling in this game but we’re touching on the autonomy of warfare, there are drone fights and there’s a moral aspect of whether we want machines to make autonomous decisions on whether to kill or not.”

The complexities of our heroine and her narrative are signalled early on in the game with dialogue options and flashpoint decisions. It’s up to you how Aloy reacts in certain situations, with these decisions rippling out to events later in the game. Should you check up on Rost’s well-being before The Proving? When Aloy is a child, should she throw a rock back at a young Nora boy? It’s not quite the level of cause and effect you’d see in Mass Effect or a Telltale adventure, but Guerrilla assures us that these moments will have consequences to the point that characters live or die by your choices – and we’re certainly given the impression that we have some control over the kind of heroine Aloy becomes.

This emphasis on play choice is reflected in the game structure too. Horizon Zero Dawn straddles the action and role-playing game (RPG) genres, with hit counters, skill trees and some customisation, but it’s more about working out how to tackle the various robots using fairly primitive weaponry. Aloy can use her smart device to scan both the environment and her enemies, picking out weak points on their bodies and learning how to use the correct weapons or ammo.

But whatever arrows you’ve got in your bow or whichever robots you’re facing, it’s quickly apparent that humans are the weaker species here. The robots can kill Aloy incredibly quickly, so one wrong move and you’ll find yourself repeatedly staring at the loading screen. Stealth is key, using the long grasses to watch and wait and following patrol paths with Aloy’s special tech. Get spotted by a Watcher, or any of the bigger, more formidable creatures you’ll meet later in the game, and you could be facing death in minutes.

With the creatures, tribes and the mix of main missions and side quests, Horizon Zero Dawn feels like a strange blend of Far Cry Primal and The Witcher 3, especially with the promise that the game will have you traversing various eco-types and encountering different symbiotic robot relationships. The one-eyed Watcher droids, for example, act like shepherds, keeping tabs on herds of Grazers, and there are other similar interactions to discover. In this way, the game becomes a sort of interactive take on a David Attenborough documentary series – something the development team say they were greatly inspired by. “What I like about David Attenborough is that it’s not just natural beauty, it’s about how dramatised it is,” says Hulst. “You look at Planet Earth and the saturation in the colours and the extreme slow-mos – it’s way over the top.”

Robots are a satisfying blend of mechanical and animal, with metal plates covering muscle-like flanks, and physical appearances simulating creatures like buffalos and giraffes. They are as intelligent and unpredictable as wild creatures. “I’ve never played a game that has an open-world where I feel totally alone in the middle of this incredibly dangerous environment,” explains Gonzalez. “It’s really interesting in kind of a tactical way.”

This an open world game with a difference, though, eschewing the familiar tactic of overpopulating the map with features and challenges in favour of wide open spaces full of natural beauty and its inhabitants. It feels like the idea is about discovering the character’s role in the world, as it is about shooting stuff. In this respect, Horizon is a game with a serious agenda, this is a character with questions and experiences that many players will relate to – despite the futuristic setting.

“Sometimes people ask about her being a ‘strong female character’ and it seems like female characters always have to be strong,” says Hulst. “Well, she happens to be quite fierce but she’s not always strong, sometimes she gets defeated, but she’s strong enough to fight back. She’s not a one-dimensional super human, she’s Aloy.”

We left the Horizon demo with a lot of questions. Who are Aloy’s parents? What happened to the Metal World? Who were the masked enemies from the story trailer? But it feels like we have the right heroine to lead us to the answers.

Guerrilla Games; PS4; £48; Pegi rating: 16+