In fact, she, too, is plugging something back in. Likewise, Aloy, as befits the title of her game, must go west. His journey, in that game, was a westward trek, with the aim of repairing a splintered America by hooking it up to high-speed internet: the pioneer trudge, retrodden with the promise of an unlimited monthly package. And, more recently, Death Stranding, in which we wobble drearily on the rim of extinction, cheered only by the sight of Norman Reedus’s abs, as he steps out of a steamy shower cubicle. Then there is Resistance and Bloodborne, wherein monsters besiege us from the cosmos and brew within our veins. We have the elegiacally zombified variety, dished up by Days Gone and The Last of Us. More than Nintendo and Microsoft, Sony has catered to our odd, unslakable hunger to witness, and play through, our own ruination. Society has been razed-by forces not so much unknown as intricately uninteresting-and toyish robotic beasts prowl the shells of cities, as though our doom were like data, to be sniffed on the breeze.
The crux of these open-world games is that life on Earth has both leaped ahead and lapsed into rubble. Even up there, perched amidst the creature’s steel feathers, her spirits fail to take flight. Still, you would think that her load would be somewhat lightened by the prospect of riding a mechanical velociraptor, as she does in the course of her adventure.
What is this burden? Aloy herself sums it up thusly: “Everything dies unless I succeed.” Fair enough. “The burden of your task is written across your face,” one character says, and he’s not wrong. Burch still delivers many of her lines in a harried whisper, hinting at the gruelling weight bearing down on our heroine. We spend the new game, as we did the first, in the company of Aloy, who is played by Ashley Burch. Horizon Forbidden West is the sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, which was released in 2017.
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