Nightmare Fuel / Horizon Zero Dawn

All spoilers on this page are unmarked, per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!

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"These things will destroy us all!"^note They did.

• The general state of the world: Primitive mankind versus killer robots. Specifically, killer robots that are as tall as buildings, run as fast as tigers, have active camouflage, and pack auto-cannons.
  • The machines responsible for the apocalypse, Faro Automated Solutions' Chariot line (represented in-game by Deathbringers, Corrupters and the derelict Metal Devils), are much worse. They were autonomous, self-sustaining, self-replicating 'peacekeeper' units that went out of control, resulting in worldwide massacre with the machines consuming bio-mass (like human flesh) as fuel.
    • Speaking of human flesh, there's a datapoint dictated by an Old One who survived partial consumption recently and keeps flashing back.
    (...) Moment my hand passes into empty space I'm back in Bridgewater and that nano-haze is stripping my legs layer by layer as the squad's medbot drags me out of the line of fire. And I start screaming like I was screaming there, in two places at once, two halves but one of them gone forever... dissolved. (...) Sergeant says I'll have prosthetics fitted tomorrow, good as new. Both [of us] know he's lying. I'll never be good again.
  • Coupled with the realization that for all practical purposes, the Faro robots would have left only bacteria alive to survive underwater or underground. Without GAIA, organic multicellular life would have literally had to re-evolve for a billion years. And when it did, the Faro robots would be there, in hibernation, waiting for more fuel...
    • First they used the plants as fuel, then the animals, then the people. By then, because the plants were gone, there was almost no oxygen to breathe.
• The opening scene has young Aloy visiting the aftermath of mass death from some thousand years ago in derelict bunker.
  • The very second datalog that can be found is from a man describing how he saw his coworkers line up to take their euthanasia, while ranting about wanting to have a proper end to his life. The recording ends in a gunshot.
• The entrance of The Grave-hoard, also known as US Robot Command. That Metal Devil is huge, as if the robots have overrun the entire place.
  • Considering that there were dead soldiers and wrecked tanks inside the facility, the implication of what went down in there ages ago are not pretty.
  • The audio datapoints of Corporal Yana Mills and Sergeant Usizo Wandari give us a glimpse into what those soldiers experienced. You can hear a horrible grinding noise at the end of both, but in Wandari's, you hear him call out to Mills as she screams in pain during that grinding. From what it sounds like, a Faro robot was in the process of consuming Corporal Mills via Biomatter Conversion.
• The Proving that Aloy participates in. More specifically, the Eclipse's attack on the Nora's young new Braves. Seeing those young teens mercilessly shot down and maimed is a horrific sight. Then just when you think this is the worst things could get, one Eclipse member strides in with a heavy machine gun.
• The Swarm, and the desperate measures that General Herres and Dr. Sobeck had to engage in just to give Project Zero Dawn the time to complete preparations: From the environmental degradation caused by the Swarm, to Herres sending tens of millions of barely-trained civilians to fight the robots, lying to them that Zero Dawn is a superweapon, to the ZD team kidnapping scientists and others to work on the project, with the option of either making themselves useful, staying in a cell until the end, or committing suicide through lethal injection. There's enough to keep players up for days.
  • Project Zero Dawn itself. You were expecting the humans of the post-ZD world to be our descendants, weren't you? They're not. They're descended from vat-grown clones, built because humanity failed and Faro's robots destroyed the planet. Even worse? The failure was inevitable. By the time you start playing, the entire human race has died out and then been reborn.
  • Imagine being brought on as a Zero Dawn scientist. You are told you will work together with the greatest scientists of your generation to save humanity, you are humanity's last hope. Only to be told that there is no hope, and humanity's extinction is certain. The project isn't a salvation, it's just a time capsule who's results you will never live to see, if it succeeds at all, which is a snowball's chance in hell. Then you're told that they can't allow you to spread this information, so your options are either to work on the project for 80 hours a week (minimum) for the next two years, in which case you'll get to live out the rest of your days in an underground bunker with two loved ones (only two), refuse to work, in which case you get stuffed in a prison cell until the project is done (if it ever is) and then thrown to the machines, or be medically euthanized.
• When you confront Olin, he relates how HADES uttered "System Threat Detected" through his Focus upon seeing Aloy. Given that at that point in the game, the Big Bad is basically a total question mark, that is an incredibly creepy thing to hear. On a replay, knowing all this, you can see Olin wince in pain after looking at Aloy for the first time.
• When venturing to the southern end of the map, glowing red mines on the ground are a sign that Stalkers are around. Unlike most machines, Stalkers will usually get the drop on you and are very good at sneaking around to catch you off guard. Even worse is when they don't lay mines to alert you of their presence, and instead perch themselves on rocks to drop down when you pass.
• Three words: Giant. ROBOT. ALLIGATORS. The Snapmaws can dramatically LEAP out of the water onto land, which can be very startling if you are not expecting it.
• Rockbreakers will burst out of the ground just about anywhere; if not right from under you, then from a distance, then just spit a whole slew of boulders at you.
• Stormbirds patrol huge pieces of the map. Since they see everything from above, it's not unheard of to get one's attention while occupied with lesser machines, especially for a player fresh out of the relatively safer Sacred Lands, and if you don't have the right gear or a good idea about what you're doing they are very daunting to fight. This very wide dangerous range may be the reason why no Corrupted or Daemonic Stormbirds are in the game or the DLC, besides a single one in the final mission.
• Metal Devils are lying around mostly intact, buried in the snow. If one were to wake up...
• The various ruins of the Old Ones are devoid of life, machine or otherwise, but the dim lighting, overgrown stalactites and stalagmites everywhere, cramped corridors, and ominous audio logs make them quite uncomfortable compared to the sprawling fields and vistas of the surface.
• Deathbringers. The first one you run into isn't mobile, but it's heavily damaged and has metal and cables dangling off it, giving it a very unsettling silhouette. The rest of the ones encountered in the game are able to move freely, and short of destroying them, there is no way to even slow them down. One Deathbringer alone is difficult, but not impossible, but it's easy to see why hundreds of them attacking all at once never ended well for the Old Ones...
  • Worse, during the climactic battle, HADES summons Deathbringers from underground, some of them in the middle of or right outside settlements. They were underground the whole time, and people were walking over them. And then you watch one nonchalantly strip the leaves off a nearby tree as fuel...
  • It's entirely possible to head back to Nora territory during one of the last missions and have one appear out of the fog and start shooting while you're busy with the Eclipse and corrupted machines.
  • The rusty remains of Deathbringers are scattered all over the map, often not recognizable until seen up close. While they're long decayed and overgrown, it's still chilling to get even a small grasp of just how many there were at the end.
• HADES has a voice very befitting of the "metal devil" nickname it gets from everyone. It's a perfect mix of "robot" and "evil warlord", completely unlike any other voice in the game, that can send chills up your spine the first time you hear it.
  • What it did with Sylens in the past. So many things could've gone wrong if not for Aloy.
• The simple fact that every bad thing that's happened here can be traced back to one single person - Ted Faro. First, his company idiotically creates self-replicating combat robots that eat biomass to survive, and they have no backdoor or off-switch. Then the robots go rogue due to some kind of glitch, and proceeded to wipe out all life on the planet. Their victory was so absolute that Project Zero Dawn was merely a way to rebuild the earth with a new humanity after the machines stripped the planet barren and left it a sterile and lifeless rock. But Ted Faro would screw the next generation too. After Elisabet Sobeck dies to seal off a bunker the Alphas are in from a swarm, Faro goes off the deep end and comes to the conclusion that the new humanity deserves to be "truly innocent" from the knowledge of the old ones, so they don't repeat the same mistakes of the past generation. Mind you, it was solely his mistakes that doomed humanity in the first place. He deletes APOLLO, the knowledge repositories that would have educated the new world. He also kills all the Alphas so they can't somehow reverse what he did. Not only did he eradicate humanity, he also made it so that the new humanity practically starts from the primordial ooze. That he's not remorseless and just a jackass who went crazy makes things even more terrifying, as he's still amassed a body count and ripple effect greater than all of history's monsters combined. Aside from the point below; the whole reason the events of the catastrophe took place is shockingly realistic in today's modern times: A businessman decided to follow the dollar into weapons development. All it took was a careless jackass with power and money to destroy the world.
  • Of course one of the worst reasons he chose to do that? He doesn't want people to know he was the cause of it in the first place. Not that it mattered in the long run, as Aloy and Sylens are the first to learn of his monstrous actions.
  • Moreover, the scariest part about them devouring biomass for fuel? It wasn’t even their main function in gathering energy to make said fuel. It was an emergency function only allowed to activate when energy levels were too low and when nothing else, main source of fuel included, was available. However, something in their programming turned a switch off inside of them, and it resulted in them solely devouring biomass instead of their usual fuel. They literally started engorging themselves on biomass solely because their programming’s switch flipped from “emergency” to “main source”. And biomass was readily available EVERYWHERE, giving them a seemingly endless supply of energy...at least, until it ran out, that is.
• Let's talk about said robots! Deathbringers are semitruck-sized slow-moving missile launchers, Corruptors are car-sized leaping things. They're quite difficult for Aloy and her contemporaries to defeat, but the soldiers of the Old World had a lot more advanced war tech. What makes the Faro Plague so dangerous is that these are manufactured by the HORUS-class Titans - immense land-Reapers with tentacles half a mile long. Up close their deactivated bodies are too big to see much of, they look like architecture. They are ridiculously overdesigned, too - consuming organic matter to refuel, repair, and reproduce; hacking robots used against them while being all but unhackable themselves; and learning from every engagement. And there are enough of them that they're called The Swarm, and all the best efforts of humanity to fight them, all the victories humans manage to wrest, don't make much impact, because they reproduce exponentially, faster than they can be killed. Their stripping of the biosphere for more organic matter kills life directly and by generating toxic fumes. The time comes when the color of the sky changes, and when the air is no longer breathable. Zero Day is mentioned, the day when life will not exist on Earth.
  • Not to mention that most of the Faro Swarm robots were not destroyed but shut down. They numbered in the tens of millions for Corruptors, hundreds of thousands for Deathbringers, and hundreds if not thousands of HORUS class, the "Metal Devils". These are STILL not destroyed, simply shut down and dormant to conserve energy. God help the world if a HORUS was awakened.
• According to a reconstructed timeline from activity logs, at least one of the ELEUTHIA facilities had to let out its teenage children almost forty years earlier than the best-case projections for the outside world being able to support human life. The GAIA plan could well have failed thanks to Ted Faro's sabotage of APOLLO, which would otherwise have given the children the skills and knowledge they needed.
  • An example of this is the ELEUTHIA facility Aloy visits under All-Mother Mountain. You find records showing that the facilities caretaker robots had to release the human inhabitants because they ran out of food. The horrifying part? Thanks to APOLLO's deletion, these young adults had the education level of kindergarteners, and they had to be released into a completely untamed world. Any of them would have been lucky to secure food or even discover fire.
  • Given that production of humans was only supposed to start when the biosphere was ready for them, it seems like either a case of Writers Cannot Do Math, or GAIA managed to do better than the best-case projection. As for the untamed world, animals which haven't had much contact with humans are curious and unafraid of them, which probably helped - early hunters could hike for a few miles to find and kill unwitting prey. One Zero Dawn scientist mentions that wolves will be part of the starter biosphere, but wolves and dogs are never mentioned in the 'present day'. Since wolves can be a threat to humans, GAIA may have arranged for them to either never be grown, or for machines to target the poor things for elimination.
• All-Mother Mountain has a HORUS/Metal Devil draped across it. When you go inside, that first big chamber in front of the sealed hatch leading into the ELEUTHIA facility has been breached. The tip of one of the monster's tentacles is coming in through the ceiling. Zero Dawn's plan to stop the Faro Plague was to hunker down while it ravaged the dying world, with GAIA spending the necessary decades figuring out the shutdown codes. Once she had them, her MINERVA subsystem would build broadcast towers with which to transmit the signal, and she'd be able to do this because without any organic life around to eat the robots would be sitting dormant. But there's a giant robot that's been deactivated seconds before it would have breached the facility meant to gestate and raise future humans. Clearly they were not completely dormant, and MINERVA's operation was much more dramatic than it sounded when Elisabet talked about the plan.
• The Frozen Wilds DLC reveals that HADES wasn't the only subordinate system that went rogue due to the unknown signal. HADES and HEPHAESTUS became very aggressive against humans due to an unknown party's interference. Only time will tell what the other subordinate systems are like.
  • The sequel reveals that the subfunctions POSEIDON, DEMETER and AETHER are all chronically depressed and in pain, and therefore actively happy to be getting reintegrated back into their "mother" GAIA.
• GAIA outlived her creators and had to be alone for centuries, which is bad enough, but also completely understood the situation, had various subsystems, and knew what to do about it. CYAN didn't. An AI described as the emotional equivalent of a child, who was afraid of being left alone.
• The fact that there is an even bigger bad than HADES lurking out there in the world, someone or something that released a virus to sabotage GAIA, release the bonds of her sub-programs that were held to her, and corrupting HADES and HAPHAESTUS's programming to the point of up to eleven...and it makes one wonder, if this is all just the beginning to some bigger, more sinister plot at hand-something that perhaps not even Sylens could have predicted or foreseen. Who or what that is toppling the dominoes over, that wants to see the destruction of all life on Earth once again, is truly a terrifying thought. They clearly want to revive the old machines, such as Corruptors and Deathbringers...imagine the destruction this unseen force could unleash if they rebooted even just one HORUS-class titan...
• Ponder for a moment the various piles of ancient debris that you can loot for Shop Fodder that includes an "Ancient Sculpture" that looks suspiciously like an artificial heart, an "Ancient Necklace" that looks a lot like a pacemaker, or the more accurately deduced "Ancient Metal Eye". Why are those just strewn about? Wouldn't it make more sense to find such things concentrated in a medical facility ruin? Once you learn the fate of the Old Ones, some deductive reasoning may lead you to a horrific conclusion: they are the inedible remnants of a person that was consumed by the Faro Swarms' harvester nanites. The other various vendor trash are typical jewelry or pocket accoutrements that would also be inedible to them. Confirmed after one such Fridge Horror realization was commented by an official Guerilla dev on a Reddit topic.
• Cauldron Xi differs from most Cauldrons in that its robotic defenses are already gone, instead replaced by a camp of cultists trying to learn its secrets. It starts out like any other base; however, after you override the core, the Cauldron summons robots to purge itself of both you and the cultists. On your way out of the base, you find most of the bandits hiding in grass, terrified for their lives… because most of those robots were Stalkers. You’ve unleashed a Mook Horror Show, and unlike most examples, you’re invited too.

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