Video Game / Horizon

"When it looks impossible, look deeper, and fight like you can win."

— Rost to Aloy

AKA "That series where the barbarian chick fights robot dinosaurs".

Horizon is a critically-acclaimed series of AAA Wide-Open Sandbox Action RPGs developed by Guerrilla Games for the PlayStation series of consoles^note Although they have been released on Steam several years after their initial release in the past. It follows the story of Aloy, a Barbarian Hero who wanders the earth attempting to save it from ancient threats. Along the way, she becomes a legendary hero in her own right as she uncovers the secrets of both her own and the world's past and prevents the world's destruction on multiple occasions.

The most notable, prominent detail about the world of Horizon is that it is extensively populated by Mechanical Animals that are informally referred to as "Machines". The primary gameplay of the series involves engaging in combat with these machines using primitive pre-industrial technology such as bows and spears, and scrapping them for parts in order to produce even better gear with which to hunt deadlier machines, as well as unlocking new combat abilities for Aloy to use. This results in a gameplay loop that is similar to Monster Hunter, but with much more action and less stringent micromanagement.

Not to be confused with Horizon the comic book, although there is a comic book based on Zero Dawn.

Works in the Horizon series

Main Series

Video Games

• Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)
  • The Frozen Wilds DLC (2017)
• Horizon Forbidden West (2022)
  • Burning Shores DLC (2023)
• Horizon: Call of the Mountain (2023)

Other Media

Comics

• Horizon Zero Dawn (2020-2021)
  • Horizon Zero Dawn: Liberation (2021)

Live Action

• A television adaptation for Netflix developed by Steve Blackman (The Umbrella Academy (2019)) and produced by Sony Pictures Television and PlayStation Productions.

Tabletop Games

• Horizon Zero Dawn: The Board Game (2020) - A Steamforged Games Ltd tabletop game that was funded through a Kickstarter campaign and managed to raise £1,393,260, well exceeding their goal of £155,000.

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The Horizon series contains examples of:

• After the End: As in, way after the end. The series takes place in the mid-31st century, just under a thousand years after rogue military machines cause the collapse of civilization and the biosphere, which is only brought back from oblivion by a terraforming AI. Unlike most versions of this trope, the world has largely healed and recovered, although the tribes of the new world are technologically around the Iron Age at the latest.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Zigzagged. The reason the world is like it is at the start of Aloy's journey is due to the Faro Robots going rogue and destroying the earth, HADES becomes the primary villain of Zero Dawn after receiving NEMESIS' Extinction Signal, HEPHAESTUS began producing Hunter-Killer machines after it become sentient, etc. Having said that, GAIA and CYAN are two instances of A.I.s that have fulfilled their intended purpose masterfully, and serve as benevolent entities.
• Artistic License: Horizon definitely falls into the "soft" science-fiction category. Most scientific inaccuracies fall under liberties regarding the passage of time.
• Barbarian Hero: Aloy is a member of the Nora tribe by proxy, who are notoriously isolationist and Luddite. Naturally, every other person from a different tribe she comes across views her as this.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: A recurring theme throughout the series, although it's most prevalent in the first game. Most of the religious people that Aloy comes across in Zero Dawn are intolerant fanatics unknowingly worshipping man-made creations from thousands of years ago that react with extreme indignance at the idea that they might be wrong in their zealotry. Aloy is especially scarred in this regard by the Nora ruling caste, as they shunned her as an outcast for most of her life and treated her with disdain before suddenly pulling a 180 the moment she arbitrarily fulfilled a prophecy of theirs about being able to open a door.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Hoboy. Given that the entire overarching plot of the series is built upon the predicate of the unfathomably rich elite fleeing the world's problems instead of trying to fix them or actively making them worse in the process through their own stupidity, this is a pervasive recurring theme throughout every game. Special standouts go to trillionaire Tech Bro mogul and Greater-Scope Villain Ted Faro, who caused a Grey Goo scenario to play out through his own incompetence and then doomed humanity to be sent back to the pre-industrial age by wiping out the cumulative records of all human civilization just so that he wouldn't be remembered as the villain (and asshole) that he was, and the Howard Hughes Homage Walter Londra from Burning Shores, who essentially grooms a large number of Quen into creating a cult of personality around himself and planned to create a society where he was effectively a living god surrounded by brainwashed sycophants.
• Cargo Cult: Several tribes fall into this category. The Nora worship the door of an ancient facility as their goddess, and ironically revile the "metal world" as spiritually tainted; the Banuk practice a form of machine-based shamanism, interpreting the blue light of machine eyes as spiritual energy; the Utaru worship the Plowhorns that maintain their homeland as "land gods"; and the basis of Tenakth culture is an ancient military museum.
• Citadel City: The Holy City of Meridian is the seat of power of the Carja Sundom because it's built on top of and partially inside a mountain which towers over the surrounding landscape and is only accessible by elevator and a single road leading in, making it nearly impenetrable to a ground assault. Of course that doesn't stop Dervahl from trying to assail it with Glinthawks or the Eclipse from using their army of Deathbringers as long-range artillery against it.
• Clarke's Third Law: The Future Primitive tribes in the world, robbed the knowledge of their past, have incorporated the Old Ones and the machines into their mythology, with more than a few cargo cults popping up. The amount of people who realize that the machines are not actually alive can be counted on one hand (although in fairness, they do come off as rather lifelike). Aloy's near-legendary status, aside from her access to Zero Dawn systems as a clone of its creator, stems from her unprecedented mastery of the advanced tech that few have even begun to understand.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: See the page here.
• Corrupted Contingency:
  • In Horizon Zero Dawn, HADES was designed as the part of GAIA'S subsystems that would purge the earth of all life if GAIA made an error and needed to restart the world because the one it was currently making wasn't fit for human survival. Unfortunately, when Nemesis' Extinction Signal made all of GAIA'S subsystems sentient, HADES decided its purpose was to indiscriminately purge the world of all life, humans included.
  • A similar thing occurred with HEPHAESTUS as explained in The Frozen Wilds and Forbidden West; it was designed as the subfunction that would build and control the machines necessary for terraforming the world on a minute scale. However, when it became sentient, HEPHAESTUS decided to build bigger and deadlier machines expressly designed to kill humans without any alternative function, resulting in Apex machines and Fireclaws.
• Culture Chop Suey: All the Tribes do this. Justified, given that the game is set on Earth After the End; the factions are confused mixes of assorted cultures because the tribal inhabitants are cluelessly mimicking fashion and concepts they see amongst the ruins of the Old World:
  • The Nora and Banuk are mostly a blend of various Native American peoples, but there are some Pictish elements are in there too.
  • The Oseram a generalized mix of North European cultures like the Celtic Kingdoms and Scandinavia, with a major Horny Vikings vibe going on where smithing, drinking, and fighting are their primary pastimes.
  • The Carja Sundom and their neighboring tribes (the Utaru and Tenakth) are all Mayincatec in general (with the Utaru leaning more toward the "peaceful Inca farmers" stereotype and the Tenakth leaning into the "bloodthirsty warmongering Aztec" side^note Though their culture is actually much more of a Proud Warrior Race with some long-abandoned customs that have been misinterpreted by the notoriously xenophobic Carja), but the Carja in also mix in elements of Ancient Grome, the Middle East, Imperial China, and even ancient Indian architecture.
  • The Quen, being from an entirely different hemisphere, have completely alien clothing and culture to any other known tribe which incorporates aspects of every Asian culture (the Quen hail from the Great Delta, which is somewhere in what used to be Asia), but they also have several "Proud of their gigantic seafaring navy and exploration fleet" traits which synonymize them with Imperial Japan and the British Empire. On top of all this, they incorporate minor modern-day cultural traits into their own due to being a semi-uplifted tribe with Focuses, meaning they have things like MegaCorps which have a heavy hand in government and Gestapo officers in all but name overseeing expeditions.
• Earth All Along: The first big reveal of the series is that it takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth after Killer Robots nearly wiped out all life, and that the AIs designed to rebuild the world have started malfunctioning.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: The series is essentially every Pulp Magazine trope amalgamated into one setting for your convenience. There are ruins of a mysterious civilization beneath the earth. There are brawny tundra barbarians with brutal rites of passage. There are indolent nobles jockeying for power. There are vast deserts filled with cows and lonely towering mesas. There are steamy jungles filled with mad cultists. There are bands of mercenaries. There are exotic femme fatales spying for king and country. There are blood sacrifices. There are Epic Heroes inexplicably better than normal men at everything. There are elaborate clifftop cities. There are shirtless men and oddly-scantily-clad women. There are intrepid archaeologists and big game hunters. There are savage pirates on tropical paradise islands. There is at least one child who trained on a mountain for years to fulfill their mystically-charged destiny. And that’s not even mentioning any of the pulp sci-fi elements blended in for good measure: killer robots that Turned Against Their Masters, the long looming shadow of Precursors, glowing holographic Instant Runes... And the franchise is only broadening as time goes on.
• Fantastic Racism: The closest equivalent in Horizon's setting to "race" is tribal affiliation, as each tribe is roughly identical in terms of phenotypical diversity. That doesn't make prejudice on those grounds any less prevalent. The Carja and Quen in particular regard other tribes as "lesser" and "backward" due to them having less cultural (in the case of the Carja) and scientific (in the case of the Quen) advancement.
• Genre Mashup: It's a Conan the Barbarian-style pulp story mashed with soft Science Fiction.
• Genre Throwback: To Pulp Fiction, similar to Primal (2019). It doesn't get much pulpier than a red-headed barbarian huntress fighting gigantic robot dinosaurs with naught but sticks and stones.
• Grey Goo: The Faro Plague was a swarm of biomass-consuming robots created by Faro Automated Solutions which very nearly succeeded in wiping out all life on earth, and resulted in the state of the setting currently.
• Humans Are Not the Dominant Species: The world is inhabited by mechanical creatures simply dubbed "machines". All but the smallest machines dwarf humans, and their increased aggression in recent decades has caused great turmoil for the tribes.
• Improbable Self-Maintenance: Despite humanity being reverted to hunter-gatherers, you won't find any with dirt, grime, or the like sticking to them. Facepaint and tribal tatoos, sure, but not the natural detritus of such an outdoorsy lifestyle.
• Mascot Mook: The mighty Thunderjaw, the game's resident mechanical T. Rexpy. It's on the cover of Zero Dawn, and is basically synonymous with the games because of how iconic and dangerous a creature it is.
• Mechanical Animals: Of every shape and kind. From the lowliest Watcher or Burrower to the nastiest Thunderjaw or Slaughterspine, Aloy has to face off against nearly every robot creature imaginable.
• Proud Industrious Race: The Oseram are an entire tribe of Blacksmiths who are experts at repurposing Machine scrap and turning them into strong armor or impressive machines. Compared to the rest of the iron-age North American tribes, the Oseram are more like a pre-industrial society that are on the verge of rediscovering the steam engine, which makes them very popular as both mercenaries and weapons contractors (The Carja Sun-King's Praetorian Guard is even made up of crack Oseram warriors). In one quest in Zero Dawn, Aloy even helps an Oseram woman named Petra invent what is essentially a rapid-fire mortar cannon out of repurposed machine parts before the world has even reinvented gunpowder.
• Proud Warrior Race: The Tenakth fit this to a T, being a culture where martial prowess and strength is valued above all else and much of their society features ritualized Trial by Combat. It's later revealed that this is because The pillars of their culture are extracted from heavily corrupted presentations at the ancient military museum that makes up the Memorial Grove, their most holy site and seat of power for the Chief, which honors a squadron of fighter pilots who fought in a 21st century conflict called the Hot Zone Crisis. Aloy is instantly able to earn their respect by defeating Regalla's champion, and only proceeds to further convince them that she's a Living Legend over the course of Forbidden West with her feats.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: This color palette is used for several of the villain factions: Zero Dawn features the Eclipse and Bandits, while Forbidden West includes Regalla's Rebels and the Sons of Prometheus.
• Rock Beats Laser: Aloy manages to defeat hundreds of machines with whatever she can engineer from machine scrap and the world around her, including bows, slings, Automatic Crossbows and more. Justfied, as the materials she uses to make ammo for these weapons comes from the components of the machines themselves, so it only makes sense that they are able to damage what they are created from.
• Scenery Porn: The Horizon games, if nothing else, are considered to be some of the most visually stunning games of their era, featuring nearly photorealistic graphics and a picturesque world reclaimed by nature and teeming with life.
• Schizo Tech: A textbook example. While humanity has experienced a hard societal and technological reset, they are also surrounded by highly advanced robots, so their technological progression is inevitably all over the place. The Nora, for example, are Luddites whose architecture consists largely of tying wood together with rope, and yet make heavy usage of compound bows (which weren't invented IRL until the 20th century).
• Science Fantasy: Downplayed, as the series doesn't really have "magical" or fantastic elements, but it's soft enough of Science Fiction that it manages to feel like Sword and Sorcery with robots and A.I. instead of fantasy beasts and gods.
• Stern Sun Worshippers: The Carja tribe combine this trope with Mayincatec. They're highly nationalistic and patriarchal sun-worshippers who, under their previous "Sun-King", practiced mass slavery and Human Sacrifice before La Résistance (including many heroic Carja and the crown prince) overthrew the government and started improving things. Unusually for the trope, not all Carja have white skin (because all Horizon tribes are a redistribution of old-world races and ethnicities), and they accept transgender rights (if Warden Janeva's authority is any indication).

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