I never finished Horizon Zero Dawn, and I didn’t play Horizon Forbidden West. Out of all of PlayStation’s games to come out in the last decade, I’d say that for my tastes, the Horizon series ranks fairly low among them.

That’s not to say these are necessarily bad games. In fact, though I never finished Zero Dawn, I went and watched all the cutscenes I hadn’t seen so I could piece the rest of its compelling story together. While I didn’t find its post-apocalyptic, robo-dinosaur strewn landscape very interesting, I was very interested in the connection between protagonist Aloy and the scientist Elisabet Sobeck, and how the world we explore came to be because of irresponsible military uses of technology.

While I was invested in the story, the gameplay fell flat for me. I didn’t particularly enjoy combat, or running around the world, or even the game’s variety in biomes. I was too bored of actually having to play the game to see it through to the end, though I wanted to know what happened. That’s kind of what makes Horizon an ideal candidate for a movie adaptation.

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Horizon Has A Great, Relevant Story

I’m not the only person who thinks Horizon’s writing was top in class. In 2017, the year it was launched, the game won the Golden Joystick Award for Best Storytelling and Best Gaming Performance. It won Outstanding Achievement in Story at the DICE Awards. It was nominated in nearly every major category at The Game Awards (and every other major awards show, for that matter).

Its themes, too, are still relevant eight years after the game was launched – perhaps even more so. In Horizon Zero Dawn, Aloy discovers that the Old World was destroyed almost a millennium ago because a corporation, Faro, lost control of its military robots. Because the robots were designed to self-replicate by consuming biomass, the robots spread across the planet, destroying Earth’s biosphere. Sobeck tried to counter this by creating Zero Dawn, an automated terraforming system that would restore life to Earth and deactivate the robots.

We live in a world ruled by corporate interests and militarism. We also live in a world that’s being ravaged by climate change and worsening natural disasters. Corporate interests, generally, enable climate change. It is entirely believable that some idiot billionaire could invent this technology in a hundred years and make a ton more money off it, with no regard for the catastrophic consequences it could have on human life. We see that kind of behaviour every day already. Horizon makes me think about how the world is as dangerous as it is beautiful and deserving of preservation.

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But Sony Needs To Do This Right

That said, we don’t know anything about the upcoming movie adaptation. Rumours circulating about the now-scrapped Netflix-produced television adaptation suggested that the project would focus on the pre-apocalypse period, which wouldn’t have been a great choice. If this is the tack Sony will take with the movie adaptation, I’m not sure it’ll work quite as well.

Horizon Zero Dawn’s story works on its own, and it doesn’t need expansion. Too many video game adaptations have come out recently that failed to stick to the stories that made the games great, like Amazon’s Like a Dragon: Yakuza series, the Borderlands film, Uncharted, and probably the upcoming Until Dawn movie.

I’m not saying that experimental adaptations are doomed to fail – Amazon’s Fallout told a new story, and HBO’s The Last of Us expanded on the source material to great effect – but so many adaptations fail to recognise the strengths that already exist in the stories they’re bringing to the big screen.

If done right, Horizon already has all the ingredients of a great movie adaptation. All Sony has to do is pull it off. I’d say it can’t be that hard, but we’ve seen so many failures already. I just hope Horizon won’t be another of them.

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Horizon: Zero Dawn

Action RPG Systems 3.0/10 OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 89/100 Critics Rec: 94% Released February 28, 2017 ESRB T for Teen: Blood, Drug Reference, Language, Mild Sexual Themes, Violence Developer(s) Guerrilla Games Publisher(s) Sony Engine Decima
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