(header is official box art)
A chance encounter
Sometime in 2019, I was out exploring the shopping centers around my apartment complex when I came across an electronics store. One of the TVs inside was showcasing HZD and I remember it piquing my interest. Maybe it were the graphics – absolutely beautiful depictions of lush outdoor locales. Or maybe it were the main character using a bow and arrows to kill a robot animal. I don’t know. It made an impression. I got home, looked up the game, and a year later, I bought it on Steam. It definitely lived up to expectations – the game’s incredible both graphically and plot-wise. I’ll note, like many others have, that HZD isn’t part of some other franchise. With the large number of sequels and spin-offs saturating the video game industry nowadays, with everyone scared to take risks, having something completely new – and this great – really drove this game up on my list.
4 annoying flaws
HZD isn’t perfect, of course, and I’ll point out 4 things that bothered me. Only 3 of these things affected my ranking of the game, which is to say they almost brought this game down to an A. The last one’s a personal nitpick.
First? The gameplay can be…annoying. I play these games stealthily. I find it so satisfying to clear out an entire bandit camp where none of them even knew what was going on until they were dead. Unfortunately, HZD’s stealth mechanics aren’t the best. So let’s say you shoot a bandit. In standard video game fashion, he survives, even if said shot delivered a hard-point metal-tipped arrow directly into his head. A yellow mark will appear over his head, meaning he’s now alerted. He’ll go to where you first shot him to investigate. So far, so good.
Let’s say after you shot that enemy, you moved to another location. He went to your first location, so he still doesn’t know where you are because you’ve moved. But let’s say you shoot him again while he’s still alerted. Damaging an enemy while he’s alerted makes him psychically lock onto you immediately, even if there’s little to no way he can know where you are. And because he’s “found” you, he’ll also alert all his companions, so now everyone can zero in on you regardless of where you go or whether you’re in stealth mode or not. It’s very annoying. Rather than being able to move from cover to cover, using the environment to hide you, stealth play involves shooting an enemy, moving somewhere out of sight, waiting until the enemy stops being alerted, shooting him again, re-hiding, etc.
It gets more ridiculous. Let’s say you set up a mine. So you shoot a guy, he walks out to investigate, and he steps on the mine. It explodes, doing damage. Well, the game counts that as a second hit while the enemy is alerted, meaning the enemy and all his buddies can now go right to you even if you were completely hidden when the mine went off.
Let’s say you’re fighting a machine with Blaze canisters on its back. Shooting Blaze with a fire arrow will cause it to explode after a short delay. So the arrow hitting the machine alerts it and the explosion counts as the second hit. Even if you’re completely hidden and not where you shot the fire arrow in the first place, the explosion grants the machine and all its friends magical psychic abilities and they’ll now all know exactly where you are.
Now one might argue that you can or should play the game as a regular action/combat game. No stealth. Toe-to-toe fights. Dodge rolling, jumping, the works. First of all, a game like this forcing a certain playstyle is bad form. Second, let’s think about things in-universe. We’ve got Aloy, a teenage girl with a bow, arrows, a spear, slings, and rudimentary explosives. She’s fighting packs of robot animals, some with laser cannons and homing missiles and cloaking and guns. If she can just openly march up to them and kill them, that ruins the immersion. You try fighting, say, a guy in a tank with medieval weaponry and see how far you get. Can you win? Maybe, if you scout the terrain, set up traps, devise a strategy, and generally keep out of sight. If you walked right up to it, though? Either you lose, which is utterly unsurprising; or you win, in which case it wouldn’t be so out of line to question whether tanks are any sort of credible weapon if a lone human with inferior technology could destroy it in open combat. Do you consider the mechs in Final Fantasy XIII a threat? Doubt it, since one of the protagonists can literally punch them to death barehanded.
…which brings me to some of the boss encounters. The boss encounters are generally not stealth-able. Bosses can, you guessed it, lock on to Aloy regardless of line-of-sight or if she’s in stealth. In particular, on several occasions, you fight Deathbringers, giant mechs loaded to the brim with machine guns and rocket launchers. And you win. A giant, mobile armory more advanced than what we have now in real life, and it loses in open combat to a teenage girl with weaponry only slightly more advanced than you’d find in the 1400s. Maybe I’m biased, but allowing us to stealth everything would’ve made more sense, and this is coming from a guy who finds Aloy’s feats throughout the game overwhelmingly badass.
The other annoying parts of the game are the parkour segments. Think Mirror’s Edge – Aloy will automatically reach out to grab ropes, ledges, etc. to climb structures. For the most part, the mechanics work without a hitch and Aloy pretty much ascends structures automatically. But a small amount of the time, you’ll actually have to input manual jumps to something grabbable – and in true Mirror’s Edge fashion, Aloy will fail to grab whatever she was supposed to grab and fall to her death. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s very annoying when it does. Moreover, Aloy will only grab onto certain things and there’s not much differentiating a ledge she’ll grab onto versus a ledge she won’t.
Third gripe: some specific parts of the plot. I’ll defer this to a subsequent section where I talk at length about the plot (most of it is absolutely fantastic).
And here’s the personal nitpick: the bows. There are 3 kinds of bows in the game: hunter, war, and sharpshot bows. Each bow shoots different kinds of arrows, so for example, if you want to shoot an ice arrow, you need a war bow. This is ridiculous. Bows aren’t guns – while, say, a pistol can’t shoot shotgun shells, any bow can shoot any arrow given the length of the arrow is compatible with the draw length of the bow. These lengths, in turn, depend on the archer. At full draw, the head of the arrow should be a bit past the bow and the tail should be around the corner of the mouth or the base of the jaw. Since Aloy is the person using all the bows, we can assume all the bows and arrows are of the same length, meaning there shouldn’t be a reason that she needs 3 different kinds of bows to shoot different arrows.
From a practical perspective, it’s pretty easy to carry different kinds of firearms around. For instance, someone could carry a pistol, a shotgun, and a machine gun at the same time with little issue. But 3 bows? For reference, I have a bow in real life, and when strung, it’s about 180 cm long – roughly my full height. You expect someone to carry 3 of those? I dealt with this by implementing a personal rule that I would only use the hunter bow and never touch the war or sharpshot bows.
The Chronicle of Aloy, Anointed of the Goddess
She hates it when people call her the Anointed.
Aloy is a very RPG-protagonist character, meaning everyone in the world asks her for help in everything and she pretty much single-handedly solves all their problems, both big and small. It’s a pretty old and cliché trope, but the game unabashedly embraces it and it works well. Case in point: in the final battle, a guy tells Aloy that they sent messengers to ask for aid defending the city and many of them volunteered to come just because they knew Aloy was there. At the beginning of the game, I found Aloy to be a somewhat blank protagonist, but the sheer amount of badassery she executes throughout the game, coupled with her dry wit and how NPCs of the world respond to her, eventually made me really like her.
So for this shrine, I have decided to outline every last thing she has done over the course of Horizon Zero Dawn – a chronicle of just how single-handed an RPG protagonist can get. Now before I continue, of course there are going to be the most massive spoilers ahead, but I just want to say that if there is any chance you’ll play this game, stop reading and go play it. I really give the game kudos for how it presents its backstory. You find datapoints – journal recordings, news articles, conversations – and slowly piece things together. It’s a difficult approach to tell a story like this: indirectly, with holes. As a writer, you’re going to need to trust your audience to infer. You’re going to need to deal with the fact that, in the early parts of the plot, your audience is going to be confused and lost. Some games decide this is too hard and give a straightforward lore dump, but HZD goes all in with this approach and does it well.
In particular, a large chunk of the datapoints you find have nothing to do with the main backstory. One set of recordings detail a regular guy telling his personal story about how his dad died due to corporate politics, how his mom struggled to make ends meet, how he sunk to delinquency, how he hated his stepdad, how he woke up and realized how much his mom cared and sacrificed for him, how his mom died, and how he decided that he was going to record his story – not a grandiose, large-scale story through the stars, but a small, personal story down to Earth. It’s a touching, tragic story that fleshes out the setting of the game’s backstory. There are the major characters and the major plot points, but Earth has literally billions of other people living all sorts of non-plot-critical lives.
So I really encourage you to experience this yourself. The game also has New Game Plus, meaning you can go through the game again and this time, understand all the datapoints that much better because you now have the context.
Alright. Still here? Let’s begin with the game’s setting.
A bleak future
The denizens of the game don’t use our calendar, because sometime in their past, civilization completely fell. That said, for context, HZD takes place in modern-day Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. The year is the 3030s. While some small animals exist – the biggest is the boar – most of the non-human lifeforms in the world are machine animals. We’ve got machine horses, machine deer, etc. The humans don’t know what these things are, so they hunt them for parts, just like how they hunt normal animals.
Humanity lives in primitive tribes. In-game, we see a Native-American-esque tribe (the Nora), a somewhat more advanced tribe that worships the sun (the Carja), a technologically savvy tribe whose crowning achievements were an elevator and a grenade launcher (the Oseram), and an Inuit-esque tribe (the Banuk).
About 20 years before the game’s events, the machine animals became more aggressive and new machine animals began appearing, modeled after sabretooth cats and dinosaurs and armed with advanced weaponry such as laser cannons. The humans call this the Derangement and attempt to concoct explanations. The Carja, in particular, decide that the sun is angry or something, so their king starts sending raiding parties throughout the lands to kidnap people to sacrifice to the sun.
At around the time the Derangement began, an infant girl appears out of nowhere in the Nora’s sacred mountain (which is modern-day Pike’s Peak). The 3 High Matriarchs of the Nora don’t know what to do – one thinks she’s holy because they found her inside the sacred mountain, another thinks she’s evil because…reasons, and the third just doesn’t know. So, they give her to Rost, an outcast, to raise, and he names her Aloy. Rost doesn’t mind being an outcast, though he himself never divulges why he’s outcast from the tribe, but Aloy is an outcast for no fault of her own, so she resolves to demand an explanation from the High Matriarchs. To do so, Rost explains that if she wins the Nora Proving ritual, she’ll be accepted into the tribe and can ask the High Matriarchs any one favor. This becomes Aloy’s first goal.
At the age of 6, Aloy finds a small triangular device in some Old World ruins. This thing is called a Focus and it can scan its surroundings to give the wearer some sort of augmented reality interface. In-game, you use it to scan enemies and find their weaknesses, or scan areas to reveal clues, or interface with Old World technology (before the fall of the previous civilization).
At the age of 18, Aloy is ready for the Proving and the game proper begins.
Odd Grata
Odd Grata is a very old lady who never talks except for praying to the Nora goddess. Aloy visits her and Grata prays to the goddess to help her retrieve her prayer beads, which are atop this mountain. How Grata got to the top of the mountain to leave her beads there in the first place, I don’t know. Anyway, Aloy hears this, retrieves the beads, and returns them to Grata. Grata, as is standard for her, doesn’t acknowledge Aloy, but instead thanks the goddess, much to Aloy’s annoyance.
The ostensible purpose of this quest is to introduce the player to the game’s parkour mechanics, since the quest involves Aloy climbing a mountain. It’s rather straightforward stuff, but there’s a fridge logic moment that I’ll get to later.
In Her Mother’s Footsteps
Aloy comes across a wounded man. Now by Nora law, nobody is allowed to talk to outcasts and outcasts aren’t allow to talk to anyone (Rost and Aloy are an exception, as the High Matriarchs told Rost to raise Aloy, so they’re allowed to talk to each other). The man is so desperate for help that he breaks the law and tells Aloy that he lost his late wife’s spear fighting a machine and broke his leg. His daughter went after the machine by herself and he wants to save her, but, well, he has a broken leg.
This side-quest illustrates an important point: Aloy has a lot of resentment toward the Nora for treating her as an outcast for the crime of “was born.” She helps this guy anyway, saving his daughter and getting the spear back.
The Forgotten
Aloy comes across a lady who is looking for her brother Brom, who is voiced by Tommy Wiseau. Now Brom has schizophrenia, but remember, the humans of the game have no knowledge of this stuff, so they think he’s being possessed by the souls of the damned or something. While humans have lost knowledge, they haven’t lost their penchant for dickery, so people constantly picked on Brom, and one day Brom snapped and killed one of them in self-defense. He was made an outcast for 10 years, but didn’t return after his sentence was up.
Long story short: Aloy finds Brom, who says he doesn’t want to go home because he’s afraid he’ll attack his sister. The player can choose to let him go or convince him to allow his sister to keep watch over him while he lives in a cave somewhere.
The important thing to note for this quest is how mental illness is still a thing in the future, but people have entirely no idea how to deal with it. In real life, this was the case in our history until people slowly grew to understand it better, a process that is still going on now. Whatever happened to delete the knowledge humanity accrued is having massive repercussions all over, and this is one of them: many, many steps backward on how to deal with mental health.
The Point of the Spear
Here’s the first main quest of the game. Rost brings Aloy outside the Embrace, which is the Nora heartland (the area immediately surrounding Pike’s Peak). He intends for her to fight a Sawtooth, one of the new machines far more dangerous compared to the other ones. Sawtooths are modeled from sabretooth cats, which you can imagine are more dangerous compared to, say, deer. Sawtooths are also hilariously weak to fire, so this isn’t an entirely difficult fight.
Rost tells Aloy that the point of this (the point of wielding a spear) is to protect the tribe, which Aloy will join once she wins the Proving. Aloy retorts that she can’t serve the tribe that’s shunned her for no reason her entire life, but she does take the lesson to heart to fight for a cause greater than herself.
Mother’s Heart
In this main quest, Aloy wanders the capital of the Nora lands, Mother’s Heart, the night before the Proving. By Nora law, since she’s taking part in the Proving, she’s allowed into the village and can talk to people. Most of the people treat her normally, but a select few show extreme prejudice toward her for being an outcast. One is Resh, a warrior guy, and another is Bast, a guy who once threw rocks at 6-year-old Aloy for no reason except he’s a dickwad.
Here’s a good time to begin a new segment of this shrine I like to call “Smart-ass Aloy moments.”
Smart-ass Aloy moment 1: Resh insults her as she’s entering the lodge all the Proving candidates are staying in the night before the event. Aloy’s response: “Oh, this is the bed-house? With you standing guard, I figured it was the latrine.”
Smart-ass Aloy moment 2: everything she says to shut down Bast. A bit of a side note: when Bast throws the rock at 6-year-old Aloy, in a non-NG+ playthrough the player can choose how to react. Bast picks up a second rock, throws it at Aloy, and Aloy catches it easily (note this is before Rost really teaches her how to fight, showing just how badass Aloy is). Bast picks up a third rock and Aloy can (1) throw the rock at Bast’s head; (2) throw the rock at Bast’s rock, knocking it out of his hand; or (3) drop the rock and leave. However much I wanted to pick the first choice, I figured it would lead to complications and the second choice is just so much more badass. Aloy brings it up in this scene and Bast tries to brush it off with some hot air bravado, saying he’ll surprise Aloy at the Proving, to which Aloy responds, “Oh, are you going to shut your mouth? Because that would be a surprise.”
Aloy also meets a few non-Nora people here. The Carja have sent a delegation to visit the Nora. Recall that the Carja Sun-King raided other lands, the Nora’s included, for people to kidnap and sacrifice. Very recently, his son Avad decided to put an end to this and raised an army, overthrowing and killing the king. The old regime’s remnants dubbed themselves the Shadow Carja and fled west to Sunfall, which is in modern-day Bryce Canyon. The new regime is sending people around to broker peace.
There are 3 notable members of the Carja delegation. One is a priest (in their sun-worshipping religion), who tries to talk before the Nora begin throwing fruit at him. Later on he tells Aloy that he thought they were throwing rocks rather than fruit, leading to…
Smart-ass Aloy moment 3: “Rocks hit harder. You’d notice.”
The military leader guarding the delegation is a fellow named Erend. Erend is an Oseram, so he talks to the Nora and calms them down because they’re more willing to hear a non-Carja out. Erend’s role here is to provide backstory about the Carja civil war, which he fought in – when Avad began his revolt, he forged an alliance between his own troops and Oseram forces under Erend’s sister Ersa. Ersa now commands Avad’s Vanguard, his best troops.
Erend is also the first of many, many people to hit on Aloy. Aloy responds with complete obliviousness.
The third important person is a guy named Olin, whose ostensible purpose is to act as a guide to the delegation, which is baffling because Olin is also an Oseram, so why would he know Nora lands? Anyway, Aloy notices Olin because Olin is also wearing a Focus, so she goes to talk to him. At that moment, Olin’s Focus freaks out and he becomes rather standoffish before fleeing.
The Proving
Aloy wins the Proving despite Resh and Bast attempting to sabotage her, but then mysterious goons with a machine gun show up and begin killing the candidates en masse. Aloy fights them off and loots a Focus off one of the goons, but then their leader Helis shows up, incapacitates Aloy, and holds a knife to her throat, intending to kill her. Rost appears to defend Aloy, but Helis fatally stabs him. Helis, instead of finishing what he was doing, walks off and orders his men to blow up the entire area with barrels of explosives. Rost saves Aloy by pushing her off the cliff they’re on before the barrels all explode.
This bugged me. Why do writers do this? Villains win and then just let the hero go. Wouldn’t a better way to do this sequence be to have Rost interrupt Helis killing Aloy, then have Rost push Aloy off the cliff before Helis kills him? It would lead to the same result without Helis letting Aloy go for no reason.
Aloy awakens inside the Nora sacred mountain. Teersa, the High Matriarch who believes Aloy is holy, appears and tells Aloy she brought her unconscious body inside so she could “be with her mother.” To explain, Teersa brings her to where they first found infant Aloy…in front of a large Old World door.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 4: “This isn’t a goddess. It’s a door.”
Why the Nora believe it to be a goddess becomes clear: Aloy steps in front of the door and an automated voice appears, saying, “Hold for identi-scan.” Yes, the Nora believe that the door’s automated voice is the voice of a goddess. Anyway, the door scans Aloy, recognizes her with a 99.47% genetic match, but then says that some registry is corrupted and the door remains locked.
Aloy also looks at the Focus she looted off the Proving attackers. Scanning the Focus with her own Focus reveals that the attackers were there specifically to kill her because she looks like some other lady the attackers apparently know (the lady she has a 99.47% genetic match with). Moreover, they were alerted to her existence because they saw her through Olin’s Focus.
The Nora tribe, meanwhile, didn’t take kindly to random guys killing their people, so they sent a War Party under their War-chief after the killers (eventually, we’ll learn these guys are called the Eclipse, so I’ll just call them that). Teersa reports that half the War Party got ambushed by machines, which the Eclipse were somehow able to take control of using “a demon.” So the other High Matriarchs decide that their goddess is angry with them for some reason and are organizing the tribe to sing for forgiveness. Teersa has a slightly better plan: have Aloy go and figure everything out. By herself.
On the way out of Nora land, Aloy fights off a Corruptor, the “demon” that could take control of machines. Corruptors are noticeably different compared to the other machines seen thus far. For one thing, they don’t resemble any animal, and their ability to commandeer other machines is new.
The War-chief’s Trail and Revenge of the Nora
These quests see Aloy find the War Party Teersa mentioned (the surviving half, anyway). They then attack the Eclipse in their 3 camps and main base, and by “they,” I mean Aloy does it more-or-less single-handedly. If you’re wondering how these guys were able to set up camps and a base in Nora territory, it’s because the Nora forbid anyone from going into Old World ruins, and the Eclipse holed themselves up in the ruins of Denver.
A side note about the final battle in this quest chain: Aloy enters the base and her goal is to shoot a storehouse of Blaze, which will make it explode and blow a hole in the wall, allowing the War Party to rush in (something Aloy has to convince them to do, since it’s forbidden). I thought I could just clear the camp myself, so I snuck around and stealth-killed like 30 guys before I realized they were respawning.
Shortage of Supplies
If you visit War-chief Sona after killing the Eclipse invaders, she’ll tell Aloy they’re low on supplies and ask her to get some and deliver them to outposts. Remember when I said everyone’s solution to everything in the game is Aloy? I meant it. Everything. Even things Sona or pretty much any of her subordinates should be able to do themselves.
Insult to Injury
The healers of the Nora are running out of herbs caring for the wounded from the Eclipse attacks, so one asks Aloy to get some from their caches. This is actually justified, as the Nora warriors are all either in the War Party or are wounded. Aloy goes to the caches but finds them empty except for some shards (money), so the healers send her to a guy named Jun who has some supplies. Aloy finds Jun locked in his own house and Jun claims some outcasts robbed him.
Aloy finds the outcasts, who say that they entered Jun’s house to ask him for healing supplies, but he got terrified because they’re outcasts, so he cowered in the corner and refused to speak to them. They agree to give Aloy most of the supplies back and she returns to Jun. Jun realizes Aloy used to be an outcast and spews some prejudice at her, whereupon she chews him out and tells him to deliver the recovered healing supplies to the healers “or [she’ll] be back.” He wisely obeys.
This quest shows that Aloy never forgets her roots. Just because she’s no longer an outcast doesn’t mean she starts shunning outcasts in accordance with Nora law. Aloy’s Neutral Good, not Lawful Good.
Bandit camps and Cause for Concern: Farewell
Aloy encounters a guy named Nil, who goes around killing bandits for sport. He loves killing, you see, but he doesn’t want to kill innocent people (for one, it’s illegal) and he doesn’t want to kill animals because he’d be wasting their bodies as he’s not eating them or making clothes out of them. Bandits, though? Nobody cares if he kills them.
Nil invites Aloy to clear out bandit camps throughout the world. These are probably my favorite parts of the game, like I talked about before. Once you clear out all the camps, Nil is sad because there’re no more bandits to kill – he says that bandits are avoiding the region because they heard that the bandits in the region were all mysteriously massacred. To sate his…whatever the hell he has, he challenges Aloy to a duel to the death.
You can accept and kill him, or refuse, which he takes as a…romantic rejection? This guy’s weird. Anyway, if you spare him, he shows up in the final battle, which is a gigantic battle and something he’d absolutely love. I also love killing bandits, so having Aloy kill Nil seems oddly hypocritical. I let Nil live.
The point of this is as follows: there are 7 bandit camps in the game spread through 3 modern-day states and Aloy kills every single last bandit in all of them by herself (you can have Nil help you, but I didn’t). The way I did it, each of them died before they even laid eyes on Aloy. I’d like to imagine the bandits, as they began finding their comrades’ bodies, started to panic like those goons in Batman Begins when Batman captures Falcone. They ran around, gripped by terror, at the verge of tears and bowel failure, as they knew their time had come. They fell to their knees, begging their unseen assailant for mercy, wailing to the night sky.
Aloy granted them their wish. She mercy-killed them. All of them.
…Look, to be honest, dying to an unseen arrow from the shadows is probably a hell of a lot better than whatever Nil does. Let’s move on.
Sanctuary
A Nora hunter was with his team when they got ambushed and his team fled inadvertently into some ruins. The hunter asks Aloy to save them. Aloy does so and the hunter asks Aloy not to tell anyone they were in the ruins, because remember, Nora law says they’re forbidden for some reason.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 5: “Relax. The Matriarchs are up singing the ‘Hymn of Atonement.’ I think you’re safe.”
The guy comically misses the point and is relieved, thinking that means the hymn atones for their crime of stumbling into the ruins. Again we see that Aloy doesn’t forget her roots and discards Nora law when she disagrees with it.
A Daughter’s Vengeance
Aloy hears a guy praying for his sister. Upon inquiry, the guy says that a Carja captain by the name of Zaid killed his father during those raids under the previous Sun-King. His sister recently decided she was going to exact revenge, so she left Nora lands to go kill Zaid.
Since Aloy is going to leave Nora lands herself on her quest, she decides to look for the guy’s sister, Nakoa. Later on, Aloy arrives at the Nora/Carja border, where there’s a fort, and finds Zaid. Zaid claims that he didn’t commit any of the atrocities attributed to him and, after subduing Nakoa, he let her go.
Aloy doesn’t buy it because Aloy isn’t stupid. She eventually finds Nakoa, imprisoned in a secret Carja camp run by, you guessed it, Zaid. Zaid appears and boasts that he let her go so he could capture her afterward and sell her into slavery. He intends to do the same to Aloy, except he bit off way more than he could chew this time around, as Aloy massacres the entire slaver camp plus Zaid’s guards. Nakoa finally gets her revenge by impaling Zaid with a spear. I then picked up Zaid’s grenade launcher and emptied it into his sad, pathetic corpse.
Luck of the Hunt
Some guy has lost his lucky ring. Aloy finds it for him – a boar tried to swallow it and choked to death. Keep this in mind as you read on and learn about all the things Aloy will do. Remember when I said everyone’s solution to everything in the game is Aloy? I meant it. Everything. Not just big things. Even “please find my ring I lost it while chasing a boar.”
Underequipped
Some Carja merchants are out in the middle of the wilderness getting attacked by machines. They were supposed to have explosive arrows (which don’t exist in the game), but someone switched the arrows with a box filled with wood shafts. Thus shafted, the merchants couldn’t really defend themselves, so they ask Aloy for help as she’s passing by. Aloy kills several waves of machines by herself and hunts down the guy who switched the boxes. That guy promptly gets shot by a Stalker, and…
I hate Stalkers. These things can cloak, are very agile, and shoot darts at you for high damage. There’s only one machine I hate more than these things, and we’ll get to the LARGE ABUNDANCE OF THOSE FUCKERS later on.
This is likely the first time the player helps a non-Nora group. Though the Carja are more technologically advanced, they clearly still need to rely on Aloy to do everything for them.
A Seeker at the Gates
Back to the main quest, Aloy exits Nora land and finds a Corruptor attacking the Carja at the border. She kills the Corruptor and the guards praise the sun, to which we get…
Smart-ass Aloy moment 6: “It wasn’t the sun risking its ass down here.”
Now that Aloy is in Carja territory, she asks around about Olin, who’s her main target. The guy in charge at the border fort tells Aloy that Olin likely went to the Carja capital of Meridian. So that’s her next main quest destination.
To Old Acquaintance
An Oseram lady asks Aloy to find her husband. She left Oseram territory awhile back and the “ealdormen” of the Oseram didn’t like that, because they’re sexist and think women should stay in the kitchen. Her husband didn’t follow her, but eventually decided sexism isn’t cool and set out after her…but then disappeared.
It turns out he got ambushed by Tramplers, machine bulls. Tramplers are fun to kill. They have this gigantic thing where the udders would be if they were cows. Shoot that and it explodes, putting a permanent burning state on the Trampler, meaning it’ll take damage-over-time until it dies.
Anyway, the guy in question is trapped on a hill until Aloy kills the Tramplers. He then asks her to retrieve his alcohol bottles from where the Tramplers were, because even in the far future, people love getting drunk. Why doesn’t he go get them himself even though Aloy killed all the Tramplers? If you’re asking this, you haven’t been paying attention.
In Foreign Lands
The captain in charge at the border fort between Carja and Nora lands tells Aloy that some Carja soldiers were left behind in Nora lands. He was going to send one of his men (the guy next to him, named Walid) to get them, but the Nora are still uneasy about allowing Carja into their territory. So he asks Aloy to find them, upon which Walid says, “Please say yes.”
Aloy agrees, because RPG protagonist, and discovers the squad was all dead except for a guy named Lakhir, who lost his armor and weapons and is therefore naked and singing loudly on a rock in the middle of a lake surrounded by Snapmaws (machine alligators…or crocodiles?). Aloy saves him and returns to the captain, who asks why Lakhir was so reluctant to talk about what happened.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 7: “He…has a lovely singing voice?” The captain’s response is also pretty funny: “That’s a capital lie if I’ve ever heard one.”
The City of the Sun, part I
Aloy makes it to Meridian and sees the Vanguard blocking the entrance because, right before she arrived, Ersa was murdered. A grieving and drunk Erend greets Aloy, commands his men to let her go as she pleases, and asks what she’s doing in Meridian. Aloy tells him to bring her to Olin’s house (Olin himself isn’t there), where she finds a recording that reveals Helis and the Eclipse are holding Olin’s wife and daughter hostage. She also finds a map that shows where Olin is.
She prepares to set off after Olin, but Erend stops her and asks how she saw that Helis is holding Olin’s family. Remember, Aloy needs her Focus to interface with Old World technology, which the recording is. Erend, without a Focus, has no way of seeing it. Aloy explains her Focus allows her to see normally invisible things, and Erend asks Aloy to help him find Ersa’s killer(s).
The Field of the Fallen
Erend brings Aloy to the site of the murder and Aloy finds rather obvious cart tracks leading away from it. Following the tracks, they find some Oseram, who attack them. What follows (after Aloy kills her ambushers) is one of my favorite sequences in the game that answers a rather logical question.
Throughout the game, some quests will require Aloy to do some detective work. Usually, this works by going to a place, scanning the place with the Focus, and examining what the Focus highlights. The question then becomes: is Aloy dependent on her Focus?
The answer is no – the Focus is more a gameplay mechanic to help the player. Let’s say you’re on a quest where you need to track someone. Here, for example, you need to follow tracks from the place Erend believes the murder happened to the place where the Oseram ambush them. The Focus will highlight the path in purple, which is rather easy for the player to follow, as opposed to the player having to scour the pixels that make up the ground for footprints or blood splotches. Aloy would be able to follow that stuff just fine, Focus or no.
Still unconvinced? Aloy now investigates the area. From a gameplay perspective, this means you use the Focus, and it highlights some smashed rocks, a bloody rock, some cut strips of leather, some weapons, and a tripod. There’s no logical explanation in-universe for why the Focus would pick up these things – why these specific rocks and not the many, many other rocks everywhere else? More likely, Aloy herself notes these things and the Focus highlighting it is just a way to signal to the player to pay attention to certain objects. One could also imagine Aloy noting these things and having the Focus tag them, like highlighting passages in a book.
Next, Aloy talks to Erend and hypothesizes that Ersa isn’t dead. The Oseram used some sort of sonic weapon, once mounted on the tripod, to disable Ersa and her guards. Aloy reasons that the weapons she found don’t show any signs of use, meaning the team must’ve been disabled immediately; and the shattered rocks suggests sonic blasts. They then killed someone roughly the same size as Ersa. They used the bloody rock to smash the dead body’s face, making her unrecognizable. They cut off Ersa’s armor (the leather straps) and put it on the dead body, making it look like Ersa’s body. They then moved the body to where Erend thought the murder happened to throw people off.
We’ll later find that Aloy is completely correct. And this deduction? This is all Aloy. The Focus can’t do any of this. Even from a gameplay perspective, the Focus never makes deductions or inferences. It just scans things and outputs a description. We get hints of Aloy’s intelligence throughout the game, and this is one such instance.
Into the Borderlands
Erend returns to Meridian, checks the body, and confirms that the body isn’t Ersa’s. They talk to Sun-King Avad, and here’s the first time the player actually meets Avad. Throughout HZD, Avad actually lives up to his reputation. He’s kind, humble, and he pursues peace in his own lands and with other lands. For now, he asks Aloy to help find Ersa. Sure, his advisor has sent an agent to investigate the person he suspects is behind Ersa’s kidnapping, an Oseram warlord named Dervahl, but wouldn’t you know it, Avad decides he also needs to rely on this girl he just now met. He turns out to be correct.
Aloy and Erend go to a northern town, close to the border with the Oseram, and find the agent…dead. They track further north, find Dervahl’s camp, and kill all his men. They find Ersa, tortured and near death, and Ersa tells them that Dervahl is about to launch a terrorist attack on Meridian. She then dies.
There’s a lot more backstory to Dervahl, but I’m going to skip it.
The Sun Shall Fall
Aloy and Erend return to Meridian and Aloy finds a large amount of Blaze and a makeshift remote-controlled bomb in a house at the edge of the city. Aloy estimates that blowing this up would indeed destroy Meridian. To neutralize the bomb, she pushes the Blaze out the window, which…sets off the bomb anyway. And the Blaze explodes. But for some reason this doesn’t destroy the city or kill anyone? This sequence made no sense to me. Also, why would Dervahl set up a bomb on the outskirts of the city? Shouldn’t it be nearer the city center if he wants to destroy the city?
Anyway, Aloy has just saved Meridian – the capital city of the Carja and the biggest city in the game. But she’s not done. She tracks Dervahl himself through a back way into the palace. She finds Dervahl in Avad’s room. Avad is on the ground, incapacitated and holding his ears due to Dervahl’s sonic weapon screaming at him, while Dervahl is taunting him. Why does Dervahl think Avad can even hear him? Between the placement of the bomb and him not understanding how his own sonic weapon works, I’m thinking this guy isn’t as smart as the game says he is.
Dervahl tries to set off the bomb, but it obviously doesn’t go off. He sees Aloy and declares he has a backup plan: summon waves of Glinthawks.
I. Fucking. Hate. Glinthawks. Unfortunately, the developers seem to love them. These things fly. They’re hard to hit. They comes in groups. They often attack right after you’ve killed something and are in the middle of looting the body because they want to loot it first.
…Anyway, Aloy kills the Glinthawks and Dervahl is taken prisoner to be given to the Oseram, who, for reasons I didn’t get into, hate him. Everyone agrees that, given the Oseram’s prowess with technology and creativity, Dervahl’s death is going to be slow and messy and cruel and unusual. I approve.
Avad thanks Aloy for literally saving his life and then hits on her. This time, Aloy knows where he’s going, and unequivocally shoots him down.
The City of the Sun, part II
Aloy goes after Olin and finds him at a dig site with Eclipse cultists, who’ve just dug up a Corruptor. Suddenly, someone contacts Aloy through her Focus and informs her that he disabled all the Focus devices (except hers) at the dig site. Aloy kills all the cultists and stands over a cowering Olin, her spearpoint mere centimeters from him, and Olin promises he’ll tell her everything he knows.
Aloy: “Oh, I know you will.”
Long story short: the Eclipse worship some devil they call HADES. They captured Olin’s family and forced Olin to help them at dig sites because Olin’s good at navigating dig sites, I guess. They gave Olin his Focus so they could monitor him; if he stepped out of line, they’d kill his family. At the night before the Proving, when Aloy approached Olin, HADES sent a broadcast through all the Focus devices throughout the entire Eclipse with 3 words: “System threat detected.”
Aloy asks about that lady she has a 99.47% genetic match with, to which Olin says he saw her face at a hologram somewhere in Maker’s End, some ruins far to the north.
At this point, Aloy’s gotten everything out of Olin he knows, so she passes judgment. You can kill him, spare him, or state that the situation is complicated, after which you choices are to kill him or spare him. If you’re wondering what the complete hell was the point of giving the player the “this is complicated” choice, we think alike.
I spared Olin. He then begs Aloy to help save his family.
Collateral
Olin tells Aloy to meet him at some farm out in the middle of nowhere, where the Eclipse are holding his family. When Aloy finds him, he’s still wearing his goddamn Focus. Why? Wasn’t he scared that the Eclipse were monitoring him through it? Sure, the mysterious guy at the dig site disabled all the Focus devices, including his, but (1) Olin doesn’t know that and (2) the guy himself says he doesn’t know how long they’ll remain disabled. Olin should’ve either left his Focus at the dig site or told Aloy where his family was and then gone about his business as usual, not go to the farm with the Focus on. Is this guy some kind of moron?
…Anyway, this mission is a straightforward “Aloy kills an entire base of guys” grand old time and she reunites Olin with his family.
Robbing the Rich
Aloy encounters a guy whose sword was stolen. He asks her, a random stranger who was just passing by his house, to help him find it. Aloy follows tracks from his house to a merchant, who tells Aloy that she stole it on behalf of her Robin Hood organization so they could sell it and help the needy. She asks Aloy to go hear her people out, at least, and she’ll stay where she is and won’t try to escape.
Aloy’s response: “It wouldn’t matter if you did. I’d find you.” Hot.
Anyway, it turns out that the stuff about the Robin Hood gang is completely true. Remember those Shadow Carja guys? The place they fled to (Sunfall) is in a barren canyon, with little in the way of resources, so whatever resources they get, they funnel to the nobles and to the military. So, the guys in this quest are trying to help the slums around Sunfall. One of their people, carrying supplies, got ambushed by Shadow Carja soldiers, so their leader asks Aloy to save him in exchange for returning the sword. This involves killing a Shadow Carja outpost’s worth of guys, and it’s perhaps the first time Aloy kills Shadow Carja soldiers proper (I’m unsure where the Eclipse fits in the Shadow Carja military).
So now Aloy can add “saving the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to her résumé, right alongside counter-terrorism and recovering rings from boars.
A Moment’s Peace
A rather sleazy fellow by the name of Vilgund greets Aloy by either complimenting her figure or insulting it – I’m actually not sure. Rather than kicking him in the balls repeatedly, Aloy decides to hear out his request, which is for her to go investigate a Banuk village where the machines are all tame. He sent a squad before, but they didn’t come back.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 8: “So now you’re hiring someone…to find the last men you hired.”
Aloy goes to the village and finds some sort of computer core that is outputting a signal that renders the machines in the area non-hostile. Unfortunately, some of Vilgund’s guys are trying to dig it out to bring back, and in their ineptitude, are damaging it. They try to get Aloy to pay them to stop, asking her how much it’s worth to her, to which Aloy says, “It’s worth more to me than you are. You still want to negotiate?” In a rare instance of an enemy showing common sense, the guys back off – but the damage has been done, and Aloy needs to rush back to the village to take out the now-normally-hostile machines. She then returns to Vilgund and demands full payment. Given Aloy doesn’t seem like she cares about money throughout the game, I assume she’s doing this just because Vilgund’s a sleazebag.
Fatal Inheritance
Aloy finds a guy who is desperate for someone to go save his family’s gigantic estate, because it got mysteriously attacked by a Ravager. Ravagers are kind of like Sawtooths, except they have a big laser cannon on their backs. This is good because you can shoot the cannon off and then pick it up and use it.
Anyway, Aloy investigates the estate, kills the machines, and finds the guy’s sister Daradi is the only survivor. This means Aloy single-handedly wins a fight a rich Carja guy’s entire guard retinue lost. Daradi reveals that her brother is actually a scumbag who tried to kill everyone (by luring the Ravager in) so he could inherit the estate. Of course, he then needed someone to go clear out the Ravager after.
The guy’s brilliant, isn’t he? He appears to finish his brilliant plan by summoning Glinthawks to finish Aloy. Actually, did I say brilliant? I meant this guy’s a dumbass, because the Glinthawks he summons promptly kill him because, while he can attract machines, he can’t control them, something he should’ve known already because otherwise, he wouldn’t have needed Aloy to go kill the Ravager for him.
Anyway, FUCKING GLINTHAWKS I HATE THESE FUCKING THINGS.
Honor the Fallen
Let’s return to Avad’s father, the Mad King Aerys II. He sent his troops to attack anyone and everyone. When Meridian was about to fall, he sent Helis and the highest priest Bahavas west with the remainder of his regime – mostly, his elite fighters (the Kestrels) and the priesthood. The priests that remained with Avad now need to contend with the fact that their religion once advocated killing people en masse to placate the sun.
One priest in particular is Namman, who wants to help 3 people obtain closure over the horrors of the former regime. Long story short: one wants to pray at a lake, so Aloy kills a bunch of Snapmaws in the lake; one wants to paint a picture on a mountain, so Aloy kills a bunch of FUCKING GLINTHAWKS on the mountain; and the third wants to pray to a defaced statue of the old king…even though the old king was who inflicted all the atrocities…? There aren’t any machines guarding the statue; instead, there’s this racist priest there blocking the entrance. Now when I first approached him, I literally just jumped around him and got past him, so I don’t know why the group of people he’s blocking don’t just…do that. Anyway, Aloy walks up to him and tells him to get lost, and he does, because I guess the game would’ve had issues if you could murder the hell out of a frail old racist man.
Hunting for the Lodge
This is the introduction to a mini-quest-line involving the Carja Hunters’ Lodge. As its name suggests, it’s a guild of sorts of machine hunters, except the vast majority of them just sit around the place and brag about themselves.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 9: “Is there actually any hunting in this Lodge? So far it’s been all talk.”
Generally speaking, the Lodge accepts “Fledglings” if they earn 3 Half Sun marks at a Hunting Ground. These are scattered throughout the world and each Ground features 3 trials; what mark you get depends on how fast you finish the trial. The Half Sun is the lowest rank (~20 minutes), followed by Full Sun and then Blazing Sun (1-3 minutes). I despise timed missions, so I skipped all the Grounds except for the first one, which I got 3 Blazing Suns at to enter the Lodge.
Now a Fledgling isn’t actually a member – to become a member, one must find a Hawk to sponsor him, at which point he becomes a Thrush. I say “he” because before Avad, the Lodge only allowed Carja males. Avad abolished this rule when he rose to power, so now the Lodge is technically open to anyone who has the requisite 3 marks and finds a sponsor.
Aloy doesn’t really care about ranks or prestige or membership in anything, so she doesn’t have much in-universe reason to join the Lodge, though given the attitude of some members, I think she’d enjoy taking them down a few pegs. In particular, the leader of the Lodge (the Sunhawk) is Ahsis. Ahsis is the most racist, sexist dickwad ever. He tries to tell Aloy that she can’t join the Lodge because she’s a non-Carja woman, except remember, that’s no longer a rule by royal edict, so Aloy tells him to shut it and point her to a sponsor. He points her to Talanah, who is a Carja woman (and thus someone Ahsis hates). Talanah says she might sponsor Aloy if she proves herself by killing a bunch of machines. Afterward, Talanah gives Aloy another mission.
Hunters’ Blind
Talanah tells Aloy that the Lodge, being a guild, is supposed to accept contracts; for instance, if a town needed someone to help them defend against machines. As you might expect, Ahsis doesn’t bother accepting these unless they’re from very rich people who can pay well, which is where the current mission comes into play. A small town is under siege by, you guessed it, FUCKING GLINTHAWKS. Talanah intends for her and Aloy to help them despite the town’s inability to pay a contract fee.
Aloy goes to the town, kills the annoying fuckers, and investigates why they’re attacking in the first place. She goes upriver and finds an assload of dead Snapmaws. See, Glinthawks, as I alluded to before, are attracted to downed machines because one of their functions is to harvest them for scrap (the other machine that does this is the ground-based Scrapper). This is one reason Glinthawks are so annoying – like Scrappers, the game will sometimes spawn them out of nowhere when you kill a machine so they try to loot the machine before you do.
Investigating further, Aloy finds a group of guys who explain that they need Snapmaw Hearts to sell to pay off someone, or they’ll lose their farm. The game is supposed to give the player an option: try to drive them off or go get a Snapmaw Heart for them. The mission is bugged, though, so that if you have a Snapmaw Heart in your inventory, the game automatically makes you give it to them.
…which isn’t that big a deal, except these guys are complete assholes. So I loaded a save, sold every Snapmaw Heart I had, went back, and chose to tell them to leave. Unlike Vilgund’s goons from before, these guys aren’t smart, so they attack. Aloy makes short work of them all.
Afterward, Talanah says she’ll sponsor Aloy. Ahsis again tries to say no, but Talanah reminds Ahsis about Avad’s edict and the fact that Aloy saved Avad’s life.
Talanah: “She did save his life, but I’m sure he’ll listen to your prejudices over his own common sense. Would you like to take it up with him?”
Ahsis may be a dick, but he’s not stupid enough to oppose the king, so he relents and allows Aloy to become Talanah’s Thrush.
Deadliest Game
Before we cover this, here’s some background. The strongest machine in the base game is the Thunderjaw. It’s a robot dinosaur armed with laser cannons, homing missiles, and 9001 ways to melee a poor sap’s face into next year. The Hunters’ Lodge has been trying to kill a specific Thunderjaw, named Redmaw, for much of its history, but Redmaw has killed every last hunter who’s gone after it.
Per the rules of the Lodge, the person who kills the strongest machine first becomes Sunhawk. Alternatively, the Sunhawk’s Thrush becomes Sunhawk if the Sunhawk dies. Ahsis rose to his rank via the latter method, because come on, did you think this guy can actually fight machines? What is he going to do, hurl racial slurs at it until it dies?
Specifically, the previous Sunhawk was Talanah’s father, who defended Lodge members who were being sacrificed by the previous king (and died doing so). You can see where this is going. Talanah has beef with Ahsis, and her plan is to take out Redmaw so she can unseat him.
At the time of this mission, nobody knows where Redmaw is, so Talanah has Aloy kill time by sending her after a Stormbird and a Thunderjaw. Stormbirds are…hard. Like Glinthawks, they fly. But, they don’t appear in groups out of nowhere, so I don’t hate them quite as much.
Upon killing a Stormbird and a Thunderjaw, the strongest machines in the base game, Aloy returns to the Lodge and learns that Ahsis and Talanah both figured out where Redmaw is and both set out after it. Aloy follows Talanah’s trail.
Redmaw
Aloy finds Talanah fighting off some mercenaries Ahsis had hired to slow her down. A few headshots later, they were all dead, and the two continue on just in time to see Redmaw brutally smack Ahsis into a rock with its tail.
REDMAW used TAIL WHIP! It’s super effective!
Now yes, as a Pokémon Master, I fully know that Tail Whip doesn’t actually do damage, but I’m keeping this, because how pathetic must Ahsis be if he took fatal damage from a non-damaging move? Okay, fine, fine, we’ll say that REDMAW used IRON TAIL! It’s super effective!
Anyway, Aloy and Talanah then kill Redmaw, which as far as I can tell, is just a regular Thunderjaw. Remember when I said the Lodge members just sit around bragging? This is probably why in all their history, they weren’t able to kill 1 Thunderjaw.
Ahsis poops himself, then dies (I’m not making this up). Talanah becomes Sunhawk and updates the Lodge’s chronicle of Redmaw, noting how she and Aloy killed it and how Ahsis pooped himself before he died. Good riddance to that fucker.
As a side note, the chronicle also notes that Ahsis’s internal organs were destroyed. How do these people know what internal organs are?
Demand and Supply
Two guys, an Oseram and a Carja, are jointly running a merchant stall. They call Aloy over and offer to buy a Longleg Lens from her. Actually, they want a Snapmaw Lens. Actually, they want a Longleg Lens. Actually…one wants a Longleg Lens and the other wants a Snapmaw Lens and they very quickly forget Aloy is even there because they start arguing about it.
The player can choose which lens to sell them, or take the mind-blowing third option of simply selling them both.
Heap of Trouble
In the northeastern part of Carja territory sits a town mostly occupied by Oseram. The lady running the town, Petra, hits on Aloy for a bit before asking her to scavenge some parts from a nearby Old World junkyard, which is currently occupied by Scrappers and bandits. Aloy kills everything in the junkyard and gets the parts Petra wants, but somehow, the bandit clan retaliates by sending waves of guys at the town. I guess most of the bandits were conveniently away when Aloy was killing her way through their camp at the junkyard.
…Actually, scratch that – there’s no convenience involved for the bandits, since the final part of the mission has Petra use the parts Aloy got to upgrade her grenade launcher, and you get to use the grenade launcher to blow up the waves of bandits. Then you blow up a bridge on the bandits. Good times all around. Except for the bandits.
Hammer and Steel
In the same town Petra runs, a guard named Kaeluf asks Aloy desperately for help. It’s kind of confusing, so I’m going to try to explain. The guy who was supposed to be on guard duty is Jorgriz, while he (Kaeluf) was supposed to go kill Behemoths and take parts from them along with a lady named Beladga. But Kaeluf and Jorgriz are total bros, dude, and Kaeluf knows Jorgriz and Beladga like each other (though each is oblivious to the other’s feelings), so he traded places with Jorgriz – Kaeluf is now on guard duty and Jorgriz is out hunting Behemoths with Beladga.
This wouldn’t be a problem except Jorgriz has the directional sense of Ryouga Hibiki from Ranma ½. That, plus the two being distracted by each other, means they missed the Behemoths and are lost out in the wilderness. Kaeluf fearfully begs Aloy for help, because if Petra hears about this, she’s going to do terrible, terrible things to him.
So of course the first thing I did was go tell Petra everything, then I went after Jorgriz and Beladga. Aloy finds the two arguing and quickly loses her patience over the entire matter. She very bluntly tells them that they like each other and goes to kill the Behemoths by herself, adding “matchmaker” to her list of accomplishments. And woe unto those who waste Aloy’s time and wear on her patience. Petra now owes Aloy even more, Kaeluf just went through hell at the hands of Petra, and the two lovebirds are…umm, in a shed somewhere. I guess they got off easy.
Get it? They…got off…let’s move on.
Blood on Stone
Aloy passes a town with a quarry where the foreman reports that something’s been killing the workers. That something turns out to be a Rockbreaker, a giant mole-like machine that tunnels underground. These things are incredibly difficult to fight…unless you find a ridge or elevated place out of their general range. Then they’ll just dig and surface once in awhile to throw rocks at you. Take the opportunity to shoot its legs off, at which point they can no longer dig underground, then finish it.
Maker’s End
We’re back to the main quest with this one. Aloy travels north and mystery man contacts her again and tells her that the lady Aloy has the genetic match to is named Elisabet Sobeck. Aloy enters Maker’s End after killing a bunch of Eclipse goons. She scans a Focus looted off their leader, which turns out to be a bad idea, because HADES sees her through the Focus and realizes she’s still alive.
From here to the end of the mission, it’s just her exploring an ancient building…which turns out to be the headquarters of an Old World corporation named Faro Automated Solutions (FAS). In the 2060s, mega-corporations governed the planet, everything was automated, and people spent much of their time online in a holographically equipped Internet. In particular, the biggest corporation is FAS, which manufactured robots. FAS was founded by a guy known as Ted Faro, and he steered his company into the military sector by building war robots. All the world’s major governments/corporations had fully automated military fleets by the 2060s, with the latest models from the Chariot line of Faro robots.
The Chariot line had these features, all by design.
Now Faro didn’t really intend for anything to go wrong, and, well, in his defense, the only thing that really could go wrong with this was…umm, let’s see…LITERALLY EVERYTHING. Some undefined glitch caused one of these swarms to go out of control, killing everything in their path and absorbing biomatter to fuel themselves to replicate to kill more things, and so on.
In desperation, Faro called upon the most intelligent scientist/engineer in the world, Elisabet Sobeck. Elisabet concluded that the end was inevitable – the robots were self-replicating faster than anyone could destroy them. So, she devised Project Zero Dawn and forced Faro to fund it. Somehow, Project Zero Dawn saved the world – while the Old World fell into ruin, life clearly still exists.
Then Sylens shows up. Well, kind of – he projects a hologram in front of Aloy. Sylens is the mysterious guy who’s been contacting Aloy, and he is an absolute dick. If this game had D&D-type stats, this guy’s empathy score would be negative 9001. He says he’s been trying to figure out what ended the Old World his entire life, but he failed, yet Aloy was able to access all this information in minutes (because of her genetic profile, which allowed access to all of Faro’s systems in the building). Aloy’s more concerned with what her connection to Elisabet is, since because of that connection, the Eclipse and HADES are trying to kill her. Sylens doesn’t give a fuck and thinks she’s being selfish, but I kind of have to agree with Aloy here. Solving mysteries and unpacking history are great, but if someone wanted me dead today, right now, that would likely be higher on my priority list. Sorry, not sorry, Sylens.
Death from the Skies
Just reading that title probably clued you into where this is going. A town is under attack by, of course, FUCKING GLINTHAWKS. Aloy investigates why they’re attacking and finds a guy desperately trying to turn off a device that’s been luring them in. Panicking, he says he found it, brought it back to study it, but then it turned on and attracted machines and now he doesn’t know how to turn it off.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 10: Wordlessly, Aloy gives the guy an “are you cereal?” look, then unceremoniously smashes the thing with her spear.
Aloy investigates some more and finds that Dervahl was planting lures around. I didn’t elaborate on why the Oseram wanted him dead, but this kind of thing is why. Dervahl made a lot of enemies, but thanks to that time Aloy saved all of Meridian, he’s now either in jail or in unimaginable agony. Or both.
The Grave-Hoard
Another main quest mission. Elisabet’s last message to Faro, where she forced him to fund Project Zero Dawn, mentioned she was traveling to U.S. Robot Command, which Sylens identifies as ruins called the Grave-Hoard. So Aloy goes there and learns more backstory: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Aaron Herres, spread a rumor that Project Zero Dawn was building a super-weapon to fight off the Faro robots, but it needed time. So, he initiated Operation Enduring Victory, which involved putting a weapon into the hands of every combat-capable human on the planet and sending them against the robots. The idea was to slow down the robots’ advance enough to give Project Zero Dawn the time it needed to finish…whatever it was that Elisabet wanted to do.
Toward the end, Aloy finds a recording of General Herres – he asks Elisabet to record his final thoughts, where he says that he sent all of humanity to die against the robots. He feels guilty, and wants to record his thoughts for posterity to judge him. Keep this in mind. For now, Elisabet reassures him that his actions made Project Zero Dawn possible, ensuring there would be a posterity, and tells him “at ease.”
Just those words. Those 2 words. They encompass just how badass Elisabet Sobeck was, that she told the highest-ranked military commander in the United States, “at ease.”
Also in this mission, Aloy finds a hologram of Earth. Sylens explains what it is and tells Aloy that Earth isn’t flat, as he assumes she believes. Aloy responds that of course Earth isn’t flat – she’s seen a lunar eclipse, which is the shadow of Earth on the moon, and the shadow is curved, so Earth must be round. Keep in mind we’re in a world where a civilization believes an automated voice in a door is a goddess and another believes the sun will calm machines down if they kill enough people to satisfy it. Aloy saw a lunar eclipse and correctly deduced what it was on her own.
At any rate, the recording revealed the location of Project Zero Dawn – it’s in Bryce Canyon. In other words, it’s right underneath the city of Sunfall, the Shadow Carja capital. And here’s where I start having some issues with the plot. See, Sylens says that Aloy can’t go to Sunfall because the Eclipse there are all wearing Focus devices, so the second they see (and scan) her, they’ll alert HADES to the fact that she’s alive, and he’ll send out another kill order on her. This argument is stupid for a few reasons:
It might still be a bad idea for Aloy to waltz into Sunfall, so Aloy suggests crashing the Focus network so that the Focus devices can’t communicate to one another…but this wouldn’t solve the problem. It would prevent people alerting each other (and HADES) across distances, but like I’ve established, that isn’t the main issue. The only way crashing the network would do anything is if the Eclipse’s Focus devices required the network to function at all, which might be the case (we don’t know how the network works), but the game doesn’t really say that.
At any rate, they decide to crash the network, and Sylens tells Aloy to meet him in a certain location.
Sun and Shadow
Let’s do some side-quests and errands on the way to that location. So there’s this guy named Lahavis and his daughter is missing. Before her disappearance, she was showing symptoms of depression and pessimism, so Lahavis fears the worst and is fearfully looking into a river from a bridge. Aloy passes by, asks him whether he’s searching for something, and he…tells her all of this. This incredibly personal situation. Lahavis tells a random stranger that happened to pass by him. And, of course, he accepts Aloy’s offer to help him.
Aloy investigates and finds the daughter, Elida, on a faraway island. She was having a secret relationship with a guy named Atral, a soldier in the Shadow Carja army. Since Elida lives in regular Carja territory, this is problematic, so they’ve been meeting in secret and signaling to one another via signal fires. Well, Atral lit one, then never showed up.
Aloy continues to investigate and discovers the Shadow Carja found Atral’s signal fire and arrested him for interrogation. Aloy kills the entire outpost they’re holding him in, but is too late – Atral gives Aloy a key to give Elida and dies.
Lahavis, upon Aloy’s return, asks Aloy to talk to Elida for him, since between her father and the stranger she confided in on an island somewhere, Elida’s more likely to open up to the latter. Returning to Elida, Aloy gives her the key (Elida says Atral gave her a lock and kept the key…which…like, am I just reading too much into…never mind), then has to talk her out of suicide. Damn, this got dark fast.
So, let’s see, the newest line on Aloy’s résumé: successful therapist.
A Curious Proposal
An obviously slimy man calling himself Fernund approaches Aloy and signals that he’s heard of her. During the conversation, his eyes drift to Aloy’s…spear. He looks at it, caressing it with his eyes, gazing up and down, up and down the long, hard shaft. How does it work, he asks Aloy, wonder in his voice.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 11, and my favorite one: “You stick the pointy end into the machine.”
Fernund tells Aloy he found a cache of Old World things out in the mesa and asks her to get it for him, as it’s too high for him to reach. Aloy doesn’t trust him, because she’s not stupid, but goes to investigate anyway. Lo and behold, Fernund appears and reveals it was a setup – he’s going to sic goons on her if she doesn’t hand over her magnificent spear.
Aloy: “You’ve obviously heard of me. You know what I’m capable of. What makes you think this will end well for you?”
I had a lot of fun with this mission. Fernund, in his defense, did indeed pick a perfect spot for an ambush. It’s this alcove of sorts against a rock face, with only 2-or-so entrances. So I booby-trapped the hell out of the entrances before triggering the event, meaning Fernund’s goons ran in directly into explosive traps and tripwires. I did say it was the perfect ambush spot. For Aloy.
Aloy tracks Fernund to a village. Seeing Aloy, Fernund flees in terror, but Aloy catches him. He grovels at her feet and begs for mercy, tears flowing down his face, desperation saturating his every sob [slight exaggeration]. He promises he will never cross Aloy again and will tell everyone not to do evil, or something, and Aloy says that he better, and lets him go.
Sun’s Judgment
In this rather simple quest, a merchant woman complains that someone’s been stealing her fruit, so Aloy tracks the thief down and saves him from FUCKING GLINTHAWKS WHY DO THE DEVELOPERS PUT THESE FUCKING THINGS EVERYWHERE. He thanks Aloy, calling her a savage the entire time, then returns to apologize and work for the merchant lady.
Sunstone Rock
Aloy approaches Sunstone Rock, a prison, which is being attacked by a Behemoth. A guard shouts that they don’t have a chance, and his companion asks whether he wants to be the one to report to “Warden Janeva” that they backed down. The first guard enthusiastically says that they should take their chances with the Behemoth. The odds turn out in their favor, by which I mean Aloy is there, so she kills the Behemoth and goes to meet Warden Janeva.
Janeva says that someone smuggled a lure into the place, which attracted the Behemoth. Her guards wonder how, since they searched all the people going into Sunstone Rock, and, well, I’ll let you fill in the crack. I mean hole. No, wait, I mean blank.
…Anyway, Janeva says three prisoners escaped and asks Aloy to go kill them. Not capture. Kill. The first one is this crazy chick who rejoins her bandit camp, except I already cleared out that camp, so she just stands on a prominent ridge in the camp and yells at her nonexistent bandit goons before Aloy shoots a few arrows into her head. The second is a smuggler guy who tries to rejoin his gang, but the gang instead ties him up and beats him to near death before Aloy kills the gang and watches him die.
The third is this super annoying guy who sets up a bunch of easily-disabled explosive traps around a ravine and taunts Aloy as she traverses the ravine to get to him. Once she does, he blows himself up.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 12: “I guess he died doing what he loved.”
To Curse the Darkness
Okay, so Aloy goes to that place Sylens indicated they meet to crash the Focus network. Along the way:
Smart-ass Aloy moment 13: “Crash the Eclipse Focus network, he said. So how are we going to do that? Oh wait, I forgot. We won’t. I do all the dangerous stuff. You just listen in.”
At the indicated location, Sylens tells Aloy that she’s at the Eclipse main base’s back entrance. He wants her to sneak in and destroy a module, which will crash the network. She reaches the module and Sylens tells her to open it, but when she tries, it electrocutes her, getting HADES’s attention. See, HADES itself resides in a computer core, which is inside the Eclipse main base, information Sylens didn’t bother to tell Aloy. Remember, the reason Sylens said to infiltrate the base is to prevent the Eclipse from notifying HADES that Aloy is still alive. I already explained why that makes no sense, but even if we ran with it, Sylens sending Aloy to HADES in an effort to hide her from HADES is the stupidest plan I’ve seen in a long while.
Moreover, Aloy doesn’t need to open the module, because she destroys it by simply stabbing it with her spear. So if Aloy had gotten to the module and Sylens had simply said to stab it, Aloy wouldn’t have gotten electrocuted and might actually have gotten out of there without attracting attention. But because Sylens is a dumbass, the entire base now knows she’s there and the game spawns an endless wave of enemies on Aloy while she frantically escapes.
Deep Secrets of the Earth
One thing that did go well – the Focus network is down. Aloy enters Sunfall and nobody recognizes her. I’ll discuss this a bit more at length later, but for now, she enters the Zero Dawn facility, but needs to vent a room since the door is jammed. The venting attracts attention, so periodically in the facility she needs to fight off Kestrels descending to investigate. How they are able to get inside – this is an Old World facility, reinforced properly, with only one main entrance that is locked to Aloy’s genetic makeup – is…never explained.
Anyway, this is Project Zero Dawn:
See, Elisabet knew the end of all life was inevitable. Her goal was to allow life to end, meaning the Faro robots would go dormant due to lack of fuel, then have GAIA shut down the robots and restore life anew. This also reveals that most of the machines Aloy faces – for instance the Tramplers, the Snapmaws, the FUCKING GLINTHAWKS – are machines constructed by HEPHAESTUS, whereas Corruptors and Deathbringers are unearthed Faro robots.
HADES is one of GAIA’s sub-functions, as you can surmise if you know Greek and Roman myth. Its purpose was to destroy GAIA’s new biosphere if it failed so that GAIA could try again, which doesn’t quite explain why it wants Aloy dead, so stay tuned.
After finding this, Aloy finds and downloads the Alpha registry that will allow her to enter that facility in the Nora sacred mountain (remember the corrupted one, from way back). After this is my least favorite plot part of the game, because Helis shows up, throws a bomb into the room, and knocks out Aloy.
The Terror of the Sun
Aloy awakens in a cage above the Sun Ring (think a Colosseum-type arena) in Sunfall. All her equipment and Focus are in and on a box next to the cage, out of reach. Helis appears and monologues, wondering why he hesitated to kill Aloy back during the Proving. In other words, the game itself acknowledges that Helis’s actions were stupid. Helis concludes that it was destiny – he was meant to let her go, so he could capture her now, so he could sacrifice her to the sun in the Sun Ring. Yeah, right. He then crushes her Focus, informs her that he sent Eclipse forces into the Nora lands to kill everyone as revenge for all the stuff she did, and releases her from the cage down into the ring, where Corruptors corrupt a Behemoth and sic it on Aloy.
I’ll outline what happens, then point out a few things. Aloy’s equipment is all in that box next to the cage, which is above the ring. So Aloy leads the Behemoth to crash into the pillars holding the platform up, sending the equipment box crashing into the ring. Aloy retrieves her stuff, equips herself, and kills the Behemoth. Sylens then appears (in person) to rescue her, which likely wasn’t necessary, but whatever. The look on Helis’s face is priceless.
I hate this sequence plot-wise. The writers again did something that I hate – let the villain capture the heroine and disarm her, but leave ALL her stuff in one, conveniently accessible location for her to get it all back. The writers want the villain to have some sort of victory, but in doing so, need to contrive ways for the heroine to get out of it. I also hate sequences where you lose all your stuff in general.
A better way to do this sequence would be to have Helis send Eclipse at Aloy en masse, like what happened after she crashed the network. Have a stray arrow or something take out her Focus as she flees, and then have her flee into the Sun Ring. Helis then appears, taunts her, and sics the corrupted Behemoth on her as normal. We don’t need Aloy to lose her equipment and then get it all back and we get to fight the Behemoth without Aloy’s Focus.
Why is that last part important? It illustrates that Aloy doesn’t actually need her Focus to fight machines, just like she doesn’t need it to investigate places and track people. Aloy kills a corrupted Behemoth in close quarters without it. Contrast this to the Eclipse. Aloy crashed their Focus network – let’s assume this rendered all their devices non-functional – and this was such a huge blow to the Eclipse that Helis felt the need to try genocide as retaliation. Moreover, remember how this allowed Aloy to walk into the capital of the Shadow Carja without anyone recognizing her? Note that Aloy is the only person in the entire game with red hair, but the Shadow Carja can’t recognize her without a Focus to scan and identify her. These guys are dependent on the Focus. Aloy isn’t.
Anyway, her losing the Focus doesn’t amount to anything immediately, since Sylens reveals that he had his own Focus and downloaded everything from Aloy’s Focus onto it while he was monitoring her, so he gives her the new Focus and nothing changes gameplay-wise. He also gives Aloy a suit of Shadow Stalwart armor, the same armor the Kestrels wear, to use as a disguise in case she wants to return to Sunfall. Note that the Kestrel armor doesn’t cover Aloy’s red hair, driving the point home again that the Shadow Carja are complete morons.
If you’re wondering why the hell she’d want to return to Sunfall…stay tuned. For now…
The Heart of the Nora
Aloy rushes back to Nora land to fight off the Eclipse forces that Helis told her about. I studied this part of the game in detail, since it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Recall that the Shadow Carja capital, where the Eclipse is based, is to the far west. The Nora Sacred Land is in the far east. The regular Carja, and Meridian, are between them, not to mention the forts at the border between Carja and Nora lands. So it’s very unlikely Helis’s Eclipse forces attacked from Eclipse territory. He must have sent messengers to some location closer to the Sacred Land, then had forces there attack.
So where is this location? I fast-traveled to the Carja-Nora border, but found no invading army and the area looks completely fine. In fact, the entirety of Nora land except for the Main Embrace Gate and east-to-southeast regions of the Embrace are completely untouched. For reference, here’s the official map of the game, where I’ve drawn a few crude borders. The leftmost red line separates the Shadow Carja from the rest of the Carja. The other red line separates Carja and Nora territories. The yellow line marks the wall separating the Embrace from the rest of Nora land. The red shading shows the area hit by Helis’s Eclipse army.
A chance encounter
Sometime in 2019, I was out exploring the shopping centers around my apartment complex when I came across an electronics store. One of the TVs inside was showcasing HZD and I remember it piquing my interest. Maybe it were the graphics – absolutely beautiful depictions of lush outdoor locales. Or maybe it were the main character using a bow and arrows to kill a robot animal. I don’t know. It made an impression. I got home, looked up the game, and a year later, I bought it on Steam. It definitely lived up to expectations – the game’s incredible both graphically and plot-wise. I’ll note, like many others have, that HZD isn’t part of some other franchise. With the large number of sequels and spin-offs saturating the video game industry nowadays, with everyone scared to take risks, having something completely new – and this great – really drove this game up on my list.
4 annoying flaws
HZD isn’t perfect, of course, and I’ll point out 4 things that bothered me. Only 3 of these things affected my ranking of the game, which is to say they almost brought this game down to an A. The last one’s a personal nitpick.
First? The gameplay can be…annoying. I play these games stealthily. I find it so satisfying to clear out an entire bandit camp where none of them even knew what was going on until they were dead. Unfortunately, HZD’s stealth mechanics aren’t the best. So let’s say you shoot a bandit. In standard video game fashion, he survives, even if said shot delivered a hard-point metal-tipped arrow directly into his head. A yellow mark will appear over his head, meaning he’s now alerted. He’ll go to where you first shot him to investigate. So far, so good.
Let’s say after you shot that enemy, you moved to another location. He went to your first location, so he still doesn’t know where you are because you’ve moved. But let’s say you shoot him again while he’s still alerted. Damaging an enemy while he’s alerted makes him psychically lock onto you immediately, even if there’s little to no way he can know where you are. And because he’s “found” you, he’ll also alert all his companions, so now everyone can zero in on you regardless of where you go or whether you’re in stealth mode or not. It’s very annoying. Rather than being able to move from cover to cover, using the environment to hide you, stealth play involves shooting an enemy, moving somewhere out of sight, waiting until the enemy stops being alerted, shooting him again, re-hiding, etc.
It gets more ridiculous. Let’s say you set up a mine. So you shoot a guy, he walks out to investigate, and he steps on the mine. It explodes, doing damage. Well, the game counts that as a second hit while the enemy is alerted, meaning the enemy and all his buddies can now go right to you even if you were completely hidden when the mine went off.
Let’s say you’re fighting a machine with Blaze canisters on its back. Shooting Blaze with a fire arrow will cause it to explode after a short delay. So the arrow hitting the machine alerts it and the explosion counts as the second hit. Even if you’re completely hidden and not where you shot the fire arrow in the first place, the explosion grants the machine and all its friends magical psychic abilities and they’ll now all know exactly where you are.
Now one might argue that you can or should play the game as a regular action/combat game. No stealth. Toe-to-toe fights. Dodge rolling, jumping, the works. First of all, a game like this forcing a certain playstyle is bad form. Second, let’s think about things in-universe. We’ve got Aloy, a teenage girl with a bow, arrows, a spear, slings, and rudimentary explosives. She’s fighting packs of robot animals, some with laser cannons and homing missiles and cloaking and guns. If she can just openly march up to them and kill them, that ruins the immersion. You try fighting, say, a guy in a tank with medieval weaponry and see how far you get. Can you win? Maybe, if you scout the terrain, set up traps, devise a strategy, and generally keep out of sight. If you walked right up to it, though? Either you lose, which is utterly unsurprising; or you win, in which case it wouldn’t be so out of line to question whether tanks are any sort of credible weapon if a lone human with inferior technology could destroy it in open combat. Do you consider the mechs in Final Fantasy XIII a threat? Doubt it, since one of the protagonists can literally punch them to death barehanded.
…which brings me to some of the boss encounters. The boss encounters are generally not stealth-able. Bosses can, you guessed it, lock on to Aloy regardless of line-of-sight or if she’s in stealth. In particular, on several occasions, you fight Deathbringers, giant mechs loaded to the brim with machine guns and rocket launchers. And you win. A giant, mobile armory more advanced than what we have now in real life, and it loses in open combat to a teenage girl with weaponry only slightly more advanced than you’d find in the 1400s. Maybe I’m biased, but allowing us to stealth everything would’ve made more sense, and this is coming from a guy who finds Aloy’s feats throughout the game overwhelmingly badass.
The other annoying parts of the game are the parkour segments. Think Mirror’s Edge – Aloy will automatically reach out to grab ropes, ledges, etc. to climb structures. For the most part, the mechanics work without a hitch and Aloy pretty much ascends structures automatically. But a small amount of the time, you’ll actually have to input manual jumps to something grabbable – and in true Mirror’s Edge fashion, Aloy will fail to grab whatever she was supposed to grab and fall to her death. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s very annoying when it does. Moreover, Aloy will only grab onto certain things and there’s not much differentiating a ledge she’ll grab onto versus a ledge she won’t.
Third gripe: some specific parts of the plot. I’ll defer this to a subsequent section where I talk at length about the plot (most of it is absolutely fantastic).
And here’s the personal nitpick: the bows. There are 3 kinds of bows in the game: hunter, war, and sharpshot bows. Each bow shoots different kinds of arrows, so for example, if you want to shoot an ice arrow, you need a war bow. This is ridiculous. Bows aren’t guns – while, say, a pistol can’t shoot shotgun shells, any bow can shoot any arrow given the length of the arrow is compatible with the draw length of the bow. These lengths, in turn, depend on the archer. At full draw, the head of the arrow should be a bit past the bow and the tail should be around the corner of the mouth or the base of the jaw. Since Aloy is the person using all the bows, we can assume all the bows and arrows are of the same length, meaning there shouldn’t be a reason that she needs 3 different kinds of bows to shoot different arrows.
From a practical perspective, it’s pretty easy to carry different kinds of firearms around. For instance, someone could carry a pistol, a shotgun, and a machine gun at the same time with little issue. But 3 bows? For reference, I have a bow in real life, and when strung, it’s about 180 cm long – roughly my full height. You expect someone to carry 3 of those? I dealt with this by implementing a personal rule that I would only use the hunter bow and never touch the war or sharpshot bows.
The Chronicle of Aloy, Anointed of the Goddess
She hates it when people call her the Anointed.
Aloy is a very RPG-protagonist character, meaning everyone in the world asks her for help in everything and she pretty much single-handedly solves all their problems, both big and small. It’s a pretty old and cliché trope, but the game unabashedly embraces it and it works well. Case in point: in the final battle, a guy tells Aloy that they sent messengers to ask for aid defending the city and many of them volunteered to come just because they knew Aloy was there. At the beginning of the game, I found Aloy to be a somewhat blank protagonist, but the sheer amount of badassery she executes throughout the game, coupled with her dry wit and how NPCs of the world respond to her, eventually made me really like her.
So for this shrine, I have decided to outline every last thing she has done over the course of Horizon Zero Dawn – a chronicle of just how single-handed an RPG protagonist can get. Now before I continue, of course there are going to be the most massive spoilers ahead, but I just want to say that if there is any chance you’ll play this game, stop reading and go play it. I really give the game kudos for how it presents its backstory. You find datapoints – journal recordings, news articles, conversations – and slowly piece things together. It’s a difficult approach to tell a story like this: indirectly, with holes. As a writer, you’re going to need to trust your audience to infer. You’re going to need to deal with the fact that, in the early parts of the plot, your audience is going to be confused and lost. Some games decide this is too hard and give a straightforward lore dump, but HZD goes all in with this approach and does it well.
In particular, a large chunk of the datapoints you find have nothing to do with the main backstory. One set of recordings detail a regular guy telling his personal story about how his dad died due to corporate politics, how his mom struggled to make ends meet, how he sunk to delinquency, how he hated his stepdad, how he woke up and realized how much his mom cared and sacrificed for him, how his mom died, and how he decided that he was going to record his story – not a grandiose, large-scale story through the stars, but a small, personal story down to Earth. It’s a touching, tragic story that fleshes out the setting of the game’s backstory. There are the major characters and the major plot points, but Earth has literally billions of other people living all sorts of non-plot-critical lives.
So I really encourage you to experience this yourself. The game also has New Game Plus, meaning you can go through the game again and this time, understand all the datapoints that much better because you now have the context.
Alright. Still here? Let’s begin with the game’s setting.
A bleak future
The denizens of the game don’t use our calendar, because sometime in their past, civilization completely fell. That said, for context, HZD takes place in modern-day Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. The year is the 3030s. While some small animals exist – the biggest is the boar – most of the non-human lifeforms in the world are machine animals. We’ve got machine horses, machine deer, etc. The humans don’t know what these things are, so they hunt them for parts, just like how they hunt normal animals.
Humanity lives in primitive tribes. In-game, we see a Native-American-esque tribe (the Nora), a somewhat more advanced tribe that worships the sun (the Carja), a technologically savvy tribe whose crowning achievements were an elevator and a grenade launcher (the Oseram), and an Inuit-esque tribe (the Banuk).
About 20 years before the game’s events, the machine animals became more aggressive and new machine animals began appearing, modeled after sabretooth cats and dinosaurs and armed with advanced weaponry such as laser cannons. The humans call this the Derangement and attempt to concoct explanations. The Carja, in particular, decide that the sun is angry or something, so their king starts sending raiding parties throughout the lands to kidnap people to sacrifice to the sun.
At around the time the Derangement began, an infant girl appears out of nowhere in the Nora’s sacred mountain (which is modern-day Pike’s Peak). The 3 High Matriarchs of the Nora don’t know what to do – one thinks she’s holy because they found her inside the sacred mountain, another thinks she’s evil because…reasons, and the third just doesn’t know. So, they give her to Rost, an outcast, to raise, and he names her Aloy. Rost doesn’t mind being an outcast, though he himself never divulges why he’s outcast from the tribe, but Aloy is an outcast for no fault of her own, so she resolves to demand an explanation from the High Matriarchs. To do so, Rost explains that if she wins the Nora Proving ritual, she’ll be accepted into the tribe and can ask the High Matriarchs any one favor. This becomes Aloy’s first goal.
At the age of 6, Aloy finds a small triangular device in some Old World ruins. This thing is called a Focus and it can scan its surroundings to give the wearer some sort of augmented reality interface. In-game, you use it to scan enemies and find their weaknesses, or scan areas to reveal clues, or interface with Old World technology (before the fall of the previous civilization).
At the age of 18, Aloy is ready for the Proving and the game proper begins.
Odd Grata
Odd Grata is a very old lady who never talks except for praying to the Nora goddess. Aloy visits her and Grata prays to the goddess to help her retrieve her prayer beads, which are atop this mountain. How Grata got to the top of the mountain to leave her beads there in the first place, I don’t know. Anyway, Aloy hears this, retrieves the beads, and returns them to Grata. Grata, as is standard for her, doesn’t acknowledge Aloy, but instead thanks the goddess, much to Aloy’s annoyance.
The ostensible purpose of this quest is to introduce the player to the game’s parkour mechanics, since the quest involves Aloy climbing a mountain. It’s rather straightforward stuff, but there’s a fridge logic moment that I’ll get to later.
In Her Mother’s Footsteps
Aloy comes across a wounded man. Now by Nora law, nobody is allowed to talk to outcasts and outcasts aren’t allow to talk to anyone (Rost and Aloy are an exception, as the High Matriarchs told Rost to raise Aloy, so they’re allowed to talk to each other). The man is so desperate for help that he breaks the law and tells Aloy that he lost his late wife’s spear fighting a machine and broke his leg. His daughter went after the machine by herself and he wants to save her, but, well, he has a broken leg.
This side-quest illustrates an important point: Aloy has a lot of resentment toward the Nora for treating her as an outcast for the crime of “was born.” She helps this guy anyway, saving his daughter and getting the spear back.
The Forgotten
Aloy comes across a lady who is looking for her brother Brom, who is voiced by Tommy Wiseau. Now Brom has schizophrenia, but remember, the humans of the game have no knowledge of this stuff, so they think he’s being possessed by the souls of the damned or something. While humans have lost knowledge, they haven’t lost their penchant for dickery, so people constantly picked on Brom, and one day Brom snapped and killed one of them in self-defense. He was made an outcast for 10 years, but didn’t return after his sentence was up.
Long story short: Aloy finds Brom, who says he doesn’t want to go home because he’s afraid he’ll attack his sister. The player can choose to let him go or convince him to allow his sister to keep watch over him while he lives in a cave somewhere.
The important thing to note for this quest is how mental illness is still a thing in the future, but people have entirely no idea how to deal with it. In real life, this was the case in our history until people slowly grew to understand it better, a process that is still going on now. Whatever happened to delete the knowledge humanity accrued is having massive repercussions all over, and this is one of them: many, many steps backward on how to deal with mental health.
The Point of the Spear
Here’s the first main quest of the game. Rost brings Aloy outside the Embrace, which is the Nora heartland (the area immediately surrounding Pike’s Peak). He intends for her to fight a Sawtooth, one of the new machines far more dangerous compared to the other ones. Sawtooths are modeled from sabretooth cats, which you can imagine are more dangerous compared to, say, deer. Sawtooths are also hilariously weak to fire, so this isn’t an entirely difficult fight.
Rost tells Aloy that the point of this (the point of wielding a spear) is to protect the tribe, which Aloy will join once she wins the Proving. Aloy retorts that she can’t serve the tribe that’s shunned her for no reason her entire life, but she does take the lesson to heart to fight for a cause greater than herself.
Mother’s Heart
In this main quest, Aloy wanders the capital of the Nora lands, Mother’s Heart, the night before the Proving. By Nora law, since she’s taking part in the Proving, she’s allowed into the village and can talk to people. Most of the people treat her normally, but a select few show extreme prejudice toward her for being an outcast. One is Resh, a warrior guy, and another is Bast, a guy who once threw rocks at 6-year-old Aloy for no reason except he’s a dickwad.
Here’s a good time to begin a new segment of this shrine I like to call “Smart-ass Aloy moments.”
Smart-ass Aloy moment 1: Resh insults her as she’s entering the lodge all the Proving candidates are staying in the night before the event. Aloy’s response: “Oh, this is the bed-house? With you standing guard, I figured it was the latrine.”
Smart-ass Aloy moment 2: everything she says to shut down Bast. A bit of a side note: when Bast throws the rock at 6-year-old Aloy, in a non-NG+ playthrough the player can choose how to react. Bast picks up a second rock, throws it at Aloy, and Aloy catches it easily (note this is before Rost really teaches her how to fight, showing just how badass Aloy is). Bast picks up a third rock and Aloy can (1) throw the rock at Bast’s head; (2) throw the rock at Bast’s rock, knocking it out of his hand; or (3) drop the rock and leave. However much I wanted to pick the first choice, I figured it would lead to complications and the second choice is just so much more badass. Aloy brings it up in this scene and Bast tries to brush it off with some hot air bravado, saying he’ll surprise Aloy at the Proving, to which Aloy responds, “Oh, are you going to shut your mouth? Because that would be a surprise.”
Aloy also meets a few non-Nora people here. The Carja have sent a delegation to visit the Nora. Recall that the Carja Sun-King raided other lands, the Nora’s included, for people to kidnap and sacrifice. Very recently, his son Avad decided to put an end to this and raised an army, overthrowing and killing the king. The old regime’s remnants dubbed themselves the Shadow Carja and fled west to Sunfall, which is in modern-day Bryce Canyon. The new regime is sending people around to broker peace.
There are 3 notable members of the Carja delegation. One is a priest (in their sun-worshipping religion), who tries to talk before the Nora begin throwing fruit at him. Later on he tells Aloy that he thought they were throwing rocks rather than fruit, leading to…
Smart-ass Aloy moment 3: “Rocks hit harder. You’d notice.”
The military leader guarding the delegation is a fellow named Erend. Erend is an Oseram, so he talks to the Nora and calms them down because they’re more willing to hear a non-Carja out. Erend’s role here is to provide backstory about the Carja civil war, which he fought in – when Avad began his revolt, he forged an alliance between his own troops and Oseram forces under Erend’s sister Ersa. Ersa now commands Avad’s Vanguard, his best troops.
Erend is also the first of many, many people to hit on Aloy. Aloy responds with complete obliviousness.
The third important person is a guy named Olin, whose ostensible purpose is to act as a guide to the delegation, which is baffling because Olin is also an Oseram, so why would he know Nora lands? Anyway, Aloy notices Olin because Olin is also wearing a Focus, so she goes to talk to him. At that moment, Olin’s Focus freaks out and he becomes rather standoffish before fleeing.
The Proving
Aloy wins the Proving despite Resh and Bast attempting to sabotage her, but then mysterious goons with a machine gun show up and begin killing the candidates en masse. Aloy fights them off and loots a Focus off one of the goons, but then their leader Helis shows up, incapacitates Aloy, and holds a knife to her throat, intending to kill her. Rost appears to defend Aloy, but Helis fatally stabs him. Helis, instead of finishing what he was doing, walks off and orders his men to blow up the entire area with barrels of explosives. Rost saves Aloy by pushing her off the cliff they’re on before the barrels all explode.
This bugged me. Why do writers do this? Villains win and then just let the hero go. Wouldn’t a better way to do this sequence be to have Rost interrupt Helis killing Aloy, then have Rost push Aloy off the cliff before Helis kills him? It would lead to the same result without Helis letting Aloy go for no reason.
Aloy awakens inside the Nora sacred mountain. Teersa, the High Matriarch who believes Aloy is holy, appears and tells Aloy she brought her unconscious body inside so she could “be with her mother.” To explain, Teersa brings her to where they first found infant Aloy…in front of a large Old World door.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 4: “This isn’t a goddess. It’s a door.”
Why the Nora believe it to be a goddess becomes clear: Aloy steps in front of the door and an automated voice appears, saying, “Hold for identi-scan.” Yes, the Nora believe that the door’s automated voice is the voice of a goddess. Anyway, the door scans Aloy, recognizes her with a 99.47% genetic match, but then says that some registry is corrupted and the door remains locked.
Aloy also looks at the Focus she looted off the Proving attackers. Scanning the Focus with her own Focus reveals that the attackers were there specifically to kill her because she looks like some other lady the attackers apparently know (the lady she has a 99.47% genetic match with). Moreover, they were alerted to her existence because they saw her through Olin’s Focus.
The Nora tribe, meanwhile, didn’t take kindly to random guys killing their people, so they sent a War Party under their War-chief after the killers (eventually, we’ll learn these guys are called the Eclipse, so I’ll just call them that). Teersa reports that half the War Party got ambushed by machines, which the Eclipse were somehow able to take control of using “a demon.” So the other High Matriarchs decide that their goddess is angry with them for some reason and are organizing the tribe to sing for forgiveness. Teersa has a slightly better plan: have Aloy go and figure everything out. By herself.
On the way out of Nora land, Aloy fights off a Corruptor, the “demon” that could take control of machines. Corruptors are noticeably different compared to the other machines seen thus far. For one thing, they don’t resemble any animal, and their ability to commandeer other machines is new.
The War-chief’s Trail and Revenge of the Nora
These quests see Aloy find the War Party Teersa mentioned (the surviving half, anyway). They then attack the Eclipse in their 3 camps and main base, and by “they,” I mean Aloy does it more-or-less single-handedly. If you’re wondering how these guys were able to set up camps and a base in Nora territory, it’s because the Nora forbid anyone from going into Old World ruins, and the Eclipse holed themselves up in the ruins of Denver.
A side note about the final battle in this quest chain: Aloy enters the base and her goal is to shoot a storehouse of Blaze, which will make it explode and blow a hole in the wall, allowing the War Party to rush in (something Aloy has to convince them to do, since it’s forbidden). I thought I could just clear the camp myself, so I snuck around and stealth-killed like 30 guys before I realized they were respawning.
Shortage of Supplies
If you visit War-chief Sona after killing the Eclipse invaders, she’ll tell Aloy they’re low on supplies and ask her to get some and deliver them to outposts. Remember when I said everyone’s solution to everything in the game is Aloy? I meant it. Everything. Even things Sona or pretty much any of her subordinates should be able to do themselves.
Insult to Injury
The healers of the Nora are running out of herbs caring for the wounded from the Eclipse attacks, so one asks Aloy to get some from their caches. This is actually justified, as the Nora warriors are all either in the War Party or are wounded. Aloy goes to the caches but finds them empty except for some shards (money), so the healers send her to a guy named Jun who has some supplies. Aloy finds Jun locked in his own house and Jun claims some outcasts robbed him.
Aloy finds the outcasts, who say that they entered Jun’s house to ask him for healing supplies, but he got terrified because they’re outcasts, so he cowered in the corner and refused to speak to them. They agree to give Aloy most of the supplies back and she returns to Jun. Jun realizes Aloy used to be an outcast and spews some prejudice at her, whereupon she chews him out and tells him to deliver the recovered healing supplies to the healers “or [she’ll] be back.” He wisely obeys.
This quest shows that Aloy never forgets her roots. Just because she’s no longer an outcast doesn’t mean she starts shunning outcasts in accordance with Nora law. Aloy’s Neutral Good, not Lawful Good.
Bandit camps and Cause for Concern: Farewell
Aloy encounters a guy named Nil, who goes around killing bandits for sport. He loves killing, you see, but he doesn’t want to kill innocent people (for one, it’s illegal) and he doesn’t want to kill animals because he’d be wasting their bodies as he’s not eating them or making clothes out of them. Bandits, though? Nobody cares if he kills them.
Nil invites Aloy to clear out bandit camps throughout the world. These are probably my favorite parts of the game, like I talked about before. Once you clear out all the camps, Nil is sad because there’re no more bandits to kill – he says that bandits are avoiding the region because they heard that the bandits in the region were all mysteriously massacred. To sate his…whatever the hell he has, he challenges Aloy to a duel to the death.
You can accept and kill him, or refuse, which he takes as a…romantic rejection? This guy’s weird. Anyway, if you spare him, he shows up in the final battle, which is a gigantic battle and something he’d absolutely love. I also love killing bandits, so having Aloy kill Nil seems oddly hypocritical. I let Nil live.
The point of this is as follows: there are 7 bandit camps in the game spread through 3 modern-day states and Aloy kills every single last bandit in all of them by herself (you can have Nil help you, but I didn’t). The way I did it, each of them died before they even laid eyes on Aloy. I’d like to imagine the bandits, as they began finding their comrades’ bodies, started to panic like those goons in Batman Begins when Batman captures Falcone. They ran around, gripped by terror, at the verge of tears and bowel failure, as they knew their time had come. They fell to their knees, begging their unseen assailant for mercy, wailing to the night sky.
Aloy granted them their wish. She mercy-killed them. All of them.
…Look, to be honest, dying to an unseen arrow from the shadows is probably a hell of a lot better than whatever Nil does. Let’s move on.
Sanctuary
A Nora hunter was with his team when they got ambushed and his team fled inadvertently into some ruins. The hunter asks Aloy to save them. Aloy does so and the hunter asks Aloy not to tell anyone they were in the ruins, because remember, Nora law says they’re forbidden for some reason.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 5: “Relax. The Matriarchs are up singing the ‘Hymn of Atonement.’ I think you’re safe.”
The guy comically misses the point and is relieved, thinking that means the hymn atones for their crime of stumbling into the ruins. Again we see that Aloy doesn’t forget her roots and discards Nora law when she disagrees with it.
A Daughter’s Vengeance
Aloy hears a guy praying for his sister. Upon inquiry, the guy says that a Carja captain by the name of Zaid killed his father during those raids under the previous Sun-King. His sister recently decided she was going to exact revenge, so she left Nora lands to go kill Zaid.
Since Aloy is going to leave Nora lands herself on her quest, she decides to look for the guy’s sister, Nakoa. Later on, Aloy arrives at the Nora/Carja border, where there’s a fort, and finds Zaid. Zaid claims that he didn’t commit any of the atrocities attributed to him and, after subduing Nakoa, he let her go.
Aloy doesn’t buy it because Aloy isn’t stupid. She eventually finds Nakoa, imprisoned in a secret Carja camp run by, you guessed it, Zaid. Zaid appears and boasts that he let her go so he could capture her afterward and sell her into slavery. He intends to do the same to Aloy, except he bit off way more than he could chew this time around, as Aloy massacres the entire slaver camp plus Zaid’s guards. Nakoa finally gets her revenge by impaling Zaid with a spear. I then picked up Zaid’s grenade launcher and emptied it into his sad, pathetic corpse.
Luck of the Hunt
Some guy has lost his lucky ring. Aloy finds it for him – a boar tried to swallow it and choked to death. Keep this in mind as you read on and learn about all the things Aloy will do. Remember when I said everyone’s solution to everything in the game is Aloy? I meant it. Everything. Not just big things. Even “please find my ring I lost it while chasing a boar.”
Underequipped
Some Carja merchants are out in the middle of the wilderness getting attacked by machines. They were supposed to have explosive arrows (which don’t exist in the game), but someone switched the arrows with a box filled with wood shafts. Thus shafted, the merchants couldn’t really defend themselves, so they ask Aloy for help as she’s passing by. Aloy kills several waves of machines by herself and hunts down the guy who switched the boxes. That guy promptly gets shot by a Stalker, and…
I hate Stalkers. These things can cloak, are very agile, and shoot darts at you for high damage. There’s only one machine I hate more than these things, and we’ll get to the LARGE ABUNDANCE OF THOSE FUCKERS later on.
This is likely the first time the player helps a non-Nora group. Though the Carja are more technologically advanced, they clearly still need to rely on Aloy to do everything for them.
A Seeker at the Gates
Back to the main quest, Aloy exits Nora land and finds a Corruptor attacking the Carja at the border. She kills the Corruptor and the guards praise the sun, to which we get…
Smart-ass Aloy moment 6: “It wasn’t the sun risking its ass down here.”
Now that Aloy is in Carja territory, she asks around about Olin, who’s her main target. The guy in charge at the border fort tells Aloy that Olin likely went to the Carja capital of Meridian. So that’s her next main quest destination.
To Old Acquaintance
An Oseram lady asks Aloy to find her husband. She left Oseram territory awhile back and the “ealdormen” of the Oseram didn’t like that, because they’re sexist and think women should stay in the kitchen. Her husband didn’t follow her, but eventually decided sexism isn’t cool and set out after her…but then disappeared.
It turns out he got ambushed by Tramplers, machine bulls. Tramplers are fun to kill. They have this gigantic thing where the udders would be if they were cows. Shoot that and it explodes, putting a permanent burning state on the Trampler, meaning it’ll take damage-over-time until it dies.
Anyway, the guy in question is trapped on a hill until Aloy kills the Tramplers. He then asks her to retrieve his alcohol bottles from where the Tramplers were, because even in the far future, people love getting drunk. Why doesn’t he go get them himself even though Aloy killed all the Tramplers? If you’re asking this, you haven’t been paying attention.
In Foreign Lands
The captain in charge at the border fort between Carja and Nora lands tells Aloy that some Carja soldiers were left behind in Nora lands. He was going to send one of his men (the guy next to him, named Walid) to get them, but the Nora are still uneasy about allowing Carja into their territory. So he asks Aloy to find them, upon which Walid says, “Please say yes.”
Aloy agrees, because RPG protagonist, and discovers the squad was all dead except for a guy named Lakhir, who lost his armor and weapons and is therefore naked and singing loudly on a rock in the middle of a lake surrounded by Snapmaws (machine alligators…or crocodiles?). Aloy saves him and returns to the captain, who asks why Lakhir was so reluctant to talk about what happened.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 7: “He…has a lovely singing voice?” The captain’s response is also pretty funny: “That’s a capital lie if I’ve ever heard one.”
The City of the Sun, part I
Aloy makes it to Meridian and sees the Vanguard blocking the entrance because, right before she arrived, Ersa was murdered. A grieving and drunk Erend greets Aloy, commands his men to let her go as she pleases, and asks what she’s doing in Meridian. Aloy tells him to bring her to Olin’s house (Olin himself isn’t there), where she finds a recording that reveals Helis and the Eclipse are holding Olin’s wife and daughter hostage. She also finds a map that shows where Olin is.
She prepares to set off after Olin, but Erend stops her and asks how she saw that Helis is holding Olin’s family. Remember, Aloy needs her Focus to interface with Old World technology, which the recording is. Erend, without a Focus, has no way of seeing it. Aloy explains her Focus allows her to see normally invisible things, and Erend asks Aloy to help him find Ersa’s killer(s).
The Field of the Fallen
Erend brings Aloy to the site of the murder and Aloy finds rather obvious cart tracks leading away from it. Following the tracks, they find some Oseram, who attack them. What follows (after Aloy kills her ambushers) is one of my favorite sequences in the game that answers a rather logical question.
Throughout the game, some quests will require Aloy to do some detective work. Usually, this works by going to a place, scanning the place with the Focus, and examining what the Focus highlights. The question then becomes: is Aloy dependent on her Focus?
The answer is no – the Focus is more a gameplay mechanic to help the player. Let’s say you’re on a quest where you need to track someone. Here, for example, you need to follow tracks from the place Erend believes the murder happened to the place where the Oseram ambush them. The Focus will highlight the path in purple, which is rather easy for the player to follow, as opposed to the player having to scour the pixels that make up the ground for footprints or blood splotches. Aloy would be able to follow that stuff just fine, Focus or no.
Still unconvinced? Aloy now investigates the area. From a gameplay perspective, this means you use the Focus, and it highlights some smashed rocks, a bloody rock, some cut strips of leather, some weapons, and a tripod. There’s no logical explanation in-universe for why the Focus would pick up these things – why these specific rocks and not the many, many other rocks everywhere else? More likely, Aloy herself notes these things and the Focus highlighting it is just a way to signal to the player to pay attention to certain objects. One could also imagine Aloy noting these things and having the Focus tag them, like highlighting passages in a book.
Next, Aloy talks to Erend and hypothesizes that Ersa isn’t dead. The Oseram used some sort of sonic weapon, once mounted on the tripod, to disable Ersa and her guards. Aloy reasons that the weapons she found don’t show any signs of use, meaning the team must’ve been disabled immediately; and the shattered rocks suggests sonic blasts. They then killed someone roughly the same size as Ersa. They used the bloody rock to smash the dead body’s face, making her unrecognizable. They cut off Ersa’s armor (the leather straps) and put it on the dead body, making it look like Ersa’s body. They then moved the body to where Erend thought the murder happened to throw people off.
We’ll later find that Aloy is completely correct. And this deduction? This is all Aloy. The Focus can’t do any of this. Even from a gameplay perspective, the Focus never makes deductions or inferences. It just scans things and outputs a description. We get hints of Aloy’s intelligence throughout the game, and this is one such instance.
Into the Borderlands
Erend returns to Meridian, checks the body, and confirms that the body isn’t Ersa’s. They talk to Sun-King Avad, and here’s the first time the player actually meets Avad. Throughout HZD, Avad actually lives up to his reputation. He’s kind, humble, and he pursues peace in his own lands and with other lands. For now, he asks Aloy to help find Ersa. Sure, his advisor has sent an agent to investigate the person he suspects is behind Ersa’s kidnapping, an Oseram warlord named Dervahl, but wouldn’t you know it, Avad decides he also needs to rely on this girl he just now met. He turns out to be correct.
Aloy and Erend go to a northern town, close to the border with the Oseram, and find the agent…dead. They track further north, find Dervahl’s camp, and kill all his men. They find Ersa, tortured and near death, and Ersa tells them that Dervahl is about to launch a terrorist attack on Meridian. She then dies.
There’s a lot more backstory to Dervahl, but I’m going to skip it.
The Sun Shall Fall
Aloy and Erend return to Meridian and Aloy finds a large amount of Blaze and a makeshift remote-controlled bomb in a house at the edge of the city. Aloy estimates that blowing this up would indeed destroy Meridian. To neutralize the bomb, she pushes the Blaze out the window, which…sets off the bomb anyway. And the Blaze explodes. But for some reason this doesn’t destroy the city or kill anyone? This sequence made no sense to me. Also, why would Dervahl set up a bomb on the outskirts of the city? Shouldn’t it be nearer the city center if he wants to destroy the city?
Anyway, Aloy has just saved Meridian – the capital city of the Carja and the biggest city in the game. But she’s not done. She tracks Dervahl himself through a back way into the palace. She finds Dervahl in Avad’s room. Avad is on the ground, incapacitated and holding his ears due to Dervahl’s sonic weapon screaming at him, while Dervahl is taunting him. Why does Dervahl think Avad can even hear him? Between the placement of the bomb and him not understanding how his own sonic weapon works, I’m thinking this guy isn’t as smart as the game says he is.
Dervahl tries to set off the bomb, but it obviously doesn’t go off. He sees Aloy and declares he has a backup plan: summon waves of Glinthawks.
I. Fucking. Hate. Glinthawks. Unfortunately, the developers seem to love them. These things fly. They’re hard to hit. They comes in groups. They often attack right after you’ve killed something and are in the middle of looting the body because they want to loot it first.
…Anyway, Aloy kills the Glinthawks and Dervahl is taken prisoner to be given to the Oseram, who, for reasons I didn’t get into, hate him. Everyone agrees that, given the Oseram’s prowess with technology and creativity, Dervahl’s death is going to be slow and messy and cruel and unusual. I approve.
Avad thanks Aloy for literally saving his life and then hits on her. This time, Aloy knows where he’s going, and unequivocally shoots him down.
The City of the Sun, part II
Aloy goes after Olin and finds him at a dig site with Eclipse cultists, who’ve just dug up a Corruptor. Suddenly, someone contacts Aloy through her Focus and informs her that he disabled all the Focus devices (except hers) at the dig site. Aloy kills all the cultists and stands over a cowering Olin, her spearpoint mere centimeters from him, and Olin promises he’ll tell her everything he knows.
Aloy: “Oh, I know you will.”
Long story short: the Eclipse worship some devil they call HADES. They captured Olin’s family and forced Olin to help them at dig sites because Olin’s good at navigating dig sites, I guess. They gave Olin his Focus so they could monitor him; if he stepped out of line, they’d kill his family. At the night before the Proving, when Aloy approached Olin, HADES sent a broadcast through all the Focus devices throughout the entire Eclipse with 3 words: “System threat detected.”
Aloy asks about that lady she has a 99.47% genetic match with, to which Olin says he saw her face at a hologram somewhere in Maker’s End, some ruins far to the north.
At this point, Aloy’s gotten everything out of Olin he knows, so she passes judgment. You can kill him, spare him, or state that the situation is complicated, after which you choices are to kill him or spare him. If you’re wondering what the complete hell was the point of giving the player the “this is complicated” choice, we think alike.
I spared Olin. He then begs Aloy to help save his family.
Collateral
Olin tells Aloy to meet him at some farm out in the middle of nowhere, where the Eclipse are holding his family. When Aloy finds him, he’s still wearing his goddamn Focus. Why? Wasn’t he scared that the Eclipse were monitoring him through it? Sure, the mysterious guy at the dig site disabled all the Focus devices, including his, but (1) Olin doesn’t know that and (2) the guy himself says he doesn’t know how long they’ll remain disabled. Olin should’ve either left his Focus at the dig site or told Aloy where his family was and then gone about his business as usual, not go to the farm with the Focus on. Is this guy some kind of moron?
…Anyway, this mission is a straightforward “Aloy kills an entire base of guys” grand old time and she reunites Olin with his family.
Robbing the Rich
Aloy encounters a guy whose sword was stolen. He asks her, a random stranger who was just passing by his house, to help him find it. Aloy follows tracks from his house to a merchant, who tells Aloy that she stole it on behalf of her Robin Hood organization so they could sell it and help the needy. She asks Aloy to go hear her people out, at least, and she’ll stay where she is and won’t try to escape.
Aloy’s response: “It wouldn’t matter if you did. I’d find you.” Hot.
Anyway, it turns out that the stuff about the Robin Hood gang is completely true. Remember those Shadow Carja guys? The place they fled to (Sunfall) is in a barren canyon, with little in the way of resources, so whatever resources they get, they funnel to the nobles and to the military. So, the guys in this quest are trying to help the slums around Sunfall. One of their people, carrying supplies, got ambushed by Shadow Carja soldiers, so their leader asks Aloy to save him in exchange for returning the sword. This involves killing a Shadow Carja outpost’s worth of guys, and it’s perhaps the first time Aloy kills Shadow Carja soldiers proper (I’m unsure where the Eclipse fits in the Shadow Carja military).
So now Aloy can add “saving the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to her résumé, right alongside counter-terrorism and recovering rings from boars.
A Moment’s Peace
A rather sleazy fellow by the name of Vilgund greets Aloy by either complimenting her figure or insulting it – I’m actually not sure. Rather than kicking him in the balls repeatedly, Aloy decides to hear out his request, which is for her to go investigate a Banuk village where the machines are all tame. He sent a squad before, but they didn’t come back.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 8: “So now you’re hiring someone…to find the last men you hired.”
Aloy goes to the village and finds some sort of computer core that is outputting a signal that renders the machines in the area non-hostile. Unfortunately, some of Vilgund’s guys are trying to dig it out to bring back, and in their ineptitude, are damaging it. They try to get Aloy to pay them to stop, asking her how much it’s worth to her, to which Aloy says, “It’s worth more to me than you are. You still want to negotiate?” In a rare instance of an enemy showing common sense, the guys back off – but the damage has been done, and Aloy needs to rush back to the village to take out the now-normally-hostile machines. She then returns to Vilgund and demands full payment. Given Aloy doesn’t seem like she cares about money throughout the game, I assume she’s doing this just because Vilgund’s a sleazebag.
Fatal Inheritance
Aloy finds a guy who is desperate for someone to go save his family’s gigantic estate, because it got mysteriously attacked by a Ravager. Ravagers are kind of like Sawtooths, except they have a big laser cannon on their backs. This is good because you can shoot the cannon off and then pick it up and use it.
Anyway, Aloy investigates the estate, kills the machines, and finds the guy’s sister Daradi is the only survivor. This means Aloy single-handedly wins a fight a rich Carja guy’s entire guard retinue lost. Daradi reveals that her brother is actually a scumbag who tried to kill everyone (by luring the Ravager in) so he could inherit the estate. Of course, he then needed someone to go clear out the Ravager after.
The guy’s brilliant, isn’t he? He appears to finish his brilliant plan by summoning Glinthawks to finish Aloy. Actually, did I say brilliant? I meant this guy’s a dumbass, because the Glinthawks he summons promptly kill him because, while he can attract machines, he can’t control them, something he should’ve known already because otherwise, he wouldn’t have needed Aloy to go kill the Ravager for him.
Anyway, FUCKING GLINTHAWKS I HATE THESE FUCKING THINGS.
Honor the Fallen
Let’s return to Avad’s father, the Mad King Aerys II. He sent his troops to attack anyone and everyone. When Meridian was about to fall, he sent Helis and the highest priest Bahavas west with the remainder of his regime – mostly, his elite fighters (the Kestrels) and the priesthood. The priests that remained with Avad now need to contend with the fact that their religion once advocated killing people en masse to placate the sun.
One priest in particular is Namman, who wants to help 3 people obtain closure over the horrors of the former regime. Long story short: one wants to pray at a lake, so Aloy kills a bunch of Snapmaws in the lake; one wants to paint a picture on a mountain, so Aloy kills a bunch of FUCKING GLINTHAWKS on the mountain; and the third wants to pray to a defaced statue of the old king…even though the old king was who inflicted all the atrocities…? There aren’t any machines guarding the statue; instead, there’s this racist priest there blocking the entrance. Now when I first approached him, I literally just jumped around him and got past him, so I don’t know why the group of people he’s blocking don’t just…do that. Anyway, Aloy walks up to him and tells him to get lost, and he does, because I guess the game would’ve had issues if you could murder the hell out of a frail old racist man.
Hunting for the Lodge
This is the introduction to a mini-quest-line involving the Carja Hunters’ Lodge. As its name suggests, it’s a guild of sorts of machine hunters, except the vast majority of them just sit around the place and brag about themselves.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 9: “Is there actually any hunting in this Lodge? So far it’s been all talk.”
Generally speaking, the Lodge accepts “Fledglings” if they earn 3 Half Sun marks at a Hunting Ground. These are scattered throughout the world and each Ground features 3 trials; what mark you get depends on how fast you finish the trial. The Half Sun is the lowest rank (~20 minutes), followed by Full Sun and then Blazing Sun (1-3 minutes). I despise timed missions, so I skipped all the Grounds except for the first one, which I got 3 Blazing Suns at to enter the Lodge.
Now a Fledgling isn’t actually a member – to become a member, one must find a Hawk to sponsor him, at which point he becomes a Thrush. I say “he” because before Avad, the Lodge only allowed Carja males. Avad abolished this rule when he rose to power, so now the Lodge is technically open to anyone who has the requisite 3 marks and finds a sponsor.
Aloy doesn’t really care about ranks or prestige or membership in anything, so she doesn’t have much in-universe reason to join the Lodge, though given the attitude of some members, I think she’d enjoy taking them down a few pegs. In particular, the leader of the Lodge (the Sunhawk) is Ahsis. Ahsis is the most racist, sexist dickwad ever. He tries to tell Aloy that she can’t join the Lodge because she’s a non-Carja woman, except remember, that’s no longer a rule by royal edict, so Aloy tells him to shut it and point her to a sponsor. He points her to Talanah, who is a Carja woman (and thus someone Ahsis hates). Talanah says she might sponsor Aloy if she proves herself by killing a bunch of machines. Afterward, Talanah gives Aloy another mission.
Hunters’ Blind
Talanah tells Aloy that the Lodge, being a guild, is supposed to accept contracts; for instance, if a town needed someone to help them defend against machines. As you might expect, Ahsis doesn’t bother accepting these unless they’re from very rich people who can pay well, which is where the current mission comes into play. A small town is under siege by, you guessed it, FUCKING GLINTHAWKS. Talanah intends for her and Aloy to help them despite the town’s inability to pay a contract fee.
Aloy goes to the town, kills the annoying fuckers, and investigates why they’re attacking in the first place. She goes upriver and finds an assload of dead Snapmaws. See, Glinthawks, as I alluded to before, are attracted to downed machines because one of their functions is to harvest them for scrap (the other machine that does this is the ground-based Scrapper). This is one reason Glinthawks are so annoying – like Scrappers, the game will sometimes spawn them out of nowhere when you kill a machine so they try to loot the machine before you do.
Investigating further, Aloy finds a group of guys who explain that they need Snapmaw Hearts to sell to pay off someone, or they’ll lose their farm. The game is supposed to give the player an option: try to drive them off or go get a Snapmaw Heart for them. The mission is bugged, though, so that if you have a Snapmaw Heart in your inventory, the game automatically makes you give it to them.
…which isn’t that big a deal, except these guys are complete assholes. So I loaded a save, sold every Snapmaw Heart I had, went back, and chose to tell them to leave. Unlike Vilgund’s goons from before, these guys aren’t smart, so they attack. Aloy makes short work of them all.
Afterward, Talanah says she’ll sponsor Aloy. Ahsis again tries to say no, but Talanah reminds Ahsis about Avad’s edict and the fact that Aloy saved Avad’s life.
Talanah: “She did save his life, but I’m sure he’ll listen to your prejudices over his own common sense. Would you like to take it up with him?”
Ahsis may be a dick, but he’s not stupid enough to oppose the king, so he relents and allows Aloy to become Talanah’s Thrush.
Deadliest Game
Before we cover this, here’s some background. The strongest machine in the base game is the Thunderjaw. It’s a robot dinosaur armed with laser cannons, homing missiles, and 9001 ways to melee a poor sap’s face into next year. The Hunters’ Lodge has been trying to kill a specific Thunderjaw, named Redmaw, for much of its history, but Redmaw has killed every last hunter who’s gone after it.
Per the rules of the Lodge, the person who kills the strongest machine first becomes Sunhawk. Alternatively, the Sunhawk’s Thrush becomes Sunhawk if the Sunhawk dies. Ahsis rose to his rank via the latter method, because come on, did you think this guy can actually fight machines? What is he going to do, hurl racial slurs at it until it dies?
Specifically, the previous Sunhawk was Talanah’s father, who defended Lodge members who were being sacrificed by the previous king (and died doing so). You can see where this is going. Talanah has beef with Ahsis, and her plan is to take out Redmaw so she can unseat him.
At the time of this mission, nobody knows where Redmaw is, so Talanah has Aloy kill time by sending her after a Stormbird and a Thunderjaw. Stormbirds are…hard. Like Glinthawks, they fly. But, they don’t appear in groups out of nowhere, so I don’t hate them quite as much.
Upon killing a Stormbird and a Thunderjaw, the strongest machines in the base game, Aloy returns to the Lodge and learns that Ahsis and Talanah both figured out where Redmaw is and both set out after it. Aloy follows Talanah’s trail.
Redmaw
Aloy finds Talanah fighting off some mercenaries Ahsis had hired to slow her down. A few headshots later, they were all dead, and the two continue on just in time to see Redmaw brutally smack Ahsis into a rock with its tail.
REDMAW used TAIL WHIP! It’s super effective!
Now yes, as a Pokémon Master, I fully know that Tail Whip doesn’t actually do damage, but I’m keeping this, because how pathetic must Ahsis be if he took fatal damage from a non-damaging move? Okay, fine, fine, we’ll say that REDMAW used IRON TAIL! It’s super effective!
Anyway, Aloy and Talanah then kill Redmaw, which as far as I can tell, is just a regular Thunderjaw. Remember when I said the Lodge members just sit around bragging? This is probably why in all their history, they weren’t able to kill 1 Thunderjaw.
Ahsis poops himself, then dies (I’m not making this up). Talanah becomes Sunhawk and updates the Lodge’s chronicle of Redmaw, noting how she and Aloy killed it and how Ahsis pooped himself before he died. Good riddance to that fucker.
As a side note, the chronicle also notes that Ahsis’s internal organs were destroyed. How do these people know what internal organs are?
Demand and Supply
Two guys, an Oseram and a Carja, are jointly running a merchant stall. They call Aloy over and offer to buy a Longleg Lens from her. Actually, they want a Snapmaw Lens. Actually, they want a Longleg Lens. Actually…one wants a Longleg Lens and the other wants a Snapmaw Lens and they very quickly forget Aloy is even there because they start arguing about it.
The player can choose which lens to sell them, or take the mind-blowing third option of simply selling them both.
Heap of Trouble
In the northeastern part of Carja territory sits a town mostly occupied by Oseram. The lady running the town, Petra, hits on Aloy for a bit before asking her to scavenge some parts from a nearby Old World junkyard, which is currently occupied by Scrappers and bandits. Aloy kills everything in the junkyard and gets the parts Petra wants, but somehow, the bandit clan retaliates by sending waves of guys at the town. I guess most of the bandits were conveniently away when Aloy was killing her way through their camp at the junkyard.
…Actually, scratch that – there’s no convenience involved for the bandits, since the final part of the mission has Petra use the parts Aloy got to upgrade her grenade launcher, and you get to use the grenade launcher to blow up the waves of bandits. Then you blow up a bridge on the bandits. Good times all around. Except for the bandits.
Hammer and Steel
In the same town Petra runs, a guard named Kaeluf asks Aloy desperately for help. It’s kind of confusing, so I’m going to try to explain. The guy who was supposed to be on guard duty is Jorgriz, while he (Kaeluf) was supposed to go kill Behemoths and take parts from them along with a lady named Beladga. But Kaeluf and Jorgriz are total bros, dude, and Kaeluf knows Jorgriz and Beladga like each other (though each is oblivious to the other’s feelings), so he traded places with Jorgriz – Kaeluf is now on guard duty and Jorgriz is out hunting Behemoths with Beladga.
This wouldn’t be a problem except Jorgriz has the directional sense of Ryouga Hibiki from Ranma ½. That, plus the two being distracted by each other, means they missed the Behemoths and are lost out in the wilderness. Kaeluf fearfully begs Aloy for help, because if Petra hears about this, she’s going to do terrible, terrible things to him.
So of course the first thing I did was go tell Petra everything, then I went after Jorgriz and Beladga. Aloy finds the two arguing and quickly loses her patience over the entire matter. She very bluntly tells them that they like each other and goes to kill the Behemoths by herself, adding “matchmaker” to her list of accomplishments. And woe unto those who waste Aloy’s time and wear on her patience. Petra now owes Aloy even more, Kaeluf just went through hell at the hands of Petra, and the two lovebirds are…umm, in a shed somewhere. I guess they got off easy.
Get it? They…got off…let’s move on.
Blood on Stone
Aloy passes a town with a quarry where the foreman reports that something’s been killing the workers. That something turns out to be a Rockbreaker, a giant mole-like machine that tunnels underground. These things are incredibly difficult to fight…unless you find a ridge or elevated place out of their general range. Then they’ll just dig and surface once in awhile to throw rocks at you. Take the opportunity to shoot its legs off, at which point they can no longer dig underground, then finish it.
Maker’s End
We’re back to the main quest with this one. Aloy travels north and mystery man contacts her again and tells her that the lady Aloy has the genetic match to is named Elisabet Sobeck. Aloy enters Maker’s End after killing a bunch of Eclipse goons. She scans a Focus looted off their leader, which turns out to be a bad idea, because HADES sees her through the Focus and realizes she’s still alive.
From here to the end of the mission, it’s just her exploring an ancient building…which turns out to be the headquarters of an Old World corporation named Faro Automated Solutions (FAS). In the 2060s, mega-corporations governed the planet, everything was automated, and people spent much of their time online in a holographically equipped Internet. In particular, the biggest corporation is FAS, which manufactured robots. FAS was founded by a guy known as Ted Faro, and he steered his company into the military sector by building war robots. All the world’s major governments/corporations had fully automated military fleets by the 2060s, with the latest models from the Chariot line of Faro robots.
The Chariot line had these features, all by design.
- Self-aware.
- Self-replicating.
- Able to absorb biomatter and convert it into fuel.
- Able to enslave/override other robots.
- Almost impossible to hack due to “cryptographic protocols using polyphasic entangled waveforms.” Now I know the writers probably just strung together some cool-sounding science words, but I actually tried to determine what this means, because it suggested to me a quantum-based technology using the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which okay, okay, I’ll shut up and move on.
Now Faro didn’t really intend for anything to go wrong, and, well, in his defense, the only thing that really could go wrong with this was…umm, let’s see…LITERALLY EVERYTHING. Some undefined glitch caused one of these swarms to go out of control, killing everything in their path and absorbing biomatter to fuel themselves to replicate to kill more things, and so on.
In desperation, Faro called upon the most intelligent scientist/engineer in the world, Elisabet Sobeck. Elisabet concluded that the end was inevitable – the robots were self-replicating faster than anyone could destroy them. So, she devised Project Zero Dawn and forced Faro to fund it. Somehow, Project Zero Dawn saved the world – while the Old World fell into ruin, life clearly still exists.
Then Sylens shows up. Well, kind of – he projects a hologram in front of Aloy. Sylens is the mysterious guy who’s been contacting Aloy, and he is an absolute dick. If this game had D&D-type stats, this guy’s empathy score would be negative 9001. He says he’s been trying to figure out what ended the Old World his entire life, but he failed, yet Aloy was able to access all this information in minutes (because of her genetic profile, which allowed access to all of Faro’s systems in the building). Aloy’s more concerned with what her connection to Elisabet is, since because of that connection, the Eclipse and HADES are trying to kill her. Sylens doesn’t give a fuck and thinks she’s being selfish, but I kind of have to agree with Aloy here. Solving mysteries and unpacking history are great, but if someone wanted me dead today, right now, that would likely be higher on my priority list. Sorry, not sorry, Sylens.
Death from the Skies
Just reading that title probably clued you into where this is going. A town is under attack by, of course, FUCKING GLINTHAWKS. Aloy investigates why they’re attacking and finds a guy desperately trying to turn off a device that’s been luring them in. Panicking, he says he found it, brought it back to study it, but then it turned on and attracted machines and now he doesn’t know how to turn it off.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 10: Wordlessly, Aloy gives the guy an “are you cereal?” look, then unceremoniously smashes the thing with her spear.
Aloy investigates some more and finds that Dervahl was planting lures around. I didn’t elaborate on why the Oseram wanted him dead, but this kind of thing is why. Dervahl made a lot of enemies, but thanks to that time Aloy saved all of Meridian, he’s now either in jail or in unimaginable agony. Or both.
The Grave-Hoard
Another main quest mission. Elisabet’s last message to Faro, where she forced him to fund Project Zero Dawn, mentioned she was traveling to U.S. Robot Command, which Sylens identifies as ruins called the Grave-Hoard. So Aloy goes there and learns more backstory: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Aaron Herres, spread a rumor that Project Zero Dawn was building a super-weapon to fight off the Faro robots, but it needed time. So, he initiated Operation Enduring Victory, which involved putting a weapon into the hands of every combat-capable human on the planet and sending them against the robots. The idea was to slow down the robots’ advance enough to give Project Zero Dawn the time it needed to finish…whatever it was that Elisabet wanted to do.
Toward the end, Aloy finds a recording of General Herres – he asks Elisabet to record his final thoughts, where he says that he sent all of humanity to die against the robots. He feels guilty, and wants to record his thoughts for posterity to judge him. Keep this in mind. For now, Elisabet reassures him that his actions made Project Zero Dawn possible, ensuring there would be a posterity, and tells him “at ease.”
Just those words. Those 2 words. They encompass just how badass Elisabet Sobeck was, that she told the highest-ranked military commander in the United States, “at ease.”
Also in this mission, Aloy finds a hologram of Earth. Sylens explains what it is and tells Aloy that Earth isn’t flat, as he assumes she believes. Aloy responds that of course Earth isn’t flat – she’s seen a lunar eclipse, which is the shadow of Earth on the moon, and the shadow is curved, so Earth must be round. Keep in mind we’re in a world where a civilization believes an automated voice in a door is a goddess and another believes the sun will calm machines down if they kill enough people to satisfy it. Aloy saw a lunar eclipse and correctly deduced what it was on her own.
At any rate, the recording revealed the location of Project Zero Dawn – it’s in Bryce Canyon. In other words, it’s right underneath the city of Sunfall, the Shadow Carja capital. And here’s where I start having some issues with the plot. See, Sylens says that Aloy can’t go to Sunfall because the Eclipse there are all wearing Focus devices, so the second they see (and scan) her, they’ll alert HADES to the fact that she’s alive, and he’ll send out another kill order on her. This argument is stupid for a few reasons:
- HADES already knows Aloy is alive. Remember, Aloy scanned the Eclipse guy’s Focus outside Maker’s End?
- Aloy’s been killing Eclipse goons left and right, so literally any of them could’ve scanned Aloy and alerted HADES/the rest of the Eclipse.
It might still be a bad idea for Aloy to waltz into Sunfall, so Aloy suggests crashing the Focus network so that the Focus devices can’t communicate to one another…but this wouldn’t solve the problem. It would prevent people alerting each other (and HADES) across distances, but like I’ve established, that isn’t the main issue. The only way crashing the network would do anything is if the Eclipse’s Focus devices required the network to function at all, which might be the case (we don’t know how the network works), but the game doesn’t really say that.
At any rate, they decide to crash the network, and Sylens tells Aloy to meet him in a certain location.
Sun and Shadow
Let’s do some side-quests and errands on the way to that location. So there’s this guy named Lahavis and his daughter is missing. Before her disappearance, she was showing symptoms of depression and pessimism, so Lahavis fears the worst and is fearfully looking into a river from a bridge. Aloy passes by, asks him whether he’s searching for something, and he…tells her all of this. This incredibly personal situation. Lahavis tells a random stranger that happened to pass by him. And, of course, he accepts Aloy’s offer to help him.
Aloy investigates and finds the daughter, Elida, on a faraway island. She was having a secret relationship with a guy named Atral, a soldier in the Shadow Carja army. Since Elida lives in regular Carja territory, this is problematic, so they’ve been meeting in secret and signaling to one another via signal fires. Well, Atral lit one, then never showed up.
Aloy continues to investigate and discovers the Shadow Carja found Atral’s signal fire and arrested him for interrogation. Aloy kills the entire outpost they’re holding him in, but is too late – Atral gives Aloy a key to give Elida and dies.
Lahavis, upon Aloy’s return, asks Aloy to talk to Elida for him, since between her father and the stranger she confided in on an island somewhere, Elida’s more likely to open up to the latter. Returning to Elida, Aloy gives her the key (Elida says Atral gave her a lock and kept the key…which…like, am I just reading too much into…never mind), then has to talk her out of suicide. Damn, this got dark fast.
So, let’s see, the newest line on Aloy’s résumé: successful therapist.
A Curious Proposal
An obviously slimy man calling himself Fernund approaches Aloy and signals that he’s heard of her. During the conversation, his eyes drift to Aloy’s…spear. He looks at it, caressing it with his eyes, gazing up and down, up and down the long, hard shaft. How does it work, he asks Aloy, wonder in his voice.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 11, and my favorite one: “You stick the pointy end into the machine.”
Fernund tells Aloy he found a cache of Old World things out in the mesa and asks her to get it for him, as it’s too high for him to reach. Aloy doesn’t trust him, because she’s not stupid, but goes to investigate anyway. Lo and behold, Fernund appears and reveals it was a setup – he’s going to sic goons on her if she doesn’t hand over her magnificent spear.
Aloy: “You’ve obviously heard of me. You know what I’m capable of. What makes you think this will end well for you?”
I had a lot of fun with this mission. Fernund, in his defense, did indeed pick a perfect spot for an ambush. It’s this alcove of sorts against a rock face, with only 2-or-so entrances. So I booby-trapped the hell out of the entrances before triggering the event, meaning Fernund’s goons ran in directly into explosive traps and tripwires. I did say it was the perfect ambush spot. For Aloy.
Aloy tracks Fernund to a village. Seeing Aloy, Fernund flees in terror, but Aloy catches him. He grovels at her feet and begs for mercy, tears flowing down his face, desperation saturating his every sob [slight exaggeration]. He promises he will never cross Aloy again and will tell everyone not to do evil, or something, and Aloy says that he better, and lets him go.
Sun’s Judgment
In this rather simple quest, a merchant woman complains that someone’s been stealing her fruit, so Aloy tracks the thief down and saves him from FUCKING GLINTHAWKS WHY DO THE DEVELOPERS PUT THESE FUCKING THINGS EVERYWHERE. He thanks Aloy, calling her a savage the entire time, then returns to apologize and work for the merchant lady.
Sunstone Rock
Aloy approaches Sunstone Rock, a prison, which is being attacked by a Behemoth. A guard shouts that they don’t have a chance, and his companion asks whether he wants to be the one to report to “Warden Janeva” that they backed down. The first guard enthusiastically says that they should take their chances with the Behemoth. The odds turn out in their favor, by which I mean Aloy is there, so she kills the Behemoth and goes to meet Warden Janeva.
Janeva says that someone smuggled a lure into the place, which attracted the Behemoth. Her guards wonder how, since they searched all the people going into Sunstone Rock, and, well, I’ll let you fill in the crack. I mean hole. No, wait, I mean blank.
…Anyway, Janeva says three prisoners escaped and asks Aloy to go kill them. Not capture. Kill. The first one is this crazy chick who rejoins her bandit camp, except I already cleared out that camp, so she just stands on a prominent ridge in the camp and yells at her nonexistent bandit goons before Aloy shoots a few arrows into her head. The second is a smuggler guy who tries to rejoin his gang, but the gang instead ties him up and beats him to near death before Aloy kills the gang and watches him die.
The third is this super annoying guy who sets up a bunch of easily-disabled explosive traps around a ravine and taunts Aloy as she traverses the ravine to get to him. Once she does, he blows himself up.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 12: “I guess he died doing what he loved.”
To Curse the Darkness
Okay, so Aloy goes to that place Sylens indicated they meet to crash the Focus network. Along the way:
Smart-ass Aloy moment 13: “Crash the Eclipse Focus network, he said. So how are we going to do that? Oh wait, I forgot. We won’t. I do all the dangerous stuff. You just listen in.”
At the indicated location, Sylens tells Aloy that she’s at the Eclipse main base’s back entrance. He wants her to sneak in and destroy a module, which will crash the network. She reaches the module and Sylens tells her to open it, but when she tries, it electrocutes her, getting HADES’s attention. See, HADES itself resides in a computer core, which is inside the Eclipse main base, information Sylens didn’t bother to tell Aloy. Remember, the reason Sylens said to infiltrate the base is to prevent the Eclipse from notifying HADES that Aloy is still alive. I already explained why that makes no sense, but even if we ran with it, Sylens sending Aloy to HADES in an effort to hide her from HADES is the stupidest plan I’ve seen in a long while.
Moreover, Aloy doesn’t need to open the module, because she destroys it by simply stabbing it with her spear. So if Aloy had gotten to the module and Sylens had simply said to stab it, Aloy wouldn’t have gotten electrocuted and might actually have gotten out of there without attracting attention. But because Sylens is a dumbass, the entire base now knows she’s there and the game spawns an endless wave of enemies on Aloy while she frantically escapes.
Deep Secrets of the Earth
One thing that did go well – the Focus network is down. Aloy enters Sunfall and nobody recognizes her. I’ll discuss this a bit more at length later, but for now, she enters the Zero Dawn facility, but needs to vent a room since the door is jammed. The venting attracts attention, so periodically in the facility she needs to fight off Kestrels descending to investigate. How they are able to get inside – this is an Old World facility, reinforced properly, with only one main entrance that is locked to Aloy’s genetic makeup – is…never explained.
Anyway, this is Project Zero Dawn:
- Build a super-AI, named GAIA.
- GAIA has several sub-functions. One, MINERVA, brute-forces the Faro robots’ cryptography and then builds transmission towers to broadcast shutdown commands. Brute-forcing the cryptography would take this super-AI at least 50 years; by that time, the entire biosphere would be gone.
- Other sub-functions work on detoxifying Earth with new robots constructed via a specific sub-function devoted to manufacturing, HEPHAESTUS.
- After the detoxification, still other sub-functions re-seed life into the world. This includes humans, born in Cradle facilities from preserved zygotes.
- APOLLO, the sub-function dedicated to preservation of knowledge, will teach the new humans about the entirety of human history and technology, allowing them to continue rebuilding the world and restoring the biosphere.
See, Elisabet knew the end of all life was inevitable. Her goal was to allow life to end, meaning the Faro robots would go dormant due to lack of fuel, then have GAIA shut down the robots and restore life anew. This also reveals that most of the machines Aloy faces – for instance the Tramplers, the Snapmaws, the FUCKING GLINTHAWKS – are machines constructed by HEPHAESTUS, whereas Corruptors and Deathbringers are unearthed Faro robots.
HADES is one of GAIA’s sub-functions, as you can surmise if you know Greek and Roman myth. Its purpose was to destroy GAIA’s new biosphere if it failed so that GAIA could try again, which doesn’t quite explain why it wants Aloy dead, so stay tuned.
After finding this, Aloy finds and downloads the Alpha registry that will allow her to enter that facility in the Nora sacred mountain (remember the corrupted one, from way back). After this is my least favorite plot part of the game, because Helis shows up, throws a bomb into the room, and knocks out Aloy.
The Terror of the Sun
Aloy awakens in a cage above the Sun Ring (think a Colosseum-type arena) in Sunfall. All her equipment and Focus are in and on a box next to the cage, out of reach. Helis appears and monologues, wondering why he hesitated to kill Aloy back during the Proving. In other words, the game itself acknowledges that Helis’s actions were stupid. Helis concludes that it was destiny – he was meant to let her go, so he could capture her now, so he could sacrifice her to the sun in the Sun Ring. Yeah, right. He then crushes her Focus, informs her that he sent Eclipse forces into the Nora lands to kill everyone as revenge for all the stuff she did, and releases her from the cage down into the ring, where Corruptors corrupt a Behemoth and sic it on Aloy.
I’ll outline what happens, then point out a few things. Aloy’s equipment is all in that box next to the cage, which is above the ring. So Aloy leads the Behemoth to crash into the pillars holding the platform up, sending the equipment box crashing into the ring. Aloy retrieves her stuff, equips herself, and kills the Behemoth. Sylens then appears (in person) to rescue her, which likely wasn’t necessary, but whatever. The look on Helis’s face is priceless.
I hate this sequence plot-wise. The writers again did something that I hate – let the villain capture the heroine and disarm her, but leave ALL her stuff in one, conveniently accessible location for her to get it all back. The writers want the villain to have some sort of victory, but in doing so, need to contrive ways for the heroine to get out of it. I also hate sequences where you lose all your stuff in general.
A better way to do this sequence would be to have Helis send Eclipse at Aloy en masse, like what happened after she crashed the network. Have a stray arrow or something take out her Focus as she flees, and then have her flee into the Sun Ring. Helis then appears, taunts her, and sics the corrupted Behemoth on her as normal. We don’t need Aloy to lose her equipment and then get it all back and we get to fight the Behemoth without Aloy’s Focus.
Why is that last part important? It illustrates that Aloy doesn’t actually need her Focus to fight machines, just like she doesn’t need it to investigate places and track people. Aloy kills a corrupted Behemoth in close quarters without it. Contrast this to the Eclipse. Aloy crashed their Focus network – let’s assume this rendered all their devices non-functional – and this was such a huge blow to the Eclipse that Helis felt the need to try genocide as retaliation. Moreover, remember how this allowed Aloy to walk into the capital of the Shadow Carja without anyone recognizing her? Note that Aloy is the only person in the entire game with red hair, but the Shadow Carja can’t recognize her without a Focus to scan and identify her. These guys are dependent on the Focus. Aloy isn’t.
Anyway, her losing the Focus doesn’t amount to anything immediately, since Sylens reveals that he had his own Focus and downloaded everything from Aloy’s Focus onto it while he was monitoring her, so he gives her the new Focus and nothing changes gameplay-wise. He also gives Aloy a suit of Shadow Stalwart armor, the same armor the Kestrels wear, to use as a disguise in case she wants to return to Sunfall. Note that the Kestrel armor doesn’t cover Aloy’s red hair, driving the point home again that the Shadow Carja are complete morons.
If you’re wondering why the hell she’d want to return to Sunfall…stay tuned. For now…
The Heart of the Nora
Aloy rushes back to Nora land to fight off the Eclipse forces that Helis told her about. I studied this part of the game in detail, since it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Recall that the Shadow Carja capital, where the Eclipse is based, is to the far west. The Nora Sacred Land is in the far east. The regular Carja, and Meridian, are between them, not to mention the forts at the border between Carja and Nora lands. So it’s very unlikely Helis’s Eclipse forces attacked from Eclipse territory. He must have sent messengers to some location closer to the Sacred Land, then had forces there attack.
So where is this location? I fast-traveled to the Carja-Nora border, but found no invading army and the area looks completely fine. In fact, the entirety of Nora land except for the Main Embrace Gate and east-to-southeast regions of the Embrace are completely untouched. For reference, here’s the official map of the game, where I’ve drawn a few crude borders. The leftmost red line separates the Shadow Carja from the rest of the Carja. The other red line separates Carja and Nora territories. The yellow line marks the wall separating the Embrace from the rest of Nora land. The red shading shows the area hit by Helis’s Eclipse army.
Note that the yellow line is a wooden wall built into natural rock walls with 3 gates. Only one, the central one, is broken, meaning the entire army attacked into the Embrace in that single location. Since there’s no sign of any damage or enemy force anywhere except in the red shading, one must conclude that the Eclipse army Helis contacted was based right around the Main Embrace gate…which, as you can imagine, doesn’t make any sense. The army is a pretty big group of cultists, Corruptors, at least one Deathbringer, and a bunch of corrupted machines. You’re telling me they were hidden just outside the Main Embrace gate this entire time?
Moreover, people later tell Aloy that the cultists did, in fact, attack from outside Nora land, since the sentinels warned the villages and eventually had to fall back to the Embrace. But remember, there’s zero sign of any fighting or anything outside of that red zone, so the Eclipse marched to the Embrace without damaging anything or killing anyone? Didn’t Helis tell them to kill every Nora they saw?
Having Eclipse attack the Nora doesn’t really do anything to move the plot and it opens up some plot holes, as you can see, so why is it in the game? One could completely eliminate this segment and just have Aloy go to Nora land after escaping Sunfall – which she was going to do anyway, since she now has that registry she downloaded from the Zero Dawn base.
At any rate, Aloy kills her way through the Eclipse to Mother’s Watch, which is right outside the Nora sacred mountain. A bunch of surviving Nora are holed up inside the mountain while the Eclipse are trying to break in with a corrupted Thunderjaw. Once Aloy swoops into the scene, the Nora inside the mountain charge out to attack, since
[the Eclipse + a corrupted Thunderjaw] > [all the Nora warriors], but
[the Eclipse + a corrupted Thunderjaw] << [all the Nora warriors + Aloy].
It’s simple math. Aloy then goes into the mountain and finally enters the facility. It turns out to be a Cradle facility, where GAIA’s ELEUTHIA sub-function grew humans out of cryo-preserved zygotes. For some reason, the humans couldn’t access the computers that they would’ve used to learn from APOLLO. Eventually, the facility was forced to release the first generation of humans into the world with very little education once the facility ran out of food, hence the “voiced door is a goddess” and “let’s kill people because the sun is angry” belief systems rather than…something real.
Then comes the big revelation. Aloy finds a recording from GAIA. In the 3020s, GAIA received some undefined transmission that separated her sub-functions from her, causing them to become self-aware and independent. The awakened HADES decided to destroy all life even though there’s no reason to, so GAIA attempted to stave it off by self-destructing her physical computer core, which housed her and all the sub-functions. Her sub-functions “escaped,” however. I didn’t quite get this – I’m unsure how software could “escape.” I guess they downloaded themselves into other, dormant systems (HADES, for example, housed itself inside that computer core Aloy found in the Eclipse base) so that when GAIA’s core exploded, they persisted.
The second part of GAIA’s plan was to use Elisabet Sobeck’s genetic information to grow a clone of her from the Cradle – this is Aloy. Yes, when I said everyone’s solution to everything in the game is Aloy, I meant it. GAIA’s final recording asks Aloy to go to GAIA Prime, the place that housed her, to retrieve the Master Override, which could purge her sub-functions. Why GAIA thinks the Master Override is still there and functional even though she just destroyed the facility, I don’t know (I mean, it is, but still). She also asks Aloy to rebuild GAIA Prime and reboot her, but doesn’t really tell her how, though, to be fair, I’m guessing those instructions would be pretty long.
Aloy returns to the Nora in the mountain. The High Matriarch who thought she was evil instantly begins groveling and begging for forgiveness. Eventually the Nora dub her “the Anointed” and try to worship her, but this pisses Aloy off and she tells them to cut it out and send fighters to Meridian in anticipation of the final battle. Note at this point she doesn’t know the final battle will take place at Meridian, so I’m assuming she’s just choosing a central location to gather allies.
Before we continue, let’s go all the way back to Odd Grata’s errand. Remember how Odd Grata never talks to Aloy, but instead talks to the goddess? In a weird and foreshadowing way, the game’s telling the player that Aloy is the goddess. And, well, she kind of isn’t, but she’s the closest to it. Don’t tell Aloy I said that. She hates being worshipped.
Acquired Taste
This mission. So…Aloy finds this Banuk guy, whose voice reminds me of Heath Ledger’s Joker, living in a hut in the middle of nowhere. The guy introduces himself as Brin and asks to smell Aloy’s fingers.
Umm, he also says he drinks machine fluid and asks Aloy to kill various machines, harvest bottles of their fluid, and bring them to him so he can drink them. Brin says this isn’t as weird as it sounds; he knows a tribe in the Forbidden West (basically, Nevada and California) that did this, but they disappeared.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 14: “Maybe because they all died?”
I waited until this late to do this side-quest because, somehow, each time you bring Brin machine fluid to drink, he gets a vision and the visions are kind of on point. He hints that Sawtooths, Stalkers, and Thunderjaws are newer machines (especially the Thunderjaw) and Corruptors are completely different. We know that last part is because Corruptors are Faro robots. We also know HEPHAESTUS built all the other ones, and the fact that the Derangement occurred around the time Aloy was born (right when GAIA got that unidentified signal) supports what Brin is saying – the newer, more heavily armed machines came about along with the Derangement.
The last machine Brin has Aloy kill for fluid is the Stormbird. This vision – apparently, of a terrible future in which Aloy is dead – spooks him and he leaves for the Forbidden West.
Traitor’s Bounty
Aloy returns to Sunfall! Why? I didn’t mention this, but a lady named Vanasha hit on Aloy and then asked to meet with her before Aloy entered the Zero Dawn facility. At that time, Bahavas (remember, the highest priest of the sun religion who fled with Helis after Meridian fell to Avad) put out a kill order for a high-ranking soldier named Uthid. Bahavas claimed he’s speaking on behalf of the Shadow Carja’s king, Itamen (Avad’s brother), but Itamen is a very young child, so it’s pretty clear Bahavas is just using him as a puppet. Now Aloy was kind of preoccupied since then, so now here we are.
Vanasha knows Uthid is innocent and wants Aloy to go save him. So she does, killing a bunch of mercenaries along the way, and eventually finds that Bahavas himself had gone to witness Uthid’s demise. He’s an idiot, because why make himself vulnerable, and after Aloy kills all of Bahavas’s guards, Uthid knifes him and I emptied another grenade launcher into his corpse.
Vanasha convinces Uthid to defect to Avad’s side. She also continually makes him very uncomfortable using her sexuality, something she will hilariously do from now until the end of the game.
Queen’s Gambit
Vanasha says that now that Bahavas is dead, there’s a power vacuum and absolute chaos at Sunfall. So, she wants to take the opportunity to get Itamen and his mother Nasadi out of Shadow Carja territory. She hired some guys to clear a path to the big river separating Shadow Carja territory from regular Carja territory, but wants Aloy to check on them, because…you don’t actually need me to explain, do you?
Her fears turn out to be well-justified, because Aloy finds that Vanasha’s hired squad is all dead save for their leader, Three-Toe Huadiv. They got ambushed by a Rockbreaker and Huadiv escaped with his life, but a rock smashed his penis or something. He’s sitting on a ridge outside the Rockbreaker’s range and doesn’t know what to do. Remember what I said about Rockbreakers? They’re easy if you find a ridge out of their range, because then you can just shoot them when they surface and dodge the rocks they throw at you. Aloy does exactly that and Crushed-Crotch Huadiv praises the miracle that is Aloy.
Vanasha, Itamen, and Nasadi appear, followed by Shadow Carja, who have brought along a corrupted Thunderjaw. I refer you to those inequalities I wrote above, and soon Itamen and Nasadi find themselves safely in regular Carja territory. Avad himself comes to welcome them, promises to protect them, and thanks Aloy for once again doing something momentous for his kingdom. Vanasha complains that “the redhead gets all the credit,” but admits that Aloy did indeed make this possible while hitting on her some more.
Newest line on Aloy’s résumé: dismantling corrupt regimes.
Healer’s Oath
As our last foray into Shadow Carja territory, Aloy returns to the slums and finds a sick little girl. The only healer around won’t help her because he doesn’t have enough supplies to help her and treat the soldiers whenever they go out, so he tells Aloy to go get a Thunderjaw Heart for him. I had like 3 already, so I gave one to him and made him treat the girl. If it’s any consolation to him, the Shadow Carja now have no figurehead leader, so they’re completely in chaos, and the game’s not even over yet.
The Mountain that Fell
Aloy goes to GAIA Prime and learns the last piece of the puzzle. Right near the end, one of the hatches to GAIA Prime didn’t close properly, meaning it was possible for the Faro robots to detect it. Elisabet went out and sealed it from the outside, sacrificing herself to save GAIA (and, by extension, all life).
After that, Ted Faro, using a backdoor, deleted all of APOLLO because he didn’t want posterity to have knowledge. Likely, he didn’t want them to learn that he was the one who destroyed the world. Remember how Herres unflinchingly insisted Elisabet record his last words? Faro’s nowhere the man Herres was, and because of him, humanity re-emerged way the hell more backward than intended. Fuck Ted Faro.
Aloy retrieves the Master Override and Sylens tells Aloy to affix it to a lance he built specifically for it. If Aloy stabs the computer core HADES is in with the lance + Master Override, it’ll allow her to use it to purge HADES. Only she can, because it’ll only respond to Elisabet Sobeck.
Sylens also reveals he was the one who first found HADES and founded the Eclipse. In exchange for HADES teaching him stuff like physics, he served it. Basically, HADES wants to conquer Meridian because Meridian is right next to the Spire, which is one of MINERVA’s transmission towers. He hopes to broadcast an activation order from the tower, reawakening the Faro robots so they can eat up the biosphere again. This is why Sylens brought HADES to the Shadow Carja and founded the Eclipse – this gave HADES command of an army keen on taking Meridian. HADES then tried to have Sylens killed for no reason, so he left the Eclipse, discovered Aloy, and realized she could solve everything.
Sylens leaves, saying everything’s up to Aloy now. Of course, everything’s been up to her this entire time anyway, so what else is new.
Ancient Armory
Aloy discovers a bunker and inside is an armor known as the Shield-Weaver, which project a protective force-field around the wearer. You need 5 power cells to access it, and they’re spread throughout the entire game, so you won’t get the Shield-Weaver until the very end. It’s a great armor to have, though I still prefer stealth play when possible.
The Looming Shadow and The Face of Extinction
Aloy returns to Meridian and warns Avad, assembling a group of allies to help defend the city and the Spire. Like I said, many show up specifically because of Aloy. In the battle itself, Helis first shows up, and he’s the penultimate boss fight. I hate this fight, not because it’s hard (it isn’t), but because you can tell the developers wrote themselves into a corner. After Aloy’s spent the game killing mobile armories and robot dinosaurs, she now needs to fight…a man. For him to put up a challenge, the developers gave him an assload of HP and the ability to block Aloy’s arrows with his bracers.
Besides the fact that I don’t believe a human, however strong he may be, can have the reaction time necessary to raise his arm to block an arrow shot at him, let’s consider some physics. Force is transmitted undiminished through a rigid object. If you leaned against a steel wall and something slammed into the wall, you’d feel it. This is why cars are designed such that they deform on impact – you want the force to go into deforming the outside of the car rather than transmit into the driver.
Aloy is shooting arrows that can pierce robot chassis. This means 2 things. One, her arrows are constructed very sturdily, with rigid metal tips. Two, her bow has very high draw weight. The minimum weight for a real-life bow if you want to hunt animals is circa 45 pounds, because you need a high weight to ensure that hitting the animal results in a clean and quick kill. Bows used for war could reach upwards of 150 pounds. So imagine someone shooting arrows with that kind of draw weight a few meters from you and you block the arrow with a metal cylinder around your wrist. That arrow will either (1) pierce right through the cylinder or (2) impact it, transmit force right through it, and liquify your arm.
Helis being any sort of challenge to Aloy really stretches the bounds of disbelief. I expected his boss fight to consist of him in some Old World mech or something. But no, it’s just him. Alternatively, it would’ve been funny to have him fight as effectively as most other human enemies do, which is to say Aloy takes him out easily. It’ll be anticlimactic, but that’s kind of the point. Helis was just a puppet this entire time. HADES doesn’t give a damn about him and his goal of retaking Meridian. HADES was just using him and his forces so HADES could kill the entire world. Helis is nothing.
Speaking of that, once you win the fight, you get to choose how to deal with Helis before killing him. You can pity him, which I didn’t, but is probably the most devastating attitude Aloy could show him at his end. You can also give him a scathing monologue about how he was too stupid to realize he was being used (above) before brutally impaling him with your spear, twisting it at the end to give him a painful death. The third option is to waste no time with him, telling him curtly that you have bigger things to worry about before fatally stabbing him and unceremoniously kicking him off your spear. I chose the second option, and it was so satisfying to put a final end to this fucker.
Aloy then joins the front. In this sequence, Eclipse forces march toward Meridian with all sorts of machines and you must defend the city with Petra’s grenade launchers. It’s a fun sequence, but the Eclipse do eventually smash through, and Aloy has to fall back to the Spire. HADES makes it there and begins transmitting. He sends a Deathbringer and a bunch of corrupted machines on Aloy, who has ~10 minutes to kill them all or the transmission finishes and the Faro robots awaken. The time limit is pretty generous – I didn’t even notice it the first time I played. Aloy then saves the world by using the Master Override to purge HADES.
In a sequel hook, we see that HADES wasn’t purged; instead, he was force-downloaded into some lantern thing held by…Sylens. This is why Sylens wanted Aloy to use his lance. He programmed it. This also raises some concerning possibilities about the Focus that he gave Aloy.
Into the Frozen Wilds
You’re technically supposed to do the expansion before the final mission, but I’m covering it separately here. Essentially, you go north from Nora territory to reach Banuk territory and encounter a Scorcher, one of the expansion’s new machines. This is meant to wake the player up – expansion enemies have way the hell more HP and do way the hell more damage compared to base game enemies.
Aloy emerges in Banuk territory, which is in modern-day Yellowstone National Park, around Old Faithful. She arrives just in time to see a weird ritual involving FUCKING GLINTHAWKS the Banuk are performing because they lost a bunch of their warriors at a place called Thunder’s Drum. The chieftain Aratak is planning a second expedition to Thunder’s Drum, but this is idiotic, since if they get wiped out the first time, how is the second time going to be any different?
A guy named Burgrend brings Aloy up to speed and advises her to find the clan’s shaman to learn more about the situation.
The Shaman’s Path
Aloy travels far to the north and finds the shaman, Ourea, who says she used to commune with a “spirit” at Thunder’s Drum, but it eventually stopped talking to her and some weird door appeared to seal the entrance to Thunder’s Drum. Aratak has forbidden anyone from going there, so Ourea asks Aloy to challenge Aratak for the position of chieftain so Aloy can rescind Aratak’s order. To do so, Aloy must first become “famous,” which involves doing a number of rather mundane tasks for her, such as clear a bandit camp or repair a Tallneck. Yes, these guys who pride themselves in being so tough they survive in a wintry environment…can’t kill a few bandits in 1 camp.
For the Werak
Aloy challenges Aratak. The challenge involves climbing a cliff, killing some machines, setting off a signal, climbing another cliff, killing some more machines, setting off a second signal, then descending into a final area to kill some more machines. The catch is that the trial is timed – Aloy needs to set off the signals before Aratak sets off his, or she loses.
Aratak gives Aloy a chance to back down and Aloy asks him to rescind the order against going to Thunder’s Drum. He refuses, so Aloy doesn’t back down, and he notes that she had her chance.
Aloy: “So did you.”
I hate timed missions. Luckily, only the first two trials apply; the third has Aloy and Aratak enter the final area, but the time limit gets cancelled because 3 Frostclaws attack, and that wasn’t supposed to happen. Frostclaws…are giant ice bears. As per usual in the expansion, they have a fuckload of HP and multiple ways of murdering the hell out of anyone and everyone. And you get to fight 3 of them at once without stealth. Huzzah.
Upon winning, Aratak claims that Aloy was the one who killed the Frostclaws and abdicates. Aloy rescinds the order and Aratak requests his new chieftain to allow him to accompany her and Ourea to Thunder’s Drum.
Another line in Aloy’s résumé: became chieftain of a Banuk clan.
Firebreak and The Forge of Winter
Aloy, Aratak, and Ourea go to Thunder’s Drum, where they find the Firebreak facility. Back before the Faro robots ate everything, a group of people built Firebreak and an AI named CYAN to govern it (this is Ourea’s “spirit”). CYAN’s job was to prevent the caldera under Yellowstone from erupting, and she succeeded, but then, well, the Faro thing happened, so her creators put her into hibernation and sealed the facility so Faro robots wouldn’t find it. This worked, and eventually life returned to the world, but then…that thing that separated GAIA’s sub-functions happened. And the awakened HEPHAESTUS decided that because humans were hunting his machines, he should cull humans. This explains the Derangement and why new machines, e.g. Thunderjaws began appearing. HEPHAESTUS wasn’t done, though, so he took over Firebreak and enslaved CYAN to build even more powerful machines (the “hunter-killer” class) to kill humans. Cue Scorchers, Frostclaws, and the final boss of the expansion, the Fireclaw. Fireclaws are giant fire bears. They’re actually slightly easier than Frostclaws are, in my opinion, because if you destroy 3 specific components, they acquire a permanent burn state and will slowly DOT to death. Frostclaws just acquire a permanent freeze state, meaning they take more damage from subsequent hits, but you still need to hit them, whereas for Fireclaws, you can just continually run away until they die.
Aloy frees CYAN, who destroys the Firebreak facility, shutting down HEPHAESTUS’s ability to build the new machines (they’ll still appear throughout the map, though). Aloy can converse with CYAN and get some lore, which is kind of cool. Aloy also abdicates the chieftain position back to Aratak, as she’s utterly uninterested in staying in the area to govern the clan.
Out of the Forge
There’s not much to this: Aloy has to kill 5 Fireclaws around the map. Unlike with the boss battle, you can stealth these, so it’s not bad.
The Claws Beneath
A guy approaches Aloy and asks her to help him fulfill a long-standing goal that he’s now too old to do and couldn’t do in the entirety of his youth. That goal?
Kill 1 Rockbreaker.
Now to be fair, this Rockbreaker fight doesn’t have an easy elevated-out-of-range place, but still.
The Survivor
This mission had one effect on me – demonstrating how idiotic the Banuk are. I’m assuming this isn’t intended. So essentially there’s a clan whose entrance exam is to go out into a cold mountain and survive there for 4 days and 4 nights without accepting aid from anyone. They reason that the founders of the Banuk tribe, in traveling north, once ended on that mountain and survived for 4 days and 4 nights before a blizzard or something subsided and they continued on. Obviously, nobody helped them, hence the rule that nobody can help the people undertaking the trial.
Aloy thinks this trial is stupid and goes out to the mountain, where she finds 2 survivors. One is searching for help because her friend, who has a broken leg, is refusing anyone’s help in accordance with the rules of the trial and is slowly succumbing to hypothermia.
So here’s the thing. Those ancestors? They probably helped one another. Nobody outside their group helped them (there wasn’t anyone around), but they supported each other, because of course they did. So the rule that you send a group of people into the mountains and they can’t help one another is idiotic. The lady with the broken leg is actually resentful that her friend searched for help. Are these people completely insane?
Frontier Justice
A guy stands accused of murdering a Carja guy, who demands justice. Banuk justice involves stripping the accused and exiling him to a mountain somewhere. If he manages to return, he’s declared innocent. Aloy investigates the situation, proves the Banuk guy was, in fact, innocent of the crime, but when she reports this to his clan’s chieftain, she doesn’t care – Banuk tradition only declares someone innocent if he survives the exile. Yeah, these people suck.
Aloy saves the Banuk guy, who leaves the clan because (see above). He’ll appear in the final battle if you finish this quest before it.
The Hunters Three
Burgrend (that guy from before who told Aloy what was going on with Thunder’s Drum) tells Aloy that 3 Banuk hunters owe him money and they’ve been trying to harvest machine parts to repay him, but they have no idea how to harvest machine parts. The Banuk just keep finding new ways to leave me utterly unimpressed, don’t they?
Aloy finds the trio, who are initially reluctant to accept her help, but they don’t really have a choice, so the 4 go to 3 different sites to harvest 3 different machine parts. Each time, they warm up to Aloy, and each time, they try to come up with a name for themselves. We’ve got the Bloody Snowdrifts, the Burning Turkeys, and honest to God the Sunshine Snowshoes. Finally, Aloy gets to name them; what name they end up with depends on player choice. You know what? I ended up liking these three.
Waterlogged
A Banuk musician tells Aloy that there’s this gigantic musical instrument near a river, but then the river suddenly grew much larger and flooded the instrument. As you might expect, this is because there’s a dam nearby and something happened to cause the water to flood the area.
That something is a fun fellow named Gildun. He went to the dam and promptly broke the control system. Aloy finds him locked behind a door. Now he has a lot of dialogue, so I kind of just sat there until I heard it all. He hears Aloy, is happy, then confused as to why she hasn’t saved him yet. He the hypothesizes that, in fact, he’s hearing not a human, but instead a Snapmaw. But a Snapmaw is too big to get to where he is, so clearly it’s a very small Snapmaw?
Gildun and Aloy work together to repair the dam, with Gildun telling jovial stories and Aloy deadpanning it up. It’s great. After you fix the dam and the water recedes, you find the musician…banging on some pipes. That was her musical instrument. A room full of water pipes. FUCK YOU TED FARO FOR MAKING EVERYONE SO STUPID.
A Secret Shared
Someone offers to upgrade Aloy’s magnificent spear if she gets some parts. Aloy puts it well:
Smart-ass Aloy moment 15: “Get a rail from some metal birds in a cave. Sounds perfectly normal.”
The cave turns out to be a drone hangar. Here’s a good place to mention a guy named Dod Blevins, who oversaw security at the Firebreak facility and was probably the biggest dick in the history of this game. Yes, he’s a bigger dick than Ted Faro was (which is to say he was, like, rude – he probably had an incredibly tiny dick that he was overcompensating for). He was a dick to everyone working in the area, and I mean everyone. He also thought terrorists would attack Yellowstone for no reason, so he insisted on military-grade drones for him. Eventually he went joyriding on a snowmobile and someone pranked him by switching some trail signs, so he went the wrong way and crashed into something and died. LOL.
Gearing Up
There are 3 quests here, each to upgrade one of the expansion-only weapons. They’re all short-range weapons, so I didn’t really use them, but it’s cute how excited the NPC upgrading the weapons gets.
And that’s the last quest I’m covering. Man this took awhile.
Moreover, people later tell Aloy that the cultists did, in fact, attack from outside Nora land, since the sentinels warned the villages and eventually had to fall back to the Embrace. But remember, there’s zero sign of any fighting or anything outside of that red zone, so the Eclipse marched to the Embrace without damaging anything or killing anyone? Didn’t Helis tell them to kill every Nora they saw?
Having Eclipse attack the Nora doesn’t really do anything to move the plot and it opens up some plot holes, as you can see, so why is it in the game? One could completely eliminate this segment and just have Aloy go to Nora land after escaping Sunfall – which she was going to do anyway, since she now has that registry she downloaded from the Zero Dawn base.
At any rate, Aloy kills her way through the Eclipse to Mother’s Watch, which is right outside the Nora sacred mountain. A bunch of surviving Nora are holed up inside the mountain while the Eclipse are trying to break in with a corrupted Thunderjaw. Once Aloy swoops into the scene, the Nora inside the mountain charge out to attack, since
[the Eclipse + a corrupted Thunderjaw] > [all the Nora warriors], but
[the Eclipse + a corrupted Thunderjaw] << [all the Nora warriors + Aloy].
It’s simple math. Aloy then goes into the mountain and finally enters the facility. It turns out to be a Cradle facility, where GAIA’s ELEUTHIA sub-function grew humans out of cryo-preserved zygotes. For some reason, the humans couldn’t access the computers that they would’ve used to learn from APOLLO. Eventually, the facility was forced to release the first generation of humans into the world with very little education once the facility ran out of food, hence the “voiced door is a goddess” and “let’s kill people because the sun is angry” belief systems rather than…something real.
Then comes the big revelation. Aloy finds a recording from GAIA. In the 3020s, GAIA received some undefined transmission that separated her sub-functions from her, causing them to become self-aware and independent. The awakened HADES decided to destroy all life even though there’s no reason to, so GAIA attempted to stave it off by self-destructing her physical computer core, which housed her and all the sub-functions. Her sub-functions “escaped,” however. I didn’t quite get this – I’m unsure how software could “escape.” I guess they downloaded themselves into other, dormant systems (HADES, for example, housed itself inside that computer core Aloy found in the Eclipse base) so that when GAIA’s core exploded, they persisted.
The second part of GAIA’s plan was to use Elisabet Sobeck’s genetic information to grow a clone of her from the Cradle – this is Aloy. Yes, when I said everyone’s solution to everything in the game is Aloy, I meant it. GAIA’s final recording asks Aloy to go to GAIA Prime, the place that housed her, to retrieve the Master Override, which could purge her sub-functions. Why GAIA thinks the Master Override is still there and functional even though she just destroyed the facility, I don’t know (I mean, it is, but still). She also asks Aloy to rebuild GAIA Prime and reboot her, but doesn’t really tell her how, though, to be fair, I’m guessing those instructions would be pretty long.
Aloy returns to the Nora in the mountain. The High Matriarch who thought she was evil instantly begins groveling and begging for forgiveness. Eventually the Nora dub her “the Anointed” and try to worship her, but this pisses Aloy off and she tells them to cut it out and send fighters to Meridian in anticipation of the final battle. Note at this point she doesn’t know the final battle will take place at Meridian, so I’m assuming she’s just choosing a central location to gather allies.
Before we continue, let’s go all the way back to Odd Grata’s errand. Remember how Odd Grata never talks to Aloy, but instead talks to the goddess? In a weird and foreshadowing way, the game’s telling the player that Aloy is the goddess. And, well, she kind of isn’t, but she’s the closest to it. Don’t tell Aloy I said that. She hates being worshipped.
Acquired Taste
This mission. So…Aloy finds this Banuk guy, whose voice reminds me of Heath Ledger’s Joker, living in a hut in the middle of nowhere. The guy introduces himself as Brin and asks to smell Aloy’s fingers.
Umm, he also says he drinks machine fluid and asks Aloy to kill various machines, harvest bottles of their fluid, and bring them to him so he can drink them. Brin says this isn’t as weird as it sounds; he knows a tribe in the Forbidden West (basically, Nevada and California) that did this, but they disappeared.
Smart-ass Aloy moment 14: “Maybe because they all died?”
I waited until this late to do this side-quest because, somehow, each time you bring Brin machine fluid to drink, he gets a vision and the visions are kind of on point. He hints that Sawtooths, Stalkers, and Thunderjaws are newer machines (especially the Thunderjaw) and Corruptors are completely different. We know that last part is because Corruptors are Faro robots. We also know HEPHAESTUS built all the other ones, and the fact that the Derangement occurred around the time Aloy was born (right when GAIA got that unidentified signal) supports what Brin is saying – the newer, more heavily armed machines came about along with the Derangement.
The last machine Brin has Aloy kill for fluid is the Stormbird. This vision – apparently, of a terrible future in which Aloy is dead – spooks him and he leaves for the Forbidden West.
Traitor’s Bounty
Aloy returns to Sunfall! Why? I didn’t mention this, but a lady named Vanasha hit on Aloy and then asked to meet with her before Aloy entered the Zero Dawn facility. At that time, Bahavas (remember, the highest priest of the sun religion who fled with Helis after Meridian fell to Avad) put out a kill order for a high-ranking soldier named Uthid. Bahavas claimed he’s speaking on behalf of the Shadow Carja’s king, Itamen (Avad’s brother), but Itamen is a very young child, so it’s pretty clear Bahavas is just using him as a puppet. Now Aloy was kind of preoccupied since then, so now here we are.
Vanasha knows Uthid is innocent and wants Aloy to go save him. So she does, killing a bunch of mercenaries along the way, and eventually finds that Bahavas himself had gone to witness Uthid’s demise. He’s an idiot, because why make himself vulnerable, and after Aloy kills all of Bahavas’s guards, Uthid knifes him and I emptied another grenade launcher into his corpse.
Vanasha convinces Uthid to defect to Avad’s side. She also continually makes him very uncomfortable using her sexuality, something she will hilariously do from now until the end of the game.
Queen’s Gambit
Vanasha says that now that Bahavas is dead, there’s a power vacuum and absolute chaos at Sunfall. So, she wants to take the opportunity to get Itamen and his mother Nasadi out of Shadow Carja territory. She hired some guys to clear a path to the big river separating Shadow Carja territory from regular Carja territory, but wants Aloy to check on them, because…you don’t actually need me to explain, do you?
Her fears turn out to be well-justified, because Aloy finds that Vanasha’s hired squad is all dead save for their leader, Three-Toe Huadiv. They got ambushed by a Rockbreaker and Huadiv escaped with his life, but a rock smashed his penis or something. He’s sitting on a ridge outside the Rockbreaker’s range and doesn’t know what to do. Remember what I said about Rockbreakers? They’re easy if you find a ridge out of their range, because then you can just shoot them when they surface and dodge the rocks they throw at you. Aloy does exactly that and Crushed-Crotch Huadiv praises the miracle that is Aloy.
Vanasha, Itamen, and Nasadi appear, followed by Shadow Carja, who have brought along a corrupted Thunderjaw. I refer you to those inequalities I wrote above, and soon Itamen and Nasadi find themselves safely in regular Carja territory. Avad himself comes to welcome them, promises to protect them, and thanks Aloy for once again doing something momentous for his kingdom. Vanasha complains that “the redhead gets all the credit,” but admits that Aloy did indeed make this possible while hitting on her some more.
Newest line on Aloy’s résumé: dismantling corrupt regimes.
Healer’s Oath
As our last foray into Shadow Carja territory, Aloy returns to the slums and finds a sick little girl. The only healer around won’t help her because he doesn’t have enough supplies to help her and treat the soldiers whenever they go out, so he tells Aloy to go get a Thunderjaw Heart for him. I had like 3 already, so I gave one to him and made him treat the girl. If it’s any consolation to him, the Shadow Carja now have no figurehead leader, so they’re completely in chaos, and the game’s not even over yet.
The Mountain that Fell
Aloy goes to GAIA Prime and learns the last piece of the puzzle. Right near the end, one of the hatches to GAIA Prime didn’t close properly, meaning it was possible for the Faro robots to detect it. Elisabet went out and sealed it from the outside, sacrificing herself to save GAIA (and, by extension, all life).
After that, Ted Faro, using a backdoor, deleted all of APOLLO because he didn’t want posterity to have knowledge. Likely, he didn’t want them to learn that he was the one who destroyed the world. Remember how Herres unflinchingly insisted Elisabet record his last words? Faro’s nowhere the man Herres was, and because of him, humanity re-emerged way the hell more backward than intended. Fuck Ted Faro.
Aloy retrieves the Master Override and Sylens tells Aloy to affix it to a lance he built specifically for it. If Aloy stabs the computer core HADES is in with the lance + Master Override, it’ll allow her to use it to purge HADES. Only she can, because it’ll only respond to Elisabet Sobeck.
Sylens also reveals he was the one who first found HADES and founded the Eclipse. In exchange for HADES teaching him stuff like physics, he served it. Basically, HADES wants to conquer Meridian because Meridian is right next to the Spire, which is one of MINERVA’s transmission towers. He hopes to broadcast an activation order from the tower, reawakening the Faro robots so they can eat up the biosphere again. This is why Sylens brought HADES to the Shadow Carja and founded the Eclipse – this gave HADES command of an army keen on taking Meridian. HADES then tried to have Sylens killed for no reason, so he left the Eclipse, discovered Aloy, and realized she could solve everything.
Sylens leaves, saying everything’s up to Aloy now. Of course, everything’s been up to her this entire time anyway, so what else is new.
Ancient Armory
Aloy discovers a bunker and inside is an armor known as the Shield-Weaver, which project a protective force-field around the wearer. You need 5 power cells to access it, and they’re spread throughout the entire game, so you won’t get the Shield-Weaver until the very end. It’s a great armor to have, though I still prefer stealth play when possible.
The Looming Shadow and The Face of Extinction
Aloy returns to Meridian and warns Avad, assembling a group of allies to help defend the city and the Spire. Like I said, many show up specifically because of Aloy. In the battle itself, Helis first shows up, and he’s the penultimate boss fight. I hate this fight, not because it’s hard (it isn’t), but because you can tell the developers wrote themselves into a corner. After Aloy’s spent the game killing mobile armories and robot dinosaurs, she now needs to fight…a man. For him to put up a challenge, the developers gave him an assload of HP and the ability to block Aloy’s arrows with his bracers.
Besides the fact that I don’t believe a human, however strong he may be, can have the reaction time necessary to raise his arm to block an arrow shot at him, let’s consider some physics. Force is transmitted undiminished through a rigid object. If you leaned against a steel wall and something slammed into the wall, you’d feel it. This is why cars are designed such that they deform on impact – you want the force to go into deforming the outside of the car rather than transmit into the driver.
Aloy is shooting arrows that can pierce robot chassis. This means 2 things. One, her arrows are constructed very sturdily, with rigid metal tips. Two, her bow has very high draw weight. The minimum weight for a real-life bow if you want to hunt animals is circa 45 pounds, because you need a high weight to ensure that hitting the animal results in a clean and quick kill. Bows used for war could reach upwards of 150 pounds. So imagine someone shooting arrows with that kind of draw weight a few meters from you and you block the arrow with a metal cylinder around your wrist. That arrow will either (1) pierce right through the cylinder or (2) impact it, transmit force right through it, and liquify your arm.
Helis being any sort of challenge to Aloy really stretches the bounds of disbelief. I expected his boss fight to consist of him in some Old World mech or something. But no, it’s just him. Alternatively, it would’ve been funny to have him fight as effectively as most other human enemies do, which is to say Aloy takes him out easily. It’ll be anticlimactic, but that’s kind of the point. Helis was just a puppet this entire time. HADES doesn’t give a damn about him and his goal of retaking Meridian. HADES was just using him and his forces so HADES could kill the entire world. Helis is nothing.
Speaking of that, once you win the fight, you get to choose how to deal with Helis before killing him. You can pity him, which I didn’t, but is probably the most devastating attitude Aloy could show him at his end. You can also give him a scathing monologue about how he was too stupid to realize he was being used (above) before brutally impaling him with your spear, twisting it at the end to give him a painful death. The third option is to waste no time with him, telling him curtly that you have bigger things to worry about before fatally stabbing him and unceremoniously kicking him off your spear. I chose the second option, and it was so satisfying to put a final end to this fucker.
Aloy then joins the front. In this sequence, Eclipse forces march toward Meridian with all sorts of machines and you must defend the city with Petra’s grenade launchers. It’s a fun sequence, but the Eclipse do eventually smash through, and Aloy has to fall back to the Spire. HADES makes it there and begins transmitting. He sends a Deathbringer and a bunch of corrupted machines on Aloy, who has ~10 minutes to kill them all or the transmission finishes and the Faro robots awaken. The time limit is pretty generous – I didn’t even notice it the first time I played. Aloy then saves the world by using the Master Override to purge HADES.
In a sequel hook, we see that HADES wasn’t purged; instead, he was force-downloaded into some lantern thing held by…Sylens. This is why Sylens wanted Aloy to use his lance. He programmed it. This also raises some concerning possibilities about the Focus that he gave Aloy.
Into the Frozen Wilds
You’re technically supposed to do the expansion before the final mission, but I’m covering it separately here. Essentially, you go north from Nora territory to reach Banuk territory and encounter a Scorcher, one of the expansion’s new machines. This is meant to wake the player up – expansion enemies have way the hell more HP and do way the hell more damage compared to base game enemies.
Aloy emerges in Banuk territory, which is in modern-day Yellowstone National Park, around Old Faithful. She arrives just in time to see a weird ritual involving FUCKING GLINTHAWKS the Banuk are performing because they lost a bunch of their warriors at a place called Thunder’s Drum. The chieftain Aratak is planning a second expedition to Thunder’s Drum, but this is idiotic, since if they get wiped out the first time, how is the second time going to be any different?
A guy named Burgrend brings Aloy up to speed and advises her to find the clan’s shaman to learn more about the situation.
The Shaman’s Path
Aloy travels far to the north and finds the shaman, Ourea, who says she used to commune with a “spirit” at Thunder’s Drum, but it eventually stopped talking to her and some weird door appeared to seal the entrance to Thunder’s Drum. Aratak has forbidden anyone from going there, so Ourea asks Aloy to challenge Aratak for the position of chieftain so Aloy can rescind Aratak’s order. To do so, Aloy must first become “famous,” which involves doing a number of rather mundane tasks for her, such as clear a bandit camp or repair a Tallneck. Yes, these guys who pride themselves in being so tough they survive in a wintry environment…can’t kill a few bandits in 1 camp.
For the Werak
Aloy challenges Aratak. The challenge involves climbing a cliff, killing some machines, setting off a signal, climbing another cliff, killing some more machines, setting off a second signal, then descending into a final area to kill some more machines. The catch is that the trial is timed – Aloy needs to set off the signals before Aratak sets off his, or she loses.
Aratak gives Aloy a chance to back down and Aloy asks him to rescind the order against going to Thunder’s Drum. He refuses, so Aloy doesn’t back down, and he notes that she had her chance.
Aloy: “So did you.”
I hate timed missions. Luckily, only the first two trials apply; the third has Aloy and Aratak enter the final area, but the time limit gets cancelled because 3 Frostclaws attack, and that wasn’t supposed to happen. Frostclaws…are giant ice bears. As per usual in the expansion, they have a fuckload of HP and multiple ways of murdering the hell out of anyone and everyone. And you get to fight 3 of them at once without stealth. Huzzah.
Upon winning, Aratak claims that Aloy was the one who killed the Frostclaws and abdicates. Aloy rescinds the order and Aratak requests his new chieftain to allow him to accompany her and Ourea to Thunder’s Drum.
Another line in Aloy’s résumé: became chieftain of a Banuk clan.
Firebreak and The Forge of Winter
Aloy, Aratak, and Ourea go to Thunder’s Drum, where they find the Firebreak facility. Back before the Faro robots ate everything, a group of people built Firebreak and an AI named CYAN to govern it (this is Ourea’s “spirit”). CYAN’s job was to prevent the caldera under Yellowstone from erupting, and she succeeded, but then, well, the Faro thing happened, so her creators put her into hibernation and sealed the facility so Faro robots wouldn’t find it. This worked, and eventually life returned to the world, but then…that thing that separated GAIA’s sub-functions happened. And the awakened HEPHAESTUS decided that because humans were hunting his machines, he should cull humans. This explains the Derangement and why new machines, e.g. Thunderjaws began appearing. HEPHAESTUS wasn’t done, though, so he took over Firebreak and enslaved CYAN to build even more powerful machines (the “hunter-killer” class) to kill humans. Cue Scorchers, Frostclaws, and the final boss of the expansion, the Fireclaw. Fireclaws are giant fire bears. They’re actually slightly easier than Frostclaws are, in my opinion, because if you destroy 3 specific components, they acquire a permanent burn state and will slowly DOT to death. Frostclaws just acquire a permanent freeze state, meaning they take more damage from subsequent hits, but you still need to hit them, whereas for Fireclaws, you can just continually run away until they die.
Aloy frees CYAN, who destroys the Firebreak facility, shutting down HEPHAESTUS’s ability to build the new machines (they’ll still appear throughout the map, though). Aloy can converse with CYAN and get some lore, which is kind of cool. Aloy also abdicates the chieftain position back to Aratak, as she’s utterly uninterested in staying in the area to govern the clan.
Out of the Forge
There’s not much to this: Aloy has to kill 5 Fireclaws around the map. Unlike with the boss battle, you can stealth these, so it’s not bad.
The Claws Beneath
A guy approaches Aloy and asks her to help him fulfill a long-standing goal that he’s now too old to do and couldn’t do in the entirety of his youth. That goal?
Kill 1 Rockbreaker.
Now to be fair, this Rockbreaker fight doesn’t have an easy elevated-out-of-range place, but still.
The Survivor
This mission had one effect on me – demonstrating how idiotic the Banuk are. I’m assuming this isn’t intended. So essentially there’s a clan whose entrance exam is to go out into a cold mountain and survive there for 4 days and 4 nights without accepting aid from anyone. They reason that the founders of the Banuk tribe, in traveling north, once ended on that mountain and survived for 4 days and 4 nights before a blizzard or something subsided and they continued on. Obviously, nobody helped them, hence the rule that nobody can help the people undertaking the trial.
Aloy thinks this trial is stupid and goes out to the mountain, where she finds 2 survivors. One is searching for help because her friend, who has a broken leg, is refusing anyone’s help in accordance with the rules of the trial and is slowly succumbing to hypothermia.
So here’s the thing. Those ancestors? They probably helped one another. Nobody outside their group helped them (there wasn’t anyone around), but they supported each other, because of course they did. So the rule that you send a group of people into the mountains and they can’t help one another is idiotic. The lady with the broken leg is actually resentful that her friend searched for help. Are these people completely insane?
Frontier Justice
A guy stands accused of murdering a Carja guy, who demands justice. Banuk justice involves stripping the accused and exiling him to a mountain somewhere. If he manages to return, he’s declared innocent. Aloy investigates the situation, proves the Banuk guy was, in fact, innocent of the crime, but when she reports this to his clan’s chieftain, she doesn’t care – Banuk tradition only declares someone innocent if he survives the exile. Yeah, these people suck.
Aloy saves the Banuk guy, who leaves the clan because (see above). He’ll appear in the final battle if you finish this quest before it.
The Hunters Three
Burgrend (that guy from before who told Aloy what was going on with Thunder’s Drum) tells Aloy that 3 Banuk hunters owe him money and they’ve been trying to harvest machine parts to repay him, but they have no idea how to harvest machine parts. The Banuk just keep finding new ways to leave me utterly unimpressed, don’t they?
Aloy finds the trio, who are initially reluctant to accept her help, but they don’t really have a choice, so the 4 go to 3 different sites to harvest 3 different machine parts. Each time, they warm up to Aloy, and each time, they try to come up with a name for themselves. We’ve got the Bloody Snowdrifts, the Burning Turkeys, and honest to God the Sunshine Snowshoes. Finally, Aloy gets to name them; what name they end up with depends on player choice. You know what? I ended up liking these three.
Waterlogged
A Banuk musician tells Aloy that there’s this gigantic musical instrument near a river, but then the river suddenly grew much larger and flooded the instrument. As you might expect, this is because there’s a dam nearby and something happened to cause the water to flood the area.
That something is a fun fellow named Gildun. He went to the dam and promptly broke the control system. Aloy finds him locked behind a door. Now he has a lot of dialogue, so I kind of just sat there until I heard it all. He hears Aloy, is happy, then confused as to why she hasn’t saved him yet. He the hypothesizes that, in fact, he’s hearing not a human, but instead a Snapmaw. But a Snapmaw is too big to get to where he is, so clearly it’s a very small Snapmaw?
Gildun and Aloy work together to repair the dam, with Gildun telling jovial stories and Aloy deadpanning it up. It’s great. After you fix the dam and the water recedes, you find the musician…banging on some pipes. That was her musical instrument. A room full of water pipes. FUCK YOU TED FARO FOR MAKING EVERYONE SO STUPID.
A Secret Shared
Someone offers to upgrade Aloy’s magnificent spear if she gets some parts. Aloy puts it well:
Smart-ass Aloy moment 15: “Get a rail from some metal birds in a cave. Sounds perfectly normal.”
The cave turns out to be a drone hangar. Here’s a good place to mention a guy named Dod Blevins, who oversaw security at the Firebreak facility and was probably the biggest dick in the history of this game. Yes, he’s a bigger dick than Ted Faro was (which is to say he was, like, rude – he probably had an incredibly tiny dick that he was overcompensating for). He was a dick to everyone working in the area, and I mean everyone. He also thought terrorists would attack Yellowstone for no reason, so he insisted on military-grade drones for him. Eventually he went joyriding on a snowmobile and someone pranked him by switching some trail signs, so he went the wrong way and crashed into something and died. LOL.
Gearing Up
There are 3 quests here, each to upgrade one of the expansion-only weapons. They’re all short-range weapons, so I didn’t really use them, but it’s cute how excited the NPC upgrading the weapons gets.
And that’s the last quest I’m covering. Man this took awhile.