The reviewer’s guide to Horizon Forbidden West has a number of details about what plot points to avoid spoiling. This includes one character “whose relationship with Aloy forms the heart and soul of the game,” according to Sony. It’s still early days for such a huge game, but it’s time. We have to talk about this.
Major spoilers for Horizon Forbidden West follow.
In the first game, Horizon Zero Dawn, Aloy is largely isolated. She starts the game as an outcast from the Nora, and just as she gains some acceptance from the group, she leaves the valley of her birth to venture out into a world where she’s even more of an outsider.
This makes Aloy an interesting protagonist, allowing us to learn about the people, customs, alliances, and rivalries of this world through her eyes. But it also gives her a bit of what you might call Commander Shepard Syndrome: She becomes a character who muscles through everything from firefights to political conflict with little more than a sidearm because, well, she’s the main character.
From the start of Horizon Forbidden West, the game’s narrative asks us to question this dynamic. Well, a bit, anyway. This is still an open-world video game, and those are never going to have massive, intractable conflicts between rival groups that can’t be easily resolved by pounding a table really hard or putting an arrow through one bad person.
But on a personal level, Forbidden West forces Aloy to confront her “I can do it on my own” mindset. Varl, one of her friends from the previous game, follows her as she travels the wilderness looking for a new GAIA, the AI-powered terraforming system that can heal the world. In exchange, Aloy repeatedly tries to ditch Varl during the night, a tactic he’s grown tediously used to at this point.
At one point, I had to pause the game to take a screenshot of a line of Varl’s dialog that was so blunt I could smoke it. Varl, trying once again to get Aloy to accept help from the characters that are already helping her a ton anyway, says, “Look, allies—friends—can help.”
