Horizon Forbidden West feels overly polished. Like they brought in the best people to improve things but the end result is like eating 12 courses of the same perfectly prepared chicken breast. It’s good but feels like it’s missing something the guest had. Its story isn’t bad, you feel urgency and care about the characters. There’s powerful moments. It checks the boxes. But this gives the game a dramatically different feel from the first.

HZD seemed to generate a lot of discussion about how it’s a great science fiction story, and it is, but it’s also a really dark tale that feels hopeless even when you know how it ultimately plays out. It told two very different stories side by side and one of them was a history in our future that was utterly bleak and it told you in a way that held little back. It truly felt like every time you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. And then Ted Faro murdered the Zero Dawn architects and deleted all of the teaching data thus dooming an entire world of unborn children to a life free from safety, food security, needless infant mortality, medicine and reading. All to hide his shame from a future he wouldn’t even be alive in. And then we learned he got to go live in his bunker while Elisabet suffocated to death in front of her childhood home. It was infuriating but fitting.

There’s bits of that sprinkled throughout Forbidden West but they’re not given the stage.