Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is an excellent way to revisit one of Sony’s best open-world adventures.
From The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered to Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, PlayStation Studios has not been shy about regurgitating its older games on current-gen consoles with a suite of slight, but admittedly tantalising upgrades. The latest of these remasters is Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, a visual and technical repaint of Guerrilla Games’ sci-fi open-world game of the same name, which proved to be iconic enough to instantly add a new mascot to the PlayStation family in the form of its sharpshooting protagonist Aloy.
Two years after the release of Horizon Forbidden West, Guerrilla Games and Nixxes Software have decided to bring the original 2017 title up to par with its sequel visually. Is it worth the $10 upgrade, or should you just pick up the original for cheaper instead?
A story worth experiencing at least once
Guerrilla Games has a tendency to release new Horizon games at the worst possible time - Horizon Zero Dawn famously launched around the same time as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and its sequel Horizon Forbidden West launched a week before Elden Ring. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered continues a frankly hilarious pattern by launching in the same week as Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Life is Strange: Double Exposure. None of that has anything to do with this review, but I feel an inexplicable need to connect those dots anyway.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered sees Guerrilla Games and Nixxes Software revisit one of the best open-world games PlayStation Studios has put out to date: Horizon Zero Dawn, a sci-fi post-apocalypse game set in the far-flung future, where humanity has regressed to primitivity under mysterious circumstances. Futuristic robotic animals roam the Earth but skyscrapers lie shattered on soil, surrounded by rusty cars and broken pavement. Mysterious laboratories contain unfathomably advanced technology, but they’ve been locked away and hidden in places where few human beings dare to venture. Civilisation has been broken down into tribes and factions who at best, maintain outright hostility towards one another, and at worst, avoid communicating at all. How can this be?
At the core of this mystery is a young redheaded adventurer named Aloy, who is cast out from the technology-fearing Nora tribe at birth, and raised to survive and fight back against the horrors of a machine-dominated world by a gruff hunter named Rost. Aloy eventually sets out to find answers about how this strange world came to be, and explore places far beyond the scope of her own imagination all across post-apocalyptic America.
While the visuals have seen an enticing facelift, the story of Horizon Zero Dawn hits just as hard as it did in 2017. This campaign is a surprisingly compelling adventure that dripfeeds the mysterious origin of this world to the player over the course of a roughly 22-40 hour story (depending on your level of completionism), with a jigsaw puzzle-like story that lures players towards the finish line, one piece at a time.
The journey is completely worthwhile; Aloy’s story is more personal than she thinks, and being with her every step of the way allows certain revelations to hit much harder.
As far as protagonists go however, I’d argue that Aloy hadn’t found her footing yet in this title. It’s a little strange to go back to this version of her – a younger and more naive Aloy, with a performance that's played in a slightly higher key by a still-fantastic Ashly Burch. Forbidden West’s Aloy is far more jaded and confident and her character arc feels much more coherent – starting off the game with a stubborn hero complex and ending it with friends on her side. In this game, Aloy hardly goes through a personal arc at all. She learns things about her world little by little, and then the game ends.
A breathtaking visual upgrade
While not much has changed in the story department for Horizon Zero Dawn in this remaster, the visuals department has seen a marked upgrade. This world looks almost indistinguishable to Horizon Forbidden West’s now, making for a much smoother transition to the sequel and vice versa.
Foliage is denser and more realistic in this remaster, but other material textures (like those used for structural walls, rocky cliff sides and clear lakes) appear much more detailed thanks to longer draw distances, and more polished work on terrain in general. Rocks look less like big chunky blobs now for example, and grass is more realistically drawn on more surfaces, the latter now accompanied by little pebbles and swathes of moss.
The remaster also incorporates technological advancements made in later Horizon releases, including this game’s The Frozen Wilds expansion, which included snow deformation. We all remember those GIFs of Aloy endlessly rolling around in snow to carve out patterns - and now you can do that pretty much anywhere in this remaster, even in sand. Horizon Forbidden West’s The Burning Shores expansion also introduced a more realistic cloud system, and that’s been retroactively applied to the first game’s cloudscapes. This is all in addition to the new lighting improvements, detailed character models and more changes made to the original’s aesthetics.
All of this comes together to make a new playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn feel like a genuine breath of fresh air. Yes, the original game still looks incredible – but this looks even better by every possible metric. It’s difficult to complain about how unnecessary it feels when it has, thanks to every new change and additional level of polish, a much more immersive world and adventure than before.
All addition, no subtraction. And of course, it runs beautifully on the PlayStation 5 – with faster loading times and different performance modes depending on whether players want to prioritise framerate, resolution or a compromise between the two. I did run into a bug when starting up a New Game+ playthrough (you can still import saves over from the PlayStation 4, which is nice), where I was met with an endless black screen. Fortunately, rebooting the game solved this issue. I also noticed another strange visual bug where the colour of foliage around Aloy would change from green to a straw-like brown the closer she got to it. Strange and immersion-breaking, but otherwise unobtrusive.
The most significant change is the game’s updated character models, which feature more lifelike faces, hair and outfits. The added detail is extraordinary, even if most of it appears to originate from a simple palette swap from Forbidden West. Some of it goes a lot deeper, however.
One of the original game’s most significant criticisms has been addressed in this remaster: its robotic NPC conversations. Before, the characters Aloy met while ticking off sidequests and completing collectathons were soulless creatures with dated animations and poor lipsync hampering their dialogue cutscenes. This remaster reportedly has over 10 hours of additional motion capture footage to fix that problem, allowing NPCs to move and talk more like real people – to an extent.
Characters like Rost may seem more lifelike and believable, which is great, considering how important they are to Aloy’s journey. Other side characters, like Teb, certainly look better – but not by very much. They still wave their arms around in conversation like puppets on strings, and while their gaze may be fixated upon Aloy, it’s clear that they don't see anything at all. These characters stick out rather unfortunately, considering the renewed beauty of their surroundings.
Verdict
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is an excellent way to experience a PlayStation-exclusive classic, especially now that it’s no longer PlayStation-exclusive at all. The world in which Aloy carves out a path for herself is breathtakingly immersive at every turn, inviting you to touch every crevice, climb every mountain and complete every sidequest simply to see more of it.
Aloy herself might not be a compelling protagonist on this adventure, but it’s fun to revisit her in her most inquisitive and hopeful stage of life, where curiosity beckons her forward just as it does to the player.
The story of Horizon Zero Dawn has aged well; a harrowing lesson of what we might become if our capitalistic and industrial innovations are left to flourish unchecked, but also a hopeful tale of a civilisation that can’t help but bounce back from cycles of disaster, even those of their own making. While Aloy’s first adventure might still be fresh on the minds of fans who aren’t ready to go through it all over again just yet, newcomers will find that this remaster is the absolute best way to experience it for themselves.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered is out now on PlayStation 5 and PC. We received a copy of the game for this review.
