I have been playing some more games, and I'd like to comment of them.
The first one of them is one that I've been replaying now but I actually finished last year and a half or so, and it created a big impact on me. Somehow the story and the characters felt very real and well-made. The game is called Horizon: Zero Dawn, and recently they made a second part, that I'll also explain a bit at some point.
Let's start with general mechanics: The game is an open world sandbox style of game, where you play as Aloy, a girl from a primitive tribe. The game is based on sneaking around and using bow and arrows mostly in order to debilitate and kill the enemies, which can be other humans or machines that look and behave like animals. You gather resources from killings, can craft ammo, potions and traps, and has also some close-combat mechanics with a spear. There's some skill trees where you can get upgrades as you level up, and it has a strange healing mechanic where you collect herbs and use them to transform them into health, as if they're communicating fluids somehow. Early on you gain the skill to scan your surroundings to find enemies and items and analyse their path and weaknesses, and a bit later you also get a skill to "hack" some of the machines in order to gain control of them. The animal machines tend to have differentiated parts that you can target, and you usually use this to target weak parts with specialised arrows that damage more that part, in order to weaken the machine or remove some of their weapons. Later on you do get more specialised bows and some specific weapons, like one that lets you put traps or another ones that ropes down machines. You can buy and sell things, and there's mods you can apply to armour and weapons to improve them, with different rarity and power. All in all some original ideas but nothing groundbreaking either. You're gathering resources as you find them and kill things and build more stuff and level up, in a kind of flow that is nice and feels fun most of the time, as you explore the world. You can climb some places but not everything, they're special marks where you can do it and usually they indicate a certain path you need to follow as you move up.
The graphics are really great, with different types of regions including jungles, deserts and snowy mountains, and you're always surrounded by nature, being able to gather resources by hunting too. The machines are beautiful and original, just copies of real animals but in a robot format, and how they behave, the lights they emit and how they move and react it's really cool, and definitely one of the big selling points of the game. Some are like current animals but others are like dinosaurs, with the most fancy one being a T-Rex in machine form and full of weapons. The game is set in what appears to be a post-apocalyptical setting, but at first you don't know anything, you just see there's ruins of buildings, of cities and towns, and there's sometimes caves where there's facilities with old advanced technology while you're just using a spear and bow. People seem to live in little towns without modern technology, but the ruins hold more advanced stuff.
To get you into moving around in this world, you find quests talking to people, where they ask you to find something or help them with something, where you use your scanning device, called focus, and find things that cannot be found without this technology. Quest tend to be interesting, although sometimes the middle of the quests adds some machines to kill to add action, when I think just the quest as they are would be nice enough and there's no need to make you kill enemies, but I know big companies tend to think that if you're not killing stuff the game will be boring and they force developers to add fights in the middle, so oh well.
Anyway, all this is not that special, just quite nice and expected form a modern big game, apart from the machines that are amazing.
Where I think they made a huge difference is in the plot. I loved the plot, the world-building and the twists and surprises.
So, in the game you're Aloy, who is from a tribe, the Nora, that are particularly closed and not accepting of modernities, very traditional. You have lived apart from them all your life because you were born without a mother, one of the ancient abandoned ruins one day made a baby appear out of nowhere, and they were superstitious about it and thought that was evil somehow, because they're matriarchal and a person without a mother cannot be a good sign. Another shunned person raises you and becomes your dad, and in the process you find a special ancient device that lets you read and learn stuff about the ancient civilisation (our civilization but in the future) that somehow got killed for unknown reasons.
Don't want to spoil too much of the story itself, but once you manage to leave that first closed area and explore more ruins with your device, you learn that some capitalistic CEO idiot made an army of automated killer robots that feed on organic matter for fuel and self-replication, and then was unable to stop them. However some humans started a massive project, Zero Dawn, to try and do something about it.
Since you see that there's humans, vegetation, and some small animals the world seems fine now, but there's also the machine robots, of course, that seem to be performing tasks of bigger animals that are no longer present in this world. So, you assume something was done that worked.
As you investigate, you see that people thought Zero Dawn was a weapon, but eventually discover that it was just a project to create underground facilities that hid AI-controlled storages that would be able to kickstart life back on earth, including humans, after everything on the top got killed. And the last people just did their best to try and save as many species, data and people as they could, knowing they wouldn't get to see it. And the world did end, it's just the project worked enough to restore life.
There's another plot on top of this as things happen nowadays that are threatening everybody in the world again, but this setting I found it amazing, very sci-fi, very anti-capitalistic, and I don't know, it was an experience to see what had been done in this world and how it made sense and created an incredible sci-fi apocalypse story while remaining positive and encouraging.
Then there's the fact that Aloy herself is charismatic, nice and funny and smart, and several characters you encounter also feel well-developed and interesting. You feel this is a group of people you wanna help and improve things, and the general tone is very positive, even when things seems quite bad and hopeless. I also loved how progressive is everything that happens on the game, where foolish traditions and prejudice are frowned upon and marked as stupid since the beginning.
As you move around the world and discover different societies, their styles, their customs, and uncover more and more information the game sets up a very interesting premise and world-building that kind of makes sense, while keeping things epic enough.
The game also manages to end the current plot in a satisfactory manner, while leaving details to solve and discover in future sequels and letting you made theories about what happened and what's going to happen.
In an era of game clones and repetitions, this game felt very original, very fresh and hopeful and full of life, and I loved it. It definitely influenced me in wanting to get a PS5 so I could play more of it. Definitely worth playing.
