Written by Jordan Coolbeth

Art by Christopher Chapman

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

Imagine your favorite post-apocalyptic game. Fallout maybe? The Last of Us? The world is ending, people are dying, and you’re just trying to survive. Have you ever wondered what happens afterwards? When the threat is dealt with, the main characters are all safe, and the world finally starts to rebuild itself? That is the story of Horizon: Zero Dawn.

– In case you didn’t notice the title, spoilers ahead! –

Horizon: Zero Dawn is Guerrilla Games’s second major title. Their first was Killzone, a first-person shooter in a nuclear war zone. It’s a violent, post-apocalyptic game. The world it takes place in is fairly modern, and it’s very dark and monotone.
In Horizon, they wanted something new. They wanted something bright and colorful, something very green. They wanted to create interesting, futuristic robots. One of their initial concepts was a female huntress in an overgrown, robot-filled world. They started creating prototypes of mechanics for this game in their old Killzone engine.
Writers weren’t brought into this project until later on in the process. They were shown the mechanics and concepts that the team had and asked to create a story that ties the game together. To do this, they had to find a way to merge together this post-post-apocalypse world, futuristic robots, and the early civilizations these people live in. They also wanted to make the story very character-driven.

You play as Aloy. You were found by the matriarchs of the tribe in a cave shortly after you were born. Out of fear, they sent you away to be raised by an outcast of the tribe. As you play through the game, you learn the history of the world and how Aloy is connected to it.
Aloy is a clone of the late Elisabet Sobeck, a woman known for creating machines that helped stop climate change. However, shortly afterwards, one of Elisabet’s former partners used her technology to create war machines that can self-replicate and turn biomass into fuel, and then lost control of them, causing the end of the world. To prevent this, Elisabet worked with a team to create Gaia, a hyperintelligent AI designed to spend as much time as it takes to destroy the machine and rebuild the Earth.
Several thousand years later, this plan was mostly successful. The war machines were rendered non-functional. People, animals, and plants were brought back from extinction. Earth was thriving. That was, until a few years before the start of the story. Somehow, Gaia’s sub functions were infected by a virus and driven insane. You must now stop the most powerful of these subfunctions from destroying the world.

An ecocritical game or story is one that uses its medium to address real-world ecological issues, and the story of Horizon firmly falls into this category.
It encourages players to respect and protect nature while they still can. In this world, many species could not be saved, and are instead replaced with mechanical alternatives. There are several side quests where the player is asked to help people find information on now extinct species, and they are delighted to learn about them. Not only that, but the mechanical replacements are notoriously aggressive and dangerous. It forces the player to consider how much better the world would be if these animals were never killed.
It shows players how to live in harmony with nature instead of subduing it. Aloy is a hunter who grew up almost entirely alone, so she relies entirely on nature to survive. If another post-apocalyptic event occurred, Aloy would likely be one of the first to be affected by it. The second game expands on this with tribes that value living in harmony with nature. One of these people is a key character who influences Aloy’s actions throughout the game.
It forces players to consider the resilience of our planet and how it can come back even after the end of the world. If other post-apocalyptic themed games about hope in the end of the world, this is what those characters dream of. Plants and animals thrive in the ruins of ancient cities. People rebuild society and create thriving, organized communities.
The mechanics of Horizon, on the other hand, have absolutely no connection to these themes. The primary game loop includes receiving a quest, killing a bunch of machines and animals in order to complete said quest, and then using all of the resources from those machines and animals to upgrade your gear, which allows you to accept more difficult quests that require you to kill even more machines and animals.
It encourages players to respect and live in harmony with nature, but forces the player to destroy it in order to level up and beat the game. It forces players to consider the resilience of our planet, but actively encourages the player to push that resilience to its limits.

Horizon, despite generally being considered an ecocritical game, was never intended to address those issues. The developers knew what mechanics they wanted to create and had a general idea of who the main character would be, but they didn’t write the story until later. The story that tied all of these mechanics together just happened to be very ecocritical.
Personally, I find this incredibly interesting. The writers never set out to create an in-depth analysis of climate issues and extinction, they just wanted to make an interesting post-post-apocalyptic story. But because climate issues are so ingrained in the way we have to think about the future of our world, they can easily become ingrained into any futurist story we try to create, whether we intended that or not.
However, when the intentions of a game aren’t clear, any message the developers may have tried to convey becomes vague and meaningless. If the story of a game tells me that I shouldn’t overhunt, but the first quest I get tells me to shoot ten rabbits, I ultimately learn nothing.
By the given definition of an ecocritical game, does Horizon even fall into this category? Its primary medium of communication—its mechanics—do not address real-world ecological problems. The writers may have created an ecocritical story, but the game itself does not have a clear enough theme to really be considered ecocritical.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that every game without a strong moral theme is a bad game. I wouldn’t have spent several weeks analyzing the mechanics and story of Horizon unless I genuinely enjoyed playing the game. Additionally, some of the most popular games of all time have no real moral theme. Games like Tetris or Pac-Man are incredibly fun, despite having no story.
This also doesn’t mean that every game with a moral has to have mechanics that perfectly align with that moral. Lethal Company has very clear anti-capitalist themes that are evident throughout the game, despite having mechanics that force you to follow along with the requests of a corrupt company. Helldivers 2 has very clear anti-militaristic themes, despite similarly forcing you to carry out the whims of a corrupt government. These games work because the story is intentionally satirical, it makes fun of the mechanics to show how ridiculous they are.
The problem with Horizon is not that it has an ecocritical message. It is also not that it fails to have an ecocritical message. The problem is that its message is very clearly not intentional. The story and mechanics were made separately, and they don’t connect to each other enough to get the message across.
If you want to make a game with a serious message, you don’t have to make the biggest, most beautiful, open-world game to ever grace Steam’s front page. You don’t have to hire a team of the best developers to work in the game industry. Some large games have great messages, and some don’t. Some small games have great messages, and some don’t. The most important thing to remember when creating a game with a clear, meaningful theme is that it has to be considered in all parts of the development process. It needs to make sense within the story, the art, and even the mechanics of the game. Start with the theme, and build up the game from there. You’ve got this.