Horizon: Forbidden West is a B- 1970s SciFi Novel 

CRITICAL ADDENDUM: i think this video paints an overall rosier picture of my time with H:FW than how i really came away feeling. i like a lot of what this game presents because i admire *the attempt,* but the end result really doesn't go nearly far enough. i know i cited "leaving the tentacle monster on the table" as an admirable trait, and it is, but i do think the game otherwise leaves way too many ideas on the table. i found the zeniths frustrating. i loved the IDEA of them, i loved thinking about them, but in practice they were simultaneously too normal and too cool. my description of this as a "dune knockoff" comes from the fact that if it WAS dune, the zeniths would be weird disgusting monster people who barely resemble humans as we know them. it's just such a shame! the satire of the zeniths is really undercut by the fact that they ARE competent, strong, and pretty. it feels a bit like how explicitly anti-nazi media can still accidentally glorify the nazis by depicting them the way they would have wanted to be seen, rather than as they actually were (neurotic loveless speed-freaks). it's so funny that this game is as long as it is, and yet somehow its biggest problem is that it isn't *more.* and i think it comes down to just how much time the combat, gathering, & crafting components eat up. i know i said this creates a fun little loop in the video, and it does, but that loop has nothing to do with the stuff that the game excels at and it really just has no business being as prominent as it is. the hypothetical person who's there FOR that combat system, after all, probably isn't gonna be there for the story, and vice versa. i honestly wish they'd just elected to cut a whole bunch of machine encounters so they'd be a bit more special, and then spent a whole hell of a lot more time fleshing out the world and characters. and maybe, yeah, not have aloy be completely fucking over it? i don't think it's possible to overemphasize just how jarring it is to be pressured by the game into doing a bunch of side quests that this beloved-ish player character is aggressively disinterested in. why did they make this choice!!! it's never been clearer to me just how much the open world format is an enemy to good storytelling. something i actually forgot to talk about-- another element of this game's trinketitis is hunting. you need animal hides and such to upgrade your ammo pouches and various other stuff. to get those upgrade materials you have to kill animals. so while you're wandering around the world you pop open your focus and, ah, look at that, a bunny. so you shoot it with an arrow that can splinter steel and now you have a rabbit hide. ok, fine, whatever, that's hunting. the problem is that this game LITERALLY OPENS with a fox wandering through the wilderness only to be swallowed up and killed by The Blight for aloy to find in a gameplay section later on. this is part of the game's overall environmentalist message, right? but then you have to turn around and kill every animal you see if you want to upgrade all your stuff, which i certainly do because the menu ammo crafting system is annoying. between that and the sheer quantity of literal human beings that aloy has to kill with her own hands at rebel outposts and the like, one can't help but feel completely torn thematically speaking. is life precious and in dire need of preservation? or should we kill everything we see for the resources they represent with wild abandon? the game sees no contradiction between the themes of its cutscenes and the themes of its gameplay, but the contradictions are absolutely undeniable. and that's why i gave this game a B-, ultimately, because while it certainly isn't overall any more or less successful than a lot of other open world games, at least it TRIES. it has stuff on its mind and by god it's trying. and i have to give credit where it's due there! i think it's a lot easier to fixate on why the gameplay of a game like this isn't working than it is to look at its narrative elements and deconstruct them for what they're worth. i admire that a game of this size took risks and aimed up where it could, and god damn if it doesn't CONTINUE to take my breath away in fits and starts. deeply flawed, often quite frustrating, but damn it i'm a sucker for above average mediocrity. ANYWAY i think that's all that i wanted to add. thanks to everyone leaving comments and spreading this one around, the response has been really rejuvenating for me and i'm excited to get back to work. if you're also excited, well... why not give me some money? it'll help me pay rent and maybe eventually buy a new camera and microphone, even comradery.co/sarahzedig

AHHHHH SHE'S BACK **FOAMS AT MOUTH AND PASSES OUT**

Honestly super glad I can watch/listen to you talk about these games so that I don’t “have to” play them to get to know about some of the interesting parts.

that hat is such a good look, i was like "whoa, somethings different. did sarah get new frames?" but no, the hat is just that powerful.

I think more video essays should include people just talking and staring at the floor

I saw your video with Sophie From Mars, and I was so glad to see you were still around! I was missing you. And then right after I stumbled on that - and her - then you finally released this new video! I'm super excited about the other videos you say you're working on. Glad you're still here.

I left Forbidden West very frustrated, personally. Whereas I loved Zero Dawn, precisely because you can tell they really wanted to focus on the world and, crucially, they gave you a main character who wanted to *learn* about that world. This created a confluence of the exploration and story that, IMO, really lifted up HZD over other open world games of its type, because I spent the whole time *wanting* to do all of the various "open-world checklists," precisely because they felt like something Aloy would also do. But in HFW, you no longer have that protagonist. Aloy is no longer exploring the mystery of the world. She has the answers already, and because she has the answers, a very clear directive, and no patience for all of the open world busy-work she has to do to advance the plot, the open world side of the game felt incredibly superfluous to me. Throw in issues with encounter balance that didn't seem so striking in the first game, and by the end of it I was just tired, because it felt like what made the first game my favorite game in the genre was more or less completely absent. Personally I also found the Tilda portion of the plot to feel very...crammed in to the last segment of the game, and I think it really would have benefited structurally from giving her more than a few cutscenes that had to both introduce her character and sell us on her obsession with Aloy/Elizabet, and I definitely agree that the Zeniths on the whole felt really flat, on top of that. So while I got 100% in HZD, once I was done with HFW I put it down and probably won't ever touch it or the series again, which is really unfortunate because there are a lot of great ideas in the series that they just end up faltering with (and as you note, Aloy pretty clearly being a big ol' lesbian is fantastic).

when press F to pay respects actually hits good.

holy shit, you're back! I found your channel a couple of days ago and was concerned about you, but you're still around and that's great

oh girl you KNOW i love talking about stuff.

like and comment for Sarah grinding it, loading it, smoking it, and choking it \m/

don't worry about eye contact, it's actually easier for me to watch it looking at the screen this way :) I don't know for sure if I'm autistic but I cannot stand eye contact Great vid also!

Just a quick correction as I’m watching - the purpose of the robots that became the swarm / the Faro plague was solely military. The environment was fixed a couple of decades earlier by FAS and Elisabet Sobek, but afterwards the company pivoted to combat robots and Elisabet quit. So when Faro accidentally ended all life on earth he wasn’t even trying to fix the environment, he was just making robot armies for dictators and companies. What a guy. Nice to see he suffered in solitude for 1000 years.

I have a lot of fondness for the series, and I totally agree with your points here! I remember there being an announcement of a TV show adaptation for Netflix,and I'm curious to see if the different medium will be able to address some of the story's weaknesses. Like, since it's not interactive, will they focus more on character writing? who knows! I'm curious to see it.

I’m enjoying the informal format. Especially because I like listening to RU-vid videos like podcasts and this is perfect for that 😀

another great video! you love to see it!

Looking forward to the Lost video, i loved that show as a teen. I guess at that age its easier to suspend disbelief, but overall i remember it being a beautiful show with interesting themes, despite the problems in the middle. Anyway, glad youre back! Hope your doing ok despite all the life stuff, really sorry about your recent losses.

So sorry for your terrible losses.

I didn't get the Faro = Pharaoh wordplay until you pointed it out lmao

this video really made me realise that the reason the mystery and discovery of Zero Dawn hit me so hard when I played it (it instantly became one of my favourite games of all time, in fact) was because I hadn't played an open world game since whenever Assassin's Creed Brotherhood came out. I was disappointed in the sequel because it was no longer the first open world game I played since AC Brotherhood and because I found the plot developments... mostly *aesthetically* objectionable XD

I really like this looser format, this & your video on The Nevers were both great!

When you have subtlety and/or nuance too many people will think the empire/The enclave/Andrew Ryan were the good guys

"If Rose was a Dirk" is such an incredibly cursed supposition to me

"open world games are like long fantasy novels" HOLY SHIT i had NOT made that connection waffling on about particular elements of story and long winded diatribes about magical items fucking you over feels exactly like playing with open world mechanics for 700 hours, in the tedium they introduce with the utilization of the same tools. breath of the wild felt very same-ish to me, and for good reason. the puzzling elements were not unique, they were designed around a codefied system of powers, but not as emergent as other zelda games because of how quickly you achieve all four/five/whatever. The powers of the four beasts could be considered the exception, but nothing in the game requires them or invents a very clever solution around them, so i don't count em. Most other fantasy novels also appear same-ish to me because you replace the runes, the tools with which to construct sections of the world, with tropes, which serve a similar purpose, about muddy ruddy wanderers, a very big open plain no one cares about and a fucking sword or something that cut off a kings left pinky thats important now, and the 700 hours is the 8000 pages of pure "stuff" i need to read through to understand the myriad of political events that take place in the universe. Both are useful and even incredibly satisfying when applied. Patterns of thought can turn out to be very useful to convey messages, and the toolset you have in order to tackle an open world is dependant on your level of skill can provide a multitude of ways in which a puzzle can be solved. (BOTW is not a good example of this, lmao). This isn't to say that tools in open world and tropes in giant fantasy universes are one and the same, but from the perspective of the time sinks their respective houses of media can be, i thought it was cool i dunno. also i highly recommend entering brawls with your microphone stand in the future as well. entering physical combat with your hardware is the struggle podcast-com-video essays need these days.

hi sarah! 💗💗💗

I usually don't come back to videos but today I was like ummmm let's watch that video essay again :) and I love your commentary.

I see like me you too know how amazing those styles of hats are. Cap gang unite!! (Also great analysis)

I would love to hear your take on the outer worlds!

Haven't played forbidden west yet but zero dawn very much felt like I was playing through a pretty okay fantasy sci-fi YA novel

Great video, lots of excellent ideas :)

Well, I understood what you meant about Rose and Dirk, and that's what counts!

fantastic video!!!!!

almost incomprehensible. i don't understand anything being said to me. i love it.

I love your jacket Sarah!

@42 minutes: if the beta kids were in the place of the alphas, with an aspect swap, Rose as heart player would be dead on that nuanced, unsettled, psychoanalyst dislike of the self, her splinters more like, attempts to be "bettered" that rose herself dislikes but has some sympathy for. That's an au I now want to write actually

"If Rose was a Dirk" You mean Epilogues Dirk? God...

This is random, but have you ever played Sable? Based on what you talked about liking about open world games, I think you’d really vibe with it

Oh, no! Not Varl! I liked him.

Comment totally unrelated to the content of the video except possibly the last five minutes I guess but I'm convinced you'd be an incredibly fun person to smoke up with. In fairness I try to get every trans person ik stoned w me...

plase dont let elon must try save the worls :( or do military drones