Horizon: Zero Dawn & Forbidden West and so on
 

So I've played through the main story of Horizon: Zero Dawn (remastered). And am going to try the PSVR2 game before getting into "Forbidden West."

Some comments on the first game:

* Beautiful! It is a truly open world game. But somewhat limited. There are all of these towns... but essentially you can't go into any huts (you know, lots of doors you can't touch) and the only people who REALLY talk to you are 1 guy that is a trader or anyone there who wants to give you a quest.

* The crawling over mountains stuff mechanics is not great. And it's super hard to drop down from any hanging area. I found myself yelling at the screen where you have to drop down several ledges, then let go and just drop to the ground and no matter WHAT button I press, she would not drop to the ground. I think maybe the Tomb Raider reboot/survival stuff was an inspiration in this but that stuff was way more fluid.

* Very limited customization. I kept waiting for kickass weapon mods but they never came from looting enemies. I just kept accumulating garbage and then kept having to spend time figuring out what to throw away to get key items. Over and over again.

* Story is grand. And deep. Lots of layers of what a post-SKYNet world might be. It's interesting. And that obviously is what interests the writers involved here. They might lean too much into that stuff and not the "awe of robotic animals everywhere" enough. Maybe. idk.

* Lack of a love story and the strategically placed LGBTQ stuff. And I know, I've read about the sequel's DLC. But still, no one is going to convince me in a post-apocalypse like this where you can't even bathe properly there is going to be a lot of same sex stuff going on. And the developers make it a point to... I think I found about 4 or 5 recordings (you find these recordings over the course of the game) where these post-apocalypse tribal people in sob stories lament their same sex boyfriend or girlfriend being lost in some terrible ways.

Also, apparently this was going to be a TV series but now it's being developed as a singular Netflix movie? Good luck with that. That is a lot of compression that isn't going to please anyone.

Just beat "Horizon II: Forbidden West."

I gotta hand it to those people. Like with Last of Us Part II, they couldn't help themselves and include all of this DEI stuff (there's even a quest where there's a tribe 1000 years in the future that doesn't know anything about our present day that has Trans flag colors and they're all flamboyantly gay in the way that we would think of that now, to name just one thing) but wow. What a journey. This was incredible. They measured everything right emotionally with who dies and when, and how much you care about X character going towards the end. And that story is... wow. After this game I felt like I read a 2000 page sci-fi book. But it's GOOD.