In playing the remaster, the reasons Forbidden West didn’t click with me are clear as day

The narrative and the way it’s presented in Zero Dawn is rare and unique in open world gaming. Aloy is very much in the audience’s shoes in that she knows there are cool metal dinosaurs, she knows they pose a threat, she knows she’s an outcast from the local tribe, she just has no idea why. We as the audience also have no idea why anything is happening, we just know it’s a cool enough premise that it got us to buy the game.

We get hints of politics in other tribes early on—again, things Aloy would have no way of knowing about, so we’re learning and processing this info along with her as it’s presented. Aloy is presented as curious, skeptical of being accepted, and we get to choose how she handles herself in several key interactions. Then the proving happens and it becomes clear that the picture we’ve been looking at is much smaller than the whole image, and we and Aloy have a lot of momentum and motivation to explore the rest of the world and put the pieces together.

I mean, it is good shit. Kind of the perfect synthesis of narrative and gameplay.

I just don’t think Forbidden West measures up at all, and I get that the developers were kind of doomed from the start considering how much they crushed it in the first game, but I think they leaned too much into small gameplay QoL improvements and let the narrative aspect kind of spiral itself into repetitive, talky nonsense.

Aloy comes across as bored, condescending, patronizing, the whole story arc is built around her realizing that friends are important even if they’re annoying sometimes. The lore gets super convoluted, the antagonists need huge exposition dumps for their characters to make sense, and in the end we’re left with a “see you next time” which almost feels like the democratic party’s assumption that they have your vote no matter what they do with it (lol pls don’t @ me, I voted)

Playing Forbidden West made me kind of dislike the whole series a bit, or at least take it less seriously. I’m really glad that the original’s narrative still holds up to the extent it does in the remaster, and I hope that the inevitable third game in the series can make the narrative feel interlinked with the world and gameplay like the original did.