Introduction
It’s no secret that Horizon Zero Dawn’s time in the spotlight was cut unfortunately short by releasing three days before The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Two exploration-based open world games coming out within three days of each other would be enough of a marketing nightmare on its own, but when one of those games is a critically adored, GOTY-sweeping entry in one gaming’s best-known franchises, I’m amazed Horizon actually broke even. But while torrents of pieces analyzing every facet of Breath of the Wild have been released and continue to get released, Horizon seems to have gone relatively unanalyzed for a game of its scope and creativity. I picked it up hoping to find a hidden gem, but what I found was more of a great blueprint for a hidden gem, that seemed to need a few more redesigns. Still, I think the successes and failures of Horizon make it one of the most interesting games released last year, and the questions it asks about how to make a AAA open world game are especially important in such a static genre. So, how does Horizon shake up the open-world formula? What fundamental assumptions about open world setting and story design does it challenge? And can it turn any of those ideas into engaging systems
Story & Setting
Horizon’s writing is probably its most interesting, back-of-the-box, selling point feature. So it’s a shame that, most of the time the player is actually engaging with it, it’s awkward, bland, or frustrating. “Awkward” is really the best word I can think of to describe the dialog, from Aloy’s teenaged attempts to land a sick burn, to the conversations with Sylens that are basically just them being angry at each other over voice chat, to the strange attempts at stiff, fantasy genre speech that most characters talk
Even in action-adventure games, you can’t escape the dialog wheel
in. It’s telling that I looked up the “Skip Dialog” button about twenty minutes into the game; most of the time when the game is talking at you, you’ll be bored. During the majority of the cutscenes, I found myself groaning with the same frequency I do at most AAA titles, because the characters speak so stiffly. I’m fairly certain that this is a problem with the script, because they’ve hired some fairly talented actors to play the parts. The closest comparison I can find is, appropriately, Dontnod’s 2015 Life is Strange. Voice actor/writer Ashly Burch voices lead characters in both of these games (Aloy in HZD and Chloe in LiS), and appropriately demonstrates the feel of a talented actor with a wooden script, and how that gets translated from page to game. The writing in Horizon feels very similar, with actors struggling to emote around clunky dialog. Part of the awkwardness in Life is Strange’s script comes from it being translated from French, and Guerrilla Games is a Dutch company, so I suppose that could have contributed to a similar feel. However, the game’s lead writer was John Gonzalez, best known for writing for Fallout New Vegas, one of the most fully-realized settings in the history of the medium. So, the cause of the clunky dialog is still a mystery to me.
However, the problems with the script extend beyond the dialog; the major plot points regularly fail to land as well. The game opens with an impeccably directed sequence (like nearly all of its cutscenes) showing Aloy dealing with her outcast status, training, growing up, and preparing to face the world. It introduces Rost, Aloy’s adoptive father (a character so forgettable I just had to Google his name), swiftly kills him off to give Aloy a personal stake in fighting the big bad. Aloy wins membership in the tribe that has treated her as an outcast for her entire life, then goes off on her great adventure. This plot is formulaic enough that it should at least function as an easy setup, but the wooden delivery and awkward structure make each point land less than gracefully. Rost, for example, is barely mentioned for the rest of the game, and because we never really see Aloy enjoying her time with him, he doesn’t work as an effective motivation. And Aloy’s drive to find out who her mother is never quite lines up with the player’s interest in the world (though they did try, and I’ll expand on that later). This results in the player sort of floating from plot event to plot event, not really invested in any of it. The Nora themselves are perhaps the best example of this, because, as an elevator pitch, they work brilliantly. Aloy grows up shunned by them for reasons she cannot understand, and 
fights for their acceptance not because she actually wants it, but because she wants to know why they treat her so horribly. Once she gains access to the community’s secrets, she discovers that they are misinterpreting the will of a dying AI, treating it as a religious faith, and that Aloy’s exile was a result of this misinterpretation. As Aloy explores the world, she learns more about how mistaken the Nora are, and returns to them with knowledge that makes her an almost mythic figure, all while dealing with the emotional confusion of being revered by the people who once shunned her. Did you get excited reading that? Because I got excited writing it. That sounds like an incredible story! I’d love to play that game! But that does not feel like the game I got to play. Almost everything with the Nora is brought up in a beautifully-rendered cutscene, then forgotten as Aloy goes and fights some boring apocalypse cult. You’ve fought a billion like them in every video game ever made. And given how forgettable that plotline is, most of your direct experience with the story is just hanging out with Aloy. And, umm. Okay, let’s talk about Aloy.
I really wanted to like Aloy. She’s voiced by Ashly Burch, which already gives her a few dozen points in her favor, she’s got a (theoretically) interesting backstory as a social outcast, and is kind of a badass on top of it. But, in execution, her character is just…bland. I can’t really come up with any of her personality traits other than “determined” and “impulsive”, which are the traits of approximately every video game protagonist since like 2004. She doesn’t really seem to enjoy what she’s doing beyond an occasional satisfied smile, and mostly seems kind of annoyed with people, which makes sense for a social outcast, but isn’t expanded upon in a meaningful enough wya to make it a worthwhile tradeoff. But Aloy’s biggest weakness as a character comes from an element that could have easily been her biggest strength: her motivation. I absolutely understand what they were trying to do; Aloy’s journey to find her mother (cloned genetic progenitor, whatever, she’s functionally her mom) gives her a personal stake in exploring the ruins of the old world. In interviews, lead writer John Gonzalez talked about how, without this personal motivation, Horizon is just a detective story, but the best detective stories are “Ones that the detective really needs to solve”. Thus, he gave Aloy a driving personal reason to dig deeper. However, as a player, I found myself thoroughly uninterested in Aloy’s journey of self because of the weak setup, and more interested in the world itself. So, I was interested in finding out more about the world, but Aloy is only interested in the bits that relate specifically to her birth. She doesn’t seem excited about uncovering some bit of world-defining lore, when the player is on the edge of their seat. She’s looting the stories of the dead world looking for scraps about her mother, and tossing aside everything else. And in her approach to the lore of the world, I really began to understand Aloy, because it lead me to ask a seemingly unrelated question that, in actuality, tells us a lot about Aloy: What point does Sylens serve in the story? This one threw me for a loop until I started combing over the plot summary and looking at his actions. He basically does 
everything interesting in the story. He does the archeological digging, uncovers ancient secrets, pieces together where to go next, and scours the world looking for new dig sites. He even kicks off the primary events of the story by awakening HADES. Basically, he figures everything out so that all Aloy needs to do is kill the people between her and Sylens’ next objective. And this is where I began to understand Aloy. Like so many video game protagonists, she is good at killing, and little else. I get that, by the nature of this being a AAA action-adventure game, she has to be good at killing, but that’s really the only thing she’s good at. But Sylens highlights what she could have been. An archeologist who knows her way around weapons, like Nathan Drake or (more appropriately, given her personality) the rebooted Laura Croft. If Aloy had done everything that Sylens did, there could have been an even tighter connection between setting and story. Sylens’ motivations of curiosity about the old world and a driving desire to explore its mysteries are so much more compatible with what the player wants to do (namely, explore) that it seems like a perfect match, in stark contrast to Aloy’s motivation of “Who’s my mom, who I guess happens to be related to the setting?” So, while playing as a character more like Sylens wouldn’t have had that same personal connection to the mystery, it would have at least made the player feel like their interest in every scrap of the old world wasn’t out of character. Giving Aloy even a bit of that archeological predisposition could have done so much to improve this.
So, the dialogue is bad, the low-level plot is bad, and the main character feels underutilized, which just leaves the setting. Fortunately, the setting is Horizon’s greatest strength, and when executed correctly, is genuinely breathtaking. This is first apparent in the game’s visual design, a strange hybrid of ancient and modern styles. Characters have headdresses made of bullet casings, fur clothes with metal flourishes, and ancient makeup and war paint in the shape of circuit boards. This, coupled with the game’s impressive graphical fidelity, makes it consistently gorgeous to look at, and conveys many of the game’s themes with much more subtlety and effectiveness than any of its story beats. The environments of the world reflect this as well, with sprawling, beautiful landscapes littered with the corpses of derelict machines, and the centuries-old ruins of ancient cities. It delivers on one of my favorite promises of the post-post-apocalypse genre (or whatever it’s called): showing a new world flourish in the carcass of the old, no longer concerned with the squabbles, culture and events of their long-dead ancestors. Similar works in this genre include Nier: Automata, and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West,
Seriously, more people need to play Enslaved
the later of which I thoroughly enjoyed. These two games are less backwards-looking than most works in the post-apocalypse genre, and I wish Horizon had committed to that more. Because, by the end of the game, there are really no mysteries left to uncover; the game has already answered everything. The only real question remaining is posted in an after-credits sequel hook where Sylens reveals that someone or something woke HADES up, which wasn’t appropriately set up beforehand (it seemed like HADES had been awake forever and Sylens just stumbled upon him while being an archaeology nerd). And while I think the ending’s lack of mystery does harm the game as a whole, I want to acknowledge the sense of wonder the game does successfully create at its beginning. As Aloy crosses from the safety of her tribe’s sacred land into the outer world at the end of Act 1, the player is burning with so many questions about the nature of the game’s world and presented with a world full of answers. That moment is one of my highlights of the entire game, and even though that mystery is diluted by the ending, it sets up the open world beautifully.While poking around the world, the player will stumble on some of the game’s best bits of world building. These include audio and text logs that describe the workings of the old world without giving away too much, giving the player small anecdotes instead of comprehensive answers. This is reminiscent of Croteam’s The Talos Principle, which never outright states the cause of the apocalypse, and instead describes people living their lives under the shadow of it. As a result, the player feels like an archeologist of their own world, uncovering bits of 21st-century technology and lore that are new and mysterious to Aloy, but not to the player. And this touches on perhaps my favorite theme in the story, that of the tribes of the new world misinterpreting the ideas of the old world. It serves as an interesting twist on Arthur C. Clarke’s famous, often-quoted line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This concept is most often used when the audience cannot understand the technology, making it seem magical, but in Horizon, we see this from the opposite perspective. During the first act,
The Womb of the Mountain/Magical Broken Computer
Aloy presents herself to what the tribe calls “The Goddess”, and ancient structure inside the mountain that they built their capital around. This takes the shape of a metal door, which emanates a red light and scans Aloy, saying, “Identity not verified, data corruption”. The player knows that this is obviously a computer, that it’s using some sort of scan to verify her identity, and that there’s a busted hard drive somewhere in the facility that’s making it throw an error. But the leaders of the Nora treat it as a prophecy, speaking of the corruption as a mythical force that Aloy must conquer. The player is given both perspectives, the technological and the magical, and is able to understand both simultaneously. Aloy’s problem of fixing a broken computer is turned into a mythic quest simply because the Nora think its magic. *That* is a brilliant use of Horizon’s genre, and one that feels fairly unique to Horizon itself.
Exploration & Combat
So how does the player uncover these setting details? Outside of the main plot, the setting is primarily communicated through the design of the world itself. While the late game may suffer from the kind of bloat that seems emblematic of post-Assassin’s Creed open world titles, during early-to-mid game, the size and scope feels just right, and allows for measured exploration. While, at the end of the game, I was fast-traveling from campfire to campfire, during the first few zones, I *loved* the open world. I was searching every corner looking for new enemies to fight, hidden areas to poke around in, and loot to find. The game lets you do something that so few contemporary open world 
games actually do: stumble upon something mysterious. The first Cauldron level I did was one of my favorite experiences in the entire game, because I was just wandering the open world when I found it. No one directed me there, I wasn’t given a quest to “Clear Cauldron 1 of X”, I just found it. While I was exploring it, I was burning with curiosity about what could be behind every new corner, and the game delivered on it. That was the discovery the game should have focused on, because it put you in the headspace of discovering an ancient, abandoned world. Unfortunately, by the late game, that mystery had begun to dissipate, and I was just Clearing Cauldron 6 of X. As the world grew in size, it felt less important to explore all of it. I already knew what I would find because icons for them were plastered all over my map. When I arrived at new zones, it wasn’t introduced with a cutscene or any exposition about what made it unique, I just kind of ran through it while following my objective marker. I tried to turn off as many of those markers as I could, and let myself get distracted as much as possible, but the game was just not built for it past its first two zones. The world was better when it was smaller.
I have one more anecdote that I think highlights the best and worst of Horizon’s open world, as it was almost one of my favorite moments in the game. I was exploring near one of the game’s northern areas, and I saw that I was nearly at the edge of the map. Curious to see what the edge of the world looked like, I headed north until I found a snowy mountain range. I tried to sneak my way past a few enemies, but made a bad call and blew my cover, resulting in enemy attacks barreling down on me from all directions. Instead of running away, I made the split-second decision to charge the mountain, and climbed it while dodging fire and just barely keeping my health bar topped off. With no healing items to spare, I reached the top, only to be greeted by…a cutscene introducing a giant, flying boss. Here, when just exploring the open world, I had stumbled onto a unique boss encounter totally undirected. It took nearly every bit of ropecaster ammo I had, but I was able to take it down, and Aloy dropped a quick voice hint about seeing what it was guarding. I moved past the machine’s corpse, and saw a series of platforming challenges (ladders, ledges, etc.), that seemed to lead to a nearby cave. I climbed about halfway up the ridge, and…I got stuck. I could not, for the life of me, find the next place to climb. I retraced my steps, tried jumping on every bit of environment that looked even remotely climbable, and even turned on the game’s objective hints. Nothing. After about half an hour of trying, I gave up, and googled a video guide. And, this is where my excitement turned to frustration. Right at the point I had stopped, in my world, there was an empty ledge, with no apparent way up, but in the world of the YouTube video I was watching, there was a ladder neatly placed right there. Apparently, that ladder only appears when you have unlocked that area’s relevant quest. Now, I understand that, in an open world game, you need to gate off certain areas that are mission-specific. But to have that gate be an arbitrary ladder halfway up the path to that
Why?
objective, with no indication to the player that they can’t reach the area? Not even an “I should come back later” voice line from Aloy? If they had simply forgotten to gate off the area, I would have understood, but the removal of this ladder implies that some designer on the team saw the problem, and deliberately implemented this disappearing ladder as a solution to solve the problem. That, I do not understand. Maybe remove the first stepping stone up the mountain, instead of one in the middle? Gate the area off entirely? I can think of dozens of equally cheap design solutions, none of which would have lead to this problem. And while this is a single issue, I think it’s emblematic of how Horizon only half commits to making its world explorable. It gets far, far closer than most games, but isn’t able to go far enough. Which, I suppose, is a good summary of my opinion on the game as a whole.
Before concluding, I do want to briefly touch on the game’s combat. Again, I enjoyed it much more at the beginning of the game than at the end, and I think that has more to do with encounter design than player skill or numerical advantages. A great deal of the campaign involves fighting human enemies, which features a largely uninteresting opening of shallow stealth that transitions irrevocably into shallow combat as soon as you are spotted. You’ve done this before in most AAA action-adventure titles. Combat against machine enemies, meanwhile is much more interesting, especially because of the various traps the game offers. The game does have one combat setup that works brilliantly, and that is when the game lets the player really step into the shoes of a hunter and plan their attack. While most of the campaign missions don’t allow for this kind of play, those that do demonstrate a style of combat that simply cannot be found in other games. Checking enemy movement patterns, scanning for their weaknesses, dropping tripcaster lines, and setting up the perfect trap is a rich tactical treat, especially on the harder difficulties. However, open combat is less tactically engaging, primarily because of the difficulty of deploying the traps mid-combat. Even with a great deal of handling 
mods on my tripcaster, I found keeping track of enemies while setting them up is incredibly difficult, and often for little reward, at least on Hard mode. This is made worse by how clunky avoiding enemy attacks is even when not trying to place traps. The player’s primary means of avoiding damage is a dodge roll that never seemed to reliably be able to avoid damage. This is used in the face of enemy attacks that are difficult to predict, because of the visually busy design of the enemies, the raw number of enemies the player will be fighting at any given time, and the fact that the player’s focus is often narrowed on weak points, making them miss subtle movements of the enemies. Additionally, enemies often attack in multi-hit combos that would put a Bloodborne boss to shame. Often times, I would see a telegraph, dodge away from the enemy, and still get him by later attacks in a combo, even if I spammed the upgraded dodge roll. Because this makes trap deployment difficult, I ended up using traps less, turning combat into a fairly standard third-person shooter. The ropecaster can do a lot to alleviate this problem, but if ever a game was calling out for some sort of Shadow of the Colossus-style enemy climbing while searching for weak points, this was it. Still, when the level designers give you a suite of tactical options, Horizon’s combat truly embraces its setting in a way that most other AAA titles simply can’t, and does feel genuinely unique and interesting to engage with. I just wish that same amount of depth could have been applied to open combat as well.
Conclusion
I feel like I came off a lot more negative towards this game than I intended, so I want to open the conclusion with a reframing of my opinion on the game: I think Horizon Zero Dawn is an incremental improvement on the AAA action-adventure game that greatly raises the bar for what we can expect from the admittedly stale genre. The quality of the cinematic and art direction alone is astonishing, and the idea that these games can explore more creative settings and have gameplay inspired by them is one that the industry is in desperate need of adopting. If every AAA open world title was as creative and risky as Horizon Zero Dawn was, I probably wouldn’t be suffering from genre fatigue. Still, there are tradeoffs to taking risks when making a game this expensive: you’re working with ideas that haven’t been iterated on and polished over multiple sequels. So, whenever Horizon Zero Dawn 2 comes out, I will be looking forward to seeing how Guerilla takes this first game, which was promising but messy, and polishes it up.
that fidelity with a strong visual aesthetic and accompanying political message and Mirror’s Edge feels fiercely contemporary. I’ll talk more about why Catalyst’s sci-fi aesthetic does not fit the design of the first game, but Mirror’s Edge did not feel like a fantasy, nor a stock reimagining of Orwell’s 1984, it feels like something that could happen today. It takes the idea of an authoritarian post-9/11 surveillance state and makes it real and uncomfortably plausible. Keeping the game locked to the first-person perspective made the player feel present in this world, and its commitment to keeping this perspective further enhanced its grounded feel, only cutting to third person in the beginning as the player assumes control of Faith, and the end as the player relinquishes it. The design of the parkour movement added even more to the feel that this was a game that interpreted realism as an actual imperative to design their game around, not a visual aesthetic that necessitated more grime, blood, and forced moral ambiguity. In Mirror’s Edge, huge falls will kill you. If you think you couldn’t make a jump in real life, you probably couldn’t make it in game. Faith isn’t a superhero, she’s just really good at parkour. The animations reinforce this, placing a great deal of emphasis on Faith’s limbs and body positioning as she moves through an environment. This realism lead to a level of mechanical transference that the other games I’m going to discuss simply didn’t. Playing Mirror’s Edge made me see real-world environments as spaces that I could parkour through, if only I had the skill. It encouraged me, in the real world, to try to climb or jump off of things, because Mirror’s Edge had conditioned me to look at spaces like that. Catalyst, Dying Light, Titanfall and Refunct, did not encourage that, because they weren’t as focused on realism as Mirror’s Edge. And it was through understanding this commitment to reality that I found what I believe to be the goal of Mirror’s Edge: to create a grounded, first-person platformer with tight levels that want you to traverse an environment quickly and stylishly, but also allowing you to slow down and think about environments as puzzle spaces. And from this foundational philosophy came the complexity of the game’s mechanics.
player to feel like they’ve mastered movement as soon as possible, but for Mirror’s Edge to match the arc of a traditional video game, it has to have a gradual sense of mastery, not an instant one. It does this, in part, through its animations. By preventing the player from easily canceling their moves, it requires the player to think more carefully about each move they make, making them engage with systems they might have otherwise ignored. And this is exactly how Dark Souls works, requiring commitment to every input, and punishing sloppy play (though Dark Souls is significantly more punishing than Mirror’s Edge). The result of applying this philosophy to movement, instead of combat, is that it turns movement into a technical challenge, not an easy means of traversal.
a roll move to let you jump from higher buildings, it even gives quickturns, a move that added a great deal of depth to Mirror’s Edge. This has a similar problem to Catalyst where, in an open world where you can unlock different abilities, the designers have to assume you haven’t unlocked them. However, they work well as ways to increase the skill ceiling on movement, while not breaking the system. But some of the upgrades are just raw stat boosts. Run faster, jump higher, survive higher falls. The problem with this is that it takes the system from a grounded and tight one and turns it into an unrealistic and floaty one. If I was designing Dying Light and absolutely had to include linear stat upgrades, I would start the player out with mechanics that were a significant amount clunkier than the starting state it shipped with, then have them reach that point at about the mid game, getting only a bit better by the end game. But the actual game starts out at about a Mirror’s Edge 1 level of control then jacks it up to a Catalyst level, then keeps going. By the end of the game you’re zipping across rooftops with a goddamn grappling hook, surviving every fall, flying over every obstacle. It feels great, but it also feels mind-numbingly easy. To their credit, the developers put a lot of work into making this system feel good, with extra bits of polish to animations and sounds, but at the end of the day the core mechanics themselves feel broken by this stat upgrade. At this point, the player feels less like a physical human being with limbs that have weight and and organic positioning, and feels more like a box that zips from place. It does create flow in the aesthetic sense, but never approaches flow, the mental state. It is firmly camped in the “control” mental state, with the player rarely being challenged. The game wants you to relax while moving, to feel good, but not really engaged. And that’s okay, as a design decision from their own open world game, but it does make me wish for a game that really did commit to skill-based movement, that took its AAA budget and applied it to a system as tightly- designed as the original Mirror’s Edge, and did tried to integrate combat well. Well, fortunately, that game exists.
any sense of freedom the player would have had. They are not exploring an organic world, they are picking which way they want to increase the completion percentage. That has lead to a fatigue with open world games, where, despite examples that I’ve found personally compelling for a time (such as Dying Light or Ubisoft’s own Far Cry 3), they eventually reduce to that completion percentage. Even the newest Grand Theft Auto, with all the artistry and skill put into its world construction, eventually reduced to instanced, scripted missions executed with the same aggressive linearity that its predecessors were created to avoid. Open worlds promised a digital landscape in which the designer did not always feel present, where the player could have experiences not explicitly designed, delivered, and focus tested by the game’s creators, but Ubisoft and its contemporaries seem to create worlds where the designer feels just as present, only giving the player more tasks to complete and evaluating them as they complete them.
difference, but these quest objectives are not given to player from the beginning, they must be discovered by talking to NPCs or triggering scripted events. In, say, Far Cry 4, the player has barely left the tutorial when the game is slathering notifications all over their screen ordering them to collect twenty deer hides or complete all bomb disarm missions. This adds to the sense of discovery that the player feels before they’ve even left the city, as these objectives organically emerged from the setting, rather than being non-diegetic, game layer objectives. Additionally, when the player opens their map to look around the world, it begins as fairly empty, and is filled in gradually as the player either discovered them or is sent there directly. Contrast this with Ubisoft titles, which start the player with a map filled with objectives. This makes selecting the mission the player wants easier, but Skyrim’s approach makes the world feel more unexplored, and temps the player with large, empty spaces of the map. Skyrim does have a fast travel system that could allow the player to jump from point to point, just completing objectives, but a great deal of the time the player spends in Skyrim’s early game is hiking to their next objective. An NPC might give them a quest halfway across the map, and the player will have to spend half an hour hiking there. The frequency of these experiences decrease by the late game, when the player has explored most of the world, but this ups the pace for the game’s last few hours, so that by the time the player is tired of half-hour hikes between each objective, they can simply fast travel there. It’s worth noting that the game does offer an in-game travel system through its carriage system, a version of fast travel that only moves between major cities. I usually play with fast travel disabled, using only this system, and the simple inclusion of an internally consistent travel system helps the world maintain its sense of scale while still providing that convenience.
important factor in if I am going to enjoy an open world game or not is if the game makes moving from place to place enjoyable. This is why I can enjoy the completely Ubisoft-inspired Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, because movement through the world is the core mechanic set of the game. Skyrim does not have any interesting movement mechanics, but instead puts a great deal of effort into making the player feel like they’re on a relaxing hike, not just moving their character from point A to point B. The overworld’s sound design is nothing short of masterful, with a brilliant combination of ambient music with rustling trees, softly blowing wind, and idle insects and animals. That soundscape blends perfectly with the often gorgeous fantasy landscape the player is moving to, regularly creating moments where the player can stop and gawk at the environment. Skyrim is a screenshot factory for this very reason: the developers wanted to create a world that the player was okay just walking through. In many ways, these sections remind me of playing Campo Santo’s Firewatch, which took these simple hiking mechanics and made an entire game out of it. That kind of idle relaxation is a perfect method of mediating the pacing of Skyrim’s long dungeon crawls. But those dungeon crawls still blend beautifully into the hiking part of Skyrim’s experience. I thoroughly respect Skyrim’s commitment to avoid instanced activities, and the dungeons just barely skirt the line in this regard, mostly for technical reasons. For example, in Burnout Paradise (a brilliantly designed open world in other capacities), you drive around the game world until you reach a stoplight, then get teleported to an instanced race starting at that location. That race plays out just like it would in a traditional racing game, then ends, and returns the player backed to the overworld. While this has its advantages (many of which Burnout Paradise uses), it creates a very modal game experience, where there is a clear distinction between two stages of play: racing and exploration. Most open worlds treat their content this way, most famously, Grand Theft Auto with its complex open world but simplistic, removed missions. The tradeoff, however, is that it makes the game world feel separate from its activities, and makes the activities themselves feel artificially gamey by comparison. Skyrim, on the other hand, doesn’t distinguish between these modes at all. There are a few load screens in the way, but the player can start in a city, walk outside into the world (even removing a loading screen if they have the right mods), wander until they find a dungeon or cave, enter that, complete it, and find their way back without changing the state of play. Skyrim doesn’t distinguish between game activities and open world exploration, in blends the two in a way that creates surprising moments. While walking to a quest objective, the player can stumble onto a bandit camp or find a dungeon, explore them, then get back on the path to their objective.
nearby. In this regard, Skyrim feels like much more of a console or ARPG than a CRPG, for lack of better genre terminology. It doesn’t want the player to be figuring out written directions and hand-drawn maps like in Morrowind (though it does occasionally offer those as side objectives), it wants the player to be in a state of flow that also incorporates discovery to keep it interesting. Walking across large distances in digital space can often kill any sense of flow that other parts of the game had built up, but with the balancing act of making the game flow but not flow so much that it’s mindless, the designers create an experience where you never feel completely lost. The end result is a system that enables and encourages hours of exploration, and doesn’t create moments of frustration where the player might quit the game. And this experience is topped off with the game’s approach to dungeon design.
area, and, what do you know, there’s an entire system of caverns, traps, and skooma manufacturing machines being run by a cabal of vampires using the skooma den to harvest their victims (Redwater. Get it?). I fought my way through the facility and got a ton of loot, ending in a dramatic showdown with the master vampire. Apparently the area is used for a quest later, but I didn’t care, because I had found these layers on my own, and I hadn’t expected a single one. It was a ruined house on top of a skooma den on top of a vampire den, and the discovery of each layer lead to more excitement. I was directed through these layers not by an artificial game system, but by my own curiosity and some subtle design tricks.
demand, keeping the player from crushing their controller and rage quitting is a persistent task for any developer, and Hitbox Team helped address this in a few clever ways, many of which overlap with this design aesthetic of flow. The game’s restarts are incredibly quick, absent of any load times, and don’t linger on your character’s death in the same way a game like Dark Souls does. You’re right back in the action in a few seconds. The music itself doesn’t even stop or react in any way, with an indifference to the player’s performance that stands in stark contrast to Runner2, or really most games out there. The game wants to keep the player calm so they are okay with trying over and over to perfect their runs of a level without turning into a rage-consumed troglodyte. This doesn’t mean the music takes a secondary role in the player’s experience, however, it means that the music creates a rhythm where a slip up and retry isn’t a jarring experience like it is in most games. You still fail – the game certainly isn’t pulling any punches – but the music keeps going even when you do. In addition to making restarts less frustrating, it also makes successful runs feel even better, as the player feels like they are matching the tone and mood of the music with an effortless-looking run. The jumps the player is making may, in actuality, be pixel-perfect, but the music, animation and game feel make it look natural. The combination of all of these elements, from visuals, to music, to game feel, to level design, create an experience that encourages to player to enter a focused, zen-like state of calm persistence as they slowly perfect their runs of a level and increase their mastery of the mechanics. The game wants to keep the player’s focus in the specific moment of the moves they are trying to pull off, and uses the music to narrow the player’s focus more effectively. For example, the game’s scoring system is designed to distract the player as little as possible, with the player being graded on two, easily and quickly identifiably variables: completion and combo. Completion is obvious to the player without requiring much additional mental effort, they just need to see if they have cleared the entire map. The combo meter is also straightforward, and simply requires the player to move quickly between objectives. With how easy both of these variables are to keep track of, the player can focus on the one variable that really matters: time. As a result, the player is always focused on their immediate concerns of moving as quickly as possible, because they do not need to spend time thinking about how to max out their combo meter or how to juggle other abstract systems. Without a focus on complex systems, the game can tell the player to focus on the immediate flow of the level, making the music match the tone perfectly.
support three tones at a time. However, the game builds on this with multiple musical layers, at first with only a background instrument or two on top of the melody, but eventually growing in complexity as the player picks up four power ups in the level. Each one plays a sound effect, displays a colorful notification on the screen, and adds another layer to the music, making the final few seconds of a level feel like a busting musical landscape. In addition to these power-ups, the level is also filled with thirty to fifty gold bars for the player to collect, all of which play a note or two when collected, also in sync with the music. Avoiding obstacles in the environment plays a different sound as well, each one placed at a point in the music that it feels natural. This is iterated on further in the boss fight for World 4, which uses a call and response structure as the foundation for the level’s music. The boss readies obstacles to throw at the player while playing a series of notes to let them know what obstacles to prepare for, then the player jumps over/ducks under/destroys these obstacles as the response is played. All of these aspects lead to a final audio track for each run of a level that is unique to that player, based on what collectibles and power-ups the player grabbed, and if they hit them at the correct time. This results in an aural experience that is much more reactive than even most rhythm games, where the player is expected to perform the audio the game wants rather than dynamically create their own. The end result is a more reactive take on flow, that feels just as elegant as Dustforce, but while Dustforce wants you to feel a detachment between the music and the gameplay, Runner2 wants you to feel like you are helping create it. Both takes are incredibly effective for each game’s specific design goals, but when compared, I think they provide interesting examples on how music can be used creatively with regards to game feel.
were obviously scripted and mostly cheesy. The more common mechanics of FEAR, however, created quite the opposite feeling. In addition to being a horror game, FEAR is also a first-person shooter, and it doesn’t seek to innovate too dramatically in that department, but it does execute on those mechanics wonderfully. From a design doc level overview of the game, it doesn’t have much to offer: samey enemies with guns, normal first person shooting, and a slow-motion mechanic to spice things up. But the game does so well with all three of these features that it elevates the game to an incredibly well-polished version of an oversaturated genre. First, the enemies use an incredibly clever AI system that sees them flanking, falling back, and responding to player actions, in a way that makes every gunfight feel delightfully dynamic. The first-person shooting feels punchy and kinetic in a way even games today still have trouble getting right. And the slow-motion, despite how overused it is in shooters, elevates the entire experience to a tactical, visceral experience. FEAR’s combat is not its only strength though, it’s environment and atmosphere do a much better job of evoking discomfort than its scripted sequences do to evoke horror. After a tough gunfight, the incredibly reactive environments will be covered in rubble and broken glass, leaving the previously sterile environments a mess. As the player walks from objective to objective, or explores an area for additional supplies, the tone is uncomfortably quiet, occasionally broken up by quiet, low-quality radio conversations that further the player’s sense of isolation. FEAR’s environments post-combat feel tense, and even though that tension is usually broken by a cheap jump scare, that tension is one of my favorite parts of the game.
frantic and confusing, but often it comes across as clunky and unpolished. This is a completely acceptable aesthetic to shoot for, but it diminishes the feeling that the game will respond to a player’s low-level skill instead of their higher-level skill. For example, aiming a gun in an FPS is a low level skill, it’s directly about using the controls to perform an action and the game reacts based on how well you do that. Deciding to flank an enemy and shoot him first instead of charging him head-on would be a higher-level skill, making tactical decisions that, while dependent on your low-level interaction with the controls, aren’t as immediately involved with them. This makes combat in Condemned more fun to think about than to actually play, as action games tend to rely more on low-level skill and the satisfaction gained from mastering them. In an opposition to FEAR, what it lacks in its low-level mechanics are made up for at a higher level. Condemned completely nails the atmosphere that FEAR only gets right some of the time. The discomfort of FEAR’s environment is ratcheted up for Condemned, making the player go from uncomfortable to always on the edge of their seat. Levels feel labyrinthine, requiring backtracking into rooms that will often be filled with new enemies performing unscripted actions. The game is fond of the same unmotivated cuts to confusing, horrific images and scenes that FEAR is, but it does them with more subtlety and effectiveness. While FEAR’s art style is largely forgettable, Condemned takes place in Metro City, but is obviously a grimey version of 1980s/90s New York, taking visual influence from films like 
Reapers, and, especially if you have chosen her romance option, she talks about Sheaprd so that another civilization might know about her, and her lines change based on your class and alignment, creating something that feels uncomfortably personal. It doesn’t make a big deal out of itself, it doesn’t have any explosions or giant battle sequences, it just tries to figure out why people like Liara so much. A bit later in the game, in an optional encounter with her on The Citadel, Liara talks about her mother, who you both killed together in the first game, and speaks of her as though she was a regular person, not some video game boss in a sci-fi epic. She tells a very relatable story about her mother taking her to a park so she could dig, a practice that sparked her interest in archeology, and with that as a starting point, she talks with Shepard about very normal things, like home and growing up, about sometime in the future settling down and starting a family. These should feel so out of place in a game about defeating crab gods from outer space, but they don’t. The game has built itself a cast of characters who feel like real, fully fleshed-out people. And, when it is at its peak, it can tell wonderful stories about them.
protagonist is going to come out on top, and if you’ve seen/read/played enough, it will start to get predictable. Citadel knows this, and it turns what could have been another self-serious save-the-galaxy plot into a self-aware comedy about Shepard and her friends going on a wacky adventure. And it isn’t without its technical accomplishments as well. For really the first time in the series, The Citadel feels massive. While fighting the clone and her mercenaries, Shepard gets to see parts of The Citadel that hint at an even grander scale, making the player really feel like they are on a massive, city-sized space station. This makes the shootouts that now are missing narrative tension more engaging because the player has never been in firefights in places that look just like this. You start to be reminded of the scale of the galaxy you have become so accustom to, and seeing a new side of a place that the player has seen in three separate games keeps the player from getting bored. But really, the writing is what carries these action sequences. The characters rag on Shepard for this and that and joke about how many people Shepard kills (because it’s a video game and Shepard murders hundreds of people). The game takes the time to be in love with its genre and its characters and just have fun with it. They make callbacks to throwaway lines from earlier in the game and use them as actual main drivers of the plot, like Traynor’s ridiculously expensive and complex tooth brush being the one tool they need to break into the Normandy after CloneShep steals it. They make jokes about how it’s really contrived that Shepard can never have more than two squadmates, but then break that rule when they have your entire team fighting beside you, something I really wish the main game’s final mission could have done. They even make a joke about Shepard saying, “I should go”, a line that reached meme status after the second game’s release. A great deal of Mass Effect 3 felt like it was made by committee, by people who didn’t quite understand how the game worked and why people loved it. Citadel feels like it was made by people who love the game as much as I do, and want to spend a few hours celebrating that. One of my notes that I took while playing through this DLC was, “This single-handed makes up for everything the main game did wrong”, and I genuinely think it does. While the main game had its share of powerful moments, Citadel feels defined by its greatness, having a purity of vision that the main game just lacked. And I felt that before the game’s crowning achievement began: Shepard throwing a party.
them. Events include walking on set of the Blasto movie, to watching a terrible romance movie that Tali is in love with, to spending a bit of time with your Shepard’s love interest. And they don’t limit themselves to squad members in the third game, they bring back *everyone*, which is really great if you romanced a character who wasn’t too present in the third game. They put a great deal of effort into making the dialog feel reactive to how you treat each one of your characters, like with James asks if his flirting might make Liara (or whoever your Shepard is getting it on with) uncomfortable, and it’s written so casually and naturally that it didn’t appear to be some token bit of interactivity, but the setting reacting to your decisions. Again, it shows the game understanding what players are about, and putting the effort into that. But once these individual character events end, the party begins, and I cannot think of a single section in any video game where I was smiling more.
The original Mirror’s Edge game came out some eight years ago, and has been one of my all-time favorites ever since I first played the demo at a friend’s house. In the time since then, there has never quite been anything like it. Sure, Brink had some parkour, Titanfall took the basic stylings and made it crazy fast (and added jetpacks, which is always nice), and Dying Light applied it to a Ubisoft-styled open world on their own, but while I love all of those games (except Brink, c’mon, Bethesda, what were you thinking?), none of them even come close to Mirror’s Edge. Because as fun as their movement systems are, at the end of the day, the feel just a bit too floaty, too removed, and, most importantly, too easy. Movement is never the core gameplay of those games. In Mirror’s Edge, it was basically all you had (I’m not going to talk about the shooting mechanics, and no one else should either). While Ubisoft games had me hating going from Point A to Point B, Mirror’s Edge is basically nothing but that. So, they figured, if our game is entirely about getting from one place to another, why not make that really freaking fun? And they did! The movement in Mirror’s Edge is filled with this flow, heft and weight. Faith can get up to some serious speed, but she lands with a thud, will get hurt if you don’t time your roll right, and fall to the ground with a sickening crunch if you miss a ledge grab. The game asked you to be constantly aware, not just to stay alive, but to move as fast as you can and look as cool as you can while doing it. The aesthetics of parkour, of traversing a complicated space in a unique way and making it look effortless, translated so well into gameplay that I am amazed that, eight years later, NO ONE ELSE HAS GOTTEN IT RIGHT. But the first Mirror’s Edge was a linear, level-to-level game, and while I really admire and enjoy its purity, this year, when we *finally* got a sequel, they changed that.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is a straight-up, Ubisoft-inspired, checkbox-ridden, collectible-filled open world. It has an overall completion rate, barfs icons for random tasks onto your map, and doesn’t provide and mechanical incentive to do any of those things. And I freaking love it. Most open world games get very tedious, very fast, because a decent chunk of your game time is just walking from objective to objective, but in Mirror’s Edge, running everywhere is the core gameplay, so they focus on making it as engaging as possible. I had a blast finding out different routes from the various points of interest in the game, felt amazing whenever I found a new shortcut to shave off some travel time, and got genuinely, shout-an-exclamation-of-joy-at-two-in-the-morning-and-piss-off-my-parents excited when I unlocked a new upgrade that let me double wall jump. I didn’t care if I was parkouring to a fixed objective on the map that added to my overall completion, I was doing parkour! I wish I had more to say about it than that, but all it took to make this style of open world enjoyable was to just make going from place to place exciting. The walking wasn’t a chore anymore. I learned every detail of the environments because they were useful to me. And a type of game that I had *hated* for years suddenly was something I was raving to friends about again. Except this time, the honeymoon phase didn’t wear off.
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