These beings, moulded from a mixture of animal and dinosaur influences, are still unsettling to behold. Credit must go to Guerrilla (a studio who made its name with the Killzone series), and to art director Jan‑Bart van Beek, for the machines that click and whirr through the fields. Not to say that newness was off the menu. Despite the recognisable formula of its design, Horizon felt strange and unique. The tribal people scattered across its pastures looked caught between the Neolithic and the Toys-R-Ussic, seemingly fashioning their clothes from smashed heaps of Zoids-those foot-bruising robotic animal toys from the eighties, which, indeed, seem to have been the inspiration for the game’s metal beasts. The visual style meshed the ancient with the futuristic. The towers, for instance, now moved, like gently grazing giraffes with saucer-shaped heads. (This desire, incidentally, is why, for the Zelda-zealous, the sheer force of creative reinvention in Breath of the Wild carried with it a mild sadness-as many of its links to the past were broken.) The other was in developer Guerrilla Games’ knack for recasting these patterns in zippy new configurations. One was in the reassuring hand of genre-the comfort-hungry eagerness with which we yearn to see the patterns of tradition honoured. Horizon was, in a sense, business as usual, but its winsome power lay in two places. I have been playing it again, on a humble PlayStation 4, and have found its charm undimmed.
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But perhaps more valuable than these cosmetic buffs is merely the chance to reconsider the game-or, for dedicated PC players, to simply consider it. There is the option to unlimit the framerate and play at 4K resolution, provided you have the requisite graphics card, that is-along with the willingness to gently broil it in pursuit of such heightened fidelity. It is out now on PC, offering a collection of advantages, such as support for ultra-wide monitors, for those who wish to flood their peripheral vision, and thus plunge themselves deeper into its fiction. One look at its map and its mission log, and you would be forgiven for thinking that it didn’t have a wild breath in its body. That same year, Horizon Zero Dawn came out-two days before, in fact, on March 1-and it was filled with ideas that were foreseen by everyone: the established creed of climbable towers, capturable bases, and craftable gear. It felt like fresh air, as though you hadn’t so much turned on your Nintendo Switch (or, God help you, your Wii U) as opened a window. The rules of its sandbox, when struck against one another, would spark with ideas and solutions that you suspected the developers couldn’t have foreseen. It was heralded for its systems-based approach-a phrase that bears all the romance of accounting software, but which describes a loosening breeze (calibrated, of course, with precision) that blew through the grid of the open world template as we knew it. The game was called The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Out into this wilderness rode a lone hero, expressive in deed and motion, and gifted the advantage of an out-of-place gadget. Mechanical beasts, wrought in the image of animals, ravened across its plains, and the ruins of an older civilisation-familiar to us, if not the citizens of this land-were glimpsable under mounds of rubble and rust. It seemed instinctively given to fantasy, but was tinged with the technological. It depicted a world of dense forests, thirst-sharpening sands, and gleaming belts of snow. In 2017, a year hardly understocked with great games, one release embarked in a bold new direction.
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