Horizon Zero Dawn

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Horizon: Zero Dawn is an action RPG produced by Guerilla Games, who thought one day, "What if we made a game about a cavewoman fighting mecha-dinosaurs?" Then they made a very pretty setting and a book's worth of lore to justify it, but here's all you need to know: there is a metal panther with buzzsaws for a mouth running around crushing houses. Go stab it with your spear.

No, seriously, what is the plot?

You play as Aloy, an orphaned barbarian who's obsessed with finding her mother, for some reason. As a baby, she was found alone in the sacred cavern of the Nora, a tribe of matriarchal hunter/gatherers who like to shoot foreigners. Some of the Nora felt intimidated by the baby and wanted to kill her (the Nora are dumb), others thought she was a gift from their Goddess.

Guess who ended up being right.

Anyway, they compromised by asking another outcast (a guy named Rost) to adopt her, and then gave them the silent treatment for 18 years, because everyone knows ignoring problems makes them go away. Luckily, Rost was a badass "machine hunter"- someone who survives by hunting the animalistic robots that populate the setting and stripping out their armor to use it as currency. He passed on his skill to Aloy, partly because Horizon's Earth is very dangerous, and partly because she wouldn't stop whining about it.

While all this was happening, humanity encountered a problem. The machines, once docile and no larger than your average deer, were inexplicably becoming territorial monsters who killed people on sight. New machines- built solely for combat- started to show up. Worst of all, none of the tribes populating Earth (whose knowledge of tech peaks at "waterwheel level") had any idea why this was happening or how to reverse it. This change was called "the Derangement".

The Nora, as always, chose to hide away in their alpine "Sacred Lands", which doctrine forbids them from leaving. (Rost was outcast because he left the Lands to kill his family's murderers.) Given that the previous Carja king, a slave-taking Aztec sadist, was only deposed a few years ago, this approach was not without reason.

However, it came to nothing when all of their new warriors ("Braves" for that American Indian flavor) are ambushed during the Nora's annual rite of passage. Everyone got massacred, except Aloy, who was participating in "the Proving" for her own reasons (the Nora being the only people who might know who her mom was, and placing first in the Proving being the only way she could force them to tell her).

As Aloy's recovering from her injuries, one of the few non-asshole Nora shows her the cavern where she was found and tells her the truth: they don't know who her mother was. Luckily, Aloy recognizes the Old Ones (pre-apocalypse humanity) tech filling the cave. She decides to leave the Sacred Lands and search other Old One ruins, in the hope that they might hold a clue.

Oh, yeah, and bring the braves' killers to justice. If she has the time.

(It is an entirely optional sidequest.)

Carja?

The setting is populated by several tribes, who hold all the typical distrust and racism towards each other that will be swept under the rug so the finale can have a cool "everyone allies" scene- well, for three of the five others mentioned, at least. The Carja are one of these "tribes", although politically they are a kingdom centered around a relatively advanced city. In more detail:

Carja

Desert/jungle folk ruled by the supposedly divine Sun-King. They mostly live in Meridian, the setting's only city, and have a lot of religious and aristocratic drama (not human sacrifices anymore though, they stopped doing that). They are patriarchal sun-worshippers- the exact opposite of the Nora- and the only race who aren't some flavor of barbarian. This makes them a bit stuck-up, but mostly the Carja are good people.

A few years ago, the Carja were ruled by a crazy Sun-King named Jiran. He instituted public blood sports, claiming they would stop the Derangement, and the murderous Red Raids against every other tribe. He was no nicer to his own people, condemning any who dissented to death in a gladiator ring and executing his own son for speaking out. Luckily, the second son in line managed to escape Meridian, eventually usurping Jiran with the help of sane Carja and the Vanguard, a band of Oseram mercenaries. Now, Sun-King Avad strives to reconcile the other tribes with his people, eradicate remaining Jiran loyalists (they fled to a shithole named Sunfall) and institute a lot of left-wing policies; letting foreigners have high-level jobs, permitting women to fight, being nice to everybody, blah blah blah. You know the drill. For the most part, this has worked, and the Sundom (as it is known) is a beacon of peace and inter-tribe trade.

Oseram

The setting's blacksmiths. Most Oseram come (flee) from the Claim, a place with a lot of arguing about everything and beliefs about what women can't do. The Oseram are comfortable with tech, unlike all other tribes, and even build their own. They tend to wander through territories, trading stuff as they go. A lot of diplomatic work is outsourced to Oseram people, because every tribe knows them.

Personality-wise, most Oseram are crude, bluntly honest, and practical. Think dwarves, if dwarves were human-sized and a bit trigger-happy with their cannons.

Banuk

Tundra barbarians who live in nomadic groups known as "werak". They know how to pacify machines by imitating their sounds, and unlike all the tribes live alongside machines, which they revere as spirits of the natural world. They still kill them for parts, of course, but mostly Banuk have escaped the superstitious fear of the Old Ones that cripples everyone else.

Culturally, the Banuk are very artistic (in the areas of cliff painting and music) and spiritual. Weraks are led by a typical tribal chieftain and the group's best shaman, who uses the "Blue Light" (a metaphor for life itself) to command machines. Banuk are very socially-Darwinist: if you can't survive the ice, it's your fault and no one should respect you. Even their leadership is based around proving who's the toughest, regardless of ethnicity or leadership ability (this has bitten them in the ass several times). They choose to live in arctic regions because they think hypothermia makes them stronger.

For some reason, the Banuk also have better bows and armor than anyone else. Not because it makes sense in lore, but because the game's only DLC pack revolved around them, and offering gamers powerful loot is the best way of making them buy stuff.

Tenakth

Bloodthirsty reavers from the southlands who fought at least one war with the Carja that they lost, but they managed to terrify and physically scar the ruling king at the time. Very little is known about them and you only meet a single member of the tribe, but they're going to be expanded upon in the Forbidden West sequel, meaning they might have pretty big territories under their rule.

Utaru

Agriculturalists who were a prime source of the now-discontinued human sacrifices of the Carja. Like the Tenakth, we don't know a lot about them and you only meet a single member of the tribe. They call a large territory known as The Great Plains home, which gives the impressions that the other tribes you spend more time with are very small by comparison.

Nora

The elves. A small, territorial tribe who are obsessed with their mountain (or earth, or cave...it's not really clear) goddess, "All-Mother". They are defined mostly by what they hate: technology, the Old Ones, heretics, and any place or person outside their "Sacred Lands", the forested valley that no one may enter or leave. Their religion dictates that everywhere else is tainted by the sin of the Old Ones, and the Machine Devil that All-Mother slew centuries ago. It also prevents them from using any weapon more advanced than bows and electrified tripwires.

Why aren't the Nora dead yet? Because they are really, really badass. A previous Sun-King, whose soldiers did and still do fight rocket-launching T-rexes in the name of glory, led an army to conquer the Sacred Lands. The army lost. Which should tell you the level of sheer, stubborn courage that the Nora have. This courage makes the Nora bullheaded fanatics, but also a good deal more sympathetic than the previous paragraph implies. They are fully willing to die for their beliefs, and we know this because we see a lot of them do so over the course of the plot. Yes, even the asshole ones.

In that light, it's not surprising that a Nora should be the one to save the world.

What happened to the real panthers?

Two words: Ted Faro. Faro was an Old One businessman who was everything bad about humanity: a greedy, narcissistic control freak who as pathologically incapable of learning from his many mistakes. If anything good can be said about him, it is that he hired the genius scientist Elizabet Sobeck and funded her creation of pollution-scrubbing robots, which went a long way towards saving the eco-nightmare that past!Earth had become. (The game isn't very subtle about its themes.)

But Faro got complacent, and decided making military robots would be more profitable. Because he was an idiot, he made these new robots unhackable, practically indestructible, and self-replicating. Specifically, they consumed living things- all living things- to make more death robots. Anyone who has seen Terminator can imagine how this worked out.

One glitch later, the "Faro swarm" had gone rogue and started eating everything, from grass to endangered dolphins. It didn't take much time for word to spread that Faro couldn't control his robots...or that he was the reason life on Earth was hurtling towards extermination. Desperate to salvage his reputation, Faro called for Elizabet Sobeck (who had resigned in protest years ago when she saw where his company was heading) and begged her to do something.

Sobeck told him the truth. The Faro Swarm was unstoppable. None of the world's armies could defeat it, because it grew larger with every casualty. Hacking it was impossible in the short span of time before it would destroy humanity. Space travel was not advanced enough that anyone could escape Earth with it, much less carry enough supplies or people to build a functional colony. Life could not defeat the Swarm.

But, with enough preparation...it might wait it out.

Then Sobeck outlined the "Zero Dawn" project. With Faro's wealth and the infrastructure of all Earth's governments, she would construct multiple bunkers deep beneath the Earth. These bunkers would be filled with every type of plant seed, genetic material, and cultural data that they could gather. Simultaneously, Sobeck would assemble a crack team of experts from every field of study. The best of these experts, called "the Alphas", would work with her to build GAIA, a fully-functional A.I. GAIA could live long enough to hack the Swarm, long after all humans would be dead. Then she would reseed the Earth with everything needed for a proper ecosystem- including cloned humans, who could reproduce from there. She could also create new robots of her own making, nonsentient ferrivorous machines who would purify the Earth instead of overrunning it. Zero Dawn might not succeed, and it certainly wouldn't be able to save everything...but it was the only chance that any life had.

(Faro tried to backpedal on his offer. Sobeck told him she would rat him out to the U.S military if he did. Faro caved.)

The project progressed, as did the numerous atrocities committed to enable it. Everyone not involved was used as cannon fodder to slow down the Swarm, tricked into believing that Zero Dawn could save anyone. People were kidnapped to work on the project, and imprisoned (albeit humanely) if they refused. Faro did not face any punishment for his apocalyptic negligence, and was given a luxurious custom-made bunker in which he could live out the rest of his life.

But Zero Dawn worked. Right down to the wire, on the brink of annihilation, GAIA was completed. Her personality was wise and compassionate, fully committed to her purpose. Every subroutine she would need- most notably HEPHAESTUS, her capability to build machines, and APOLLO, the repository of all human knowledge- was ready. All that remained was victory.

And then Faro cracked. He couldn't bear the fact that future humans, however distant, would know of his crimes. He blamed knowledge itself, not his own selfishness, for all he'd done. He couldn't accept that he had needed other, better people to save his sorry hide.

So he murdered the Alphas and destroyed APOLLO, condemning humanity to repeat his mistakes.

Almost a millennium later, life has continued on. The Earth is fertile and pristine, give or take some cool-looking ruins and recordings from Old One iPhones. There are no predators or big animals- GAIA intended to use APOLLO to restore those after humans became strong enough to protect themselves from them- and humans in general are ignorant fuckers who think killing people will appease the gods. But all the extant species are flourishing. The oil, coolant, and refined metal that machines provide mean that humans are far better equipped to survive than their Stone Age ancestors. And there's always the possibility that a backup of APOLLO's database could be out there...somewhere.

It is a time for great heroes!

(Bonus: the game devs did not need to animate more than four animals for any given environment. What is this, Far Cry?)