Horizon Zero Dawn

Aloy (Ashly Burch) was cast out from the Nora tribe at birth and raised by an outcast named Rost (JB Blanc). As a child (Ava Potter), she obtained a Focus, a small augmented reality device that gives her special perceptive abilities. After coming of age, Aloy enters a competition called the Proving to win the right to become a Nora Brave, and by extension, a member of the Nora tribe. Aloy wins the competition, but the Nora are attacked by cultists. Aloy is almost killed by their leader, Helis (Crispin Freeman), but Rost sacrifices himself to save her. When Aloy awakes, a Matriarch explains that the cultists had gained control of corrupted machines. Aloy learns that as an infant, she was found at the foot of a sealed door. Oseram foreigner Olin (Chook Sibtain) informs Aloy that the cultists are part of a group called the Eclipse, and indicates that Aloy was targeted due to her resemblance to an Old World scientist named Dr. Elisabet Sobeck (also voiced by Burch). Aloy locates the remnants of the company Faro Automated Solutions and discovers that the old world was destroyed nearly 1,000 years ago after Faro lost control of its automated “peacekeeper” military robots. The robots, which could self-replicate and consumed biomass as fuel, overran the planet and consumed the biosphere, stripping Earth of all life. Project Zero Dawn, a top secret project spearheaded by Dr. Sobeck, was a plan to create an automated terraforming system to eventually shut the robots down and restore life to Earth.[6][34]

Aloy is contacted by Sylens (Lance Reddick), a secretive figure interested in uncovering what happened to the “Old Ones”. Aloy eventually learns that Dr. Sobeck was sent to an Orbital Launch Base to complete Zero Dawn and Sylens reveals that the base is located under the Citadel, the centre of Eclipse power. Aloy heads for the base and inside, she finds out that Zero Dawn was a vast underground system of databases, factories, and cloning facilities controlled by a single artificial intelligence, GAIA (Lesley Ewen). Once all life had been extinguished, GAIA developed a countermeasure to deactivate all of the Faro robots and build its own robots to restore the Earth’s biosphere. Once the planet was habitable again, GAIA reseeded life on Earth based on stored DNA and taught the first human clones not to repeat their predecessors’ past mistakes. However, APOLLO, the system designed to teach the new humans, was sabotaged by Faro in a fit of nihilism, and the Cradle-born humans were reduced to a tribal, subsistence society. HADES (John Gonzalez) was one of GAIA’s subsystems designed to enact controlled extinction if the outcome of Zero Dawn was not favourable for human existence. Reaching Dr. Sobeck’s office, Aloy downloads a registry to give her access to the door from which she was born. She is captured by Helis and sentenced to death at the Citadel, but escapes with the help of Sylens. Aloy helps the Nora tribe fight off the Eclipse and ends up at the door beneath the Nora mountain.[6][34]

She finds a recording left behind by GAIA, revealing that a signal of unknown origin caused HADES to activate and seize control of her functions. As a last resort, GAIA self-destructed in order to stop HADES. Without GAIA to maintain the terraforming process, the entire system began to break down. As a contingency plan, GAIA created a clone of Dr. Sobeck in the form of Aloy, in the hope that she would find GAIA’s message, destroy HADES, and restore GAIA’s functions. Aloy learns that Dr. Sobeck sacrificed her life to ensure the Faro robot swarm would not find GAIA. Aloy manages to obtain the master override necessary to destroy HADES. Sylens admits that he was the original founder of the Eclipse, originally tempted by HADES’ promises of knowledge. With Sylens’s help, Aloy surmises that HADES means to send a signal to reactivate the Faro robots to once again extinguish all life on Earth. Aloy kills Helis and helps fight off waves of corrupted machines, before stabbing HADES with Sylens’ lance and activating the master override, ending the war. She journeys to Dr. Sobeck’s old home, finding her corpse, and has a moment of mourning for her predecessor. In a post-credits scene, HADES is shown to still be alive, but trapped by Sylens, who intends to interrogate HADES to find out who sent the signal that activated it.

Minimum Configuration
CPU: Intel Core [email protected] or AMD FX [email protected]
CPU SPEED: Info
RAM: 8 GB
OS: Windows 10 64-bits
VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 (3 GB) or AMD Radeon R9 290 (4GB)
PIXEL SHADER: 5.0
VERTEX SHADER: 5.0
FREE DISK SPACE: 100 GB
DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 3 GB

Recommended configuration
CPU: Intel Core [email protected] or Ryzen 5 [email protected]
CPU SPEED: Info
RAM: 16 GB
OS: Windows 10 64-bits
VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB) or AMD Radeon RX 580 (8GB)
PIXEL SHADER: 5.1
VERTEX SHADER: 5.1
FREE DISK SPACE: 100 GB
DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 6 GB

See Also

Mass Effect™ One