Horizon Zero Dawn Doujinshi and Comics

Horizon Zero Dawn is a 2017 action role-playing game developed by Guerrilla Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The plot follows Aloy, a young huntress in a world overrun by machines, who sets out to uncover her past. The player uses ranged weapons, a spear, and stealth to combat mechanical creatures and other enemy forces. A skill tree provides the player with new abilities and bonuses. The player can explore the open world to discover locations and take on side quests. It is the first game in the Horizon series and was released for the PlayStation 4 in 2017 and Microsoft Windows in 2020.

Horizon Zero Dawn is Guerrilla Games' first intellectual property since Killzone in 2004 and its first role-playing video game. Development began in 2011 after the completion of Killzone 3, with director Mathijs de Jonge considering it the riskiest idea pitched at the time. The game engine, Decima, was developed for Killzone: Shadow Fall and altered for Horizon Zero Dawn. Being set in a post-apocalyptic setting, anthropologists were consulted to authenticate the world's decay over a millennium. The soundtrack was led by composer Joris de Man, featuring contributions from The Flight.

Horizon Zero Dawn was praised by critics for its open world, story, visuals, combat, characterization, and the performance of voice actress Ashly Burch; however, the dialogue, melee combat, and character models received some criticism. The game won numerous awards and sold over 20 million copies by February 2022, making it one of the best-selling PlayStation 4 games. An expansion, The Frozen Wilds, was released in November 2017. A sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, was released for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on 18 February 2022. A television series set prior to the games, Horizon 2074 is in development at Netflix.

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic United States, between the states of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, in the 31st century. Humans live in scattered, primitive tribes with varying levels of technological development. Their technologically advanced predecessors are remembered as the "Old Ones". Large robotic creatures, known as "machines", dominate the Earth. For the most part, they peacefully coexist with humans, who occasionally hunt them for parts. However, a phenomenon known as the "Derangement" has caused machines to become more aggressive towards humans, and larger and deadlier machines have begun to appear. There are four tribes that are prominently featured: the Nora, the Banuk, the Carja and the Oseram. The Nora are fierce hunter-gatherers who live in the mountains and worship nature as the "All-Mother". The Carja are desert-dwelling city builders who worship the Sun. The Banuk consists of wandering clans made up of hunters and shamans who live in snowy mountains and worship the machines and their "songs". The Oseram are tinkerers and salvagers known for their metalworking, brewing, and talent as warriors.

Aloy (Ashly Burch) is cast out from the Nora tribe at birth and raised by a fellow outcast named Rost (JB Blanc). As a child (Ava Potter), Aloy obtains a Focus, an augmented reality device that gives her special perceptive abilities. Aloy becomes curious about her origins and is told by Rost that if she wins the Proving, a competition to earn the right to become a member of the Nora, the tribe's Matriarchs might concede this information. Aloy spends some years training in combat and survival under Rost's instruction.

After coming of age, Aloy takes part in the Proving; she wins the competition, but the Nora are attacked by masked cultists. Rost sacrifices himself to save Aloy from their leader, Helis (Crispin Freeman). When Aloy awakens, the Matriarchs explain that Aloy was found as an infant before a sealed door within the Nora's sacred mountain, and that these suspicious origins were the reason for being outcast. The Matriarchs name Aloy a "Seeker", allowing her to leave their lands in pursuit of the cultists. Aloy meets Oseram member Olin (Chook Sibtain), who informs Aloy that the cultists are part of a splinter Carja faction called the Eclipse, and indicates that Aloy was targeted due to her resemblance to an Old World scientist named Elisabet Sobeck (also voiced by Burch). Aloy locates the ruined corporate campus of Faro Automated Solutions and discovers that the Old World was destroyed nearly a thousand years ago after Faro lost control of its automated peacekeeper military robots. The robots, which could self-replicate and consumed biomass, overran the planet and consumed the biosphere, stripping Earth of life. Zero Dawn, a project spearheaded by Sobeck, was initiated to create an automated terraforming system to deactivate the robots and restore life to Earth.

Aloy is contacted by Sylens (Lance Reddick), a secretive figure interested in uncovering the fate of the Old Ones. Aloy learns that Sobeck was sent to a decommissioned Orbital Launch Base to complete Zero Dawn, which is located under the Citadel, the centre of Eclipse power. Inside the base, Aloy learns 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 the Faro robots and build its own to restore the Earth's biosphere. Once the planet was habitable again, GAIA's next goal was to reseed life on Earth based on stored DNA and teach the first human clones not to repeat their predecessors' mistakes. However, APOLLO, the subsystem designed to teach humanity, was sabotaged by Faro's founder and CEO Theodore Faro in a fit of nihilism, and the first humans were reduced to a tribal, subsistence society. The Eclipse are secretly controlled by HADES (John Gonzalez), another of GAIA's subsystems designed to enact controlled extinction if the outcome of Zero Dawn was not favorable for human existence. Reaching Sobeck's office, Aloy obtains a registry to give her access to the door beneath the Nora's mountain. She is captured by Helis and sentenced to death at the Citadel, but escapes with the help of Sylens. Aloy helps the Nora fight off the Eclipse and unlocks the mountain's door.

She finds a recording from 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 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 Sobeck sacrificed her life to ensure the Faro robots would not find GAIA. Aloy manages to obtain the master override to destroy HADES. Sylens reveals that he was the founder of the Eclipse, originally tempted by HADES' promises of knowledge. They surmise that HADES intends to send a signal to reactivate the Faro robots to extinguish life on Earth. Aloy kills Helis and helps fight off machines, before stabbing HADES and activating the master override, ending the war. She journeys to Sobeck's old home, finding her corpse, and mourns her predecessor. In a post-credits scene, an alive HADES is trapped by Sylens, who intends to interrogate HADES to find out who sent the signal that activated it.

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