 Hello everyone, I recently had the distinct pleasure of finishing 2017's Horizon Zero Dawn, a game I had played and loved back when it first released, but never finished because I'm quite lousy with action games that require shooting on console. I'll soon deliver you a much lengthier examination of the game and its PC port. Hopefully very soon indeed, but before I do I wanted to spend some time talking about the shifting context of secondary information sources, namely text data points in Horizon Zero Dawn. We are, I'm afraid, not going to talk about my crippling crush and alloy today. Here's to hoping we touch on that next week. For real? I mean, maybe. Be advised. The following video will spoil one of the big mysteries of Horizon, the fate of the old ones, i.e. of a future version of our own civilization. If you're not familiar with Horizon Zero Dawn at all, its events have set a thousand years into the future, and follow a young outcast, the aforementioned alloy, as she attempts to discover her place in the world and to figure out its mysteries. As for the structure of this video, we are going to go through a data point or two, which I'll interpret in a few sentences. Then I'll play outtakes of the key cutscenes which shift the context, as it were, and we'll go back to those same data points, re-examining them now in view of this key information. The first data point is what scares me, and is the account of an anarchist who has found an enjoyment and purpose in the fight against the machines. It's a searching, questioning account, and a very good piece of companion fiction on its own merits. But what I'm interested in is the notions that its ending creates in the reader's mind. All I know is we've got to fight until Zero Dawn is ready. If I end up surviving this, guess I can worry about my politics then. How many action movies and apocalyptic pieces of media have you seen that adopt that same wishful tone? How many of them eventually turn things around? Our second text data point is just God back. Here things are somewhat bleaker, especially when it comes to that last, oh my god, but hope is very much alive. Project Zero Dawn is that light in the darkness, the savior that will redeem humanity's sin of hubris. Despite the bad songs, everyone clings to the belief of Zero Dawn as humanity's salvation. In the face of overwhelming odds, in the face of this paired notion that survival is possible, that the turning point must be near, is deeply embedded in the reader's mind. Decades of hide randomly in entertainment has calibrated our minds to leap to the conclusion that things will turn around. It goes as far back as the story of David versus Goliath, maybe even further. But is it the way this story goes? Let's take a look at these cutscenes to find out. If you'd prefer a short description of their main points, skip to the timestamp in the video or description below. Three key moments I'd like to point you to. The first is the conversation between Faro and Doctor Elizabeth Sobek. This one confirms and expands on what the player has known, that the old ones fell and machines are the root cause for it. Is what I tell them. Sign, and I'll tell them the wealthiest corporation on earth has guaranteed the funds necessary to build Zero Dawn. Exactly as I've designed it. Or don't sign, and I will make sure they and everyone else on this planet knows the real cause of the glitch. Jesus, Liz. You don't have to threaten me. I'll sign. Look on the bright side, Ted. From here on out, you get to do what you've always been good at. Footing the bill while others get their hands dirty. God forgive me. The machines themselves are of course of human make. And whatever glitch turned them against humanity, well, it's Faro's fault that it is impossible to fix this. So far so good. The second is Gerald Harris. Voiced here by the brilliant Toby Longworth, who reveals the true nature of Operation Enduring Victory. The wide-ranging military campaign that is referenced in data points both overtly and covertly. Here's why. By the time the glitch was noticed, it was already too late. Nothing could stop the Faro plague. Nothing can. Its robots will continue to replicate and devour the biosphere. Life on earth will be destroyed. Our planet reduced to a barren sphere. Global extinction is inevitable. No matter how many we kill, the robots just keep exponentially making more. If we had their deactivation codes, we could shut them all down. The entire swarm. But since their cryptographic protocols use polyphasic entangled waveforms, cracking a code set would take half a century. At best, we've got 16 months. Not exactly what you call a survival option. The destruction of a biosphere is not the sort of apocalypse you can wait out in a fallout shelter or a space station. There will be no birth left to reclaim. Just a lifeless, toxic rock with several million Faro robots on it. Hypernating. Waiting for something to eat. This is where the turn that shift begins. We're told in no uncertain terms that there's no stopping the Faro plague. The world is doomed, and with it all of humanity. Yet it's obvious humanity has lived on. How is it that this has come to be? Then since the writers of guerrilla games are not charlatans, you can rest easy, knowing we're not unaware fragments of some self-conscious AI's daydreams. The final piece of the puzzle is revealed by Dr. Sobek here. Elizabeth Sobek. You've heard the bad news, and it's all true. The Faro plague is devouring the biosphere. Life itself will cease to exist. But does that have to be the end? What if we could give life a future? What if we could build a kind of seed from which, on a dead planet, life could blossom anew? This is the aim, the hope, of Project Zero Dawn. To create a super-intelligent, fully automated terraforming system, and bring life back from lifelessness. Now over the days to come, you'll learn how all these functions, all these pieces that you'll be working on, fit together. How we'll race the clock to execute our harvest initiatives, write the software, build the tech and the facilities. How we'll lock it down and seal it up before the inevitable occurs. But even more important, you'll know how it doesn't end here. How Gaia will generate those deactivation codes General Harris talked about, and build the transmission arrays to broadcast them, shutting down the Faro robots for good. How Gaia will not just build, but imagine any conceivable robot it needs to do its work across centuries. From detoxifying the Earth's ravaged atmosphere and poisoned seas, to the regreting of the Earth from cryopreserved seed stocks, to rewilding the Earth with animal life, and then, when all that is done, how a new generation of human beings, spawned at cradle facilities around the globe, will partake of Apollo. The vast archive of human knowledge and cultural achievement from which they will learn of us, our world. And most important, how not to repeat our mistakes. It's not an impossible dream. It is within our grasp, if we work tirelessly and stop at nothing to achieve it. We can't stop life from ending. But if you will help me, help Gaia, we can give it a future. Join me and help make that future real. It's a bombshell plan, an audacious beyond measure. Project Zero Dawn is indeed salvation, but in a very different way than the one we'd built up in our minds. So let's recap. What is revealed to us is that the Faro plague, a self-aware swarm host of machines, is slowly but certainly consuming all the biomass on the planet, humans included. To combat this, the Zero Dawn protocols are signed. An operation enduring victory is enacted, one to pave the way to humanity and the Earth's future, the other to pay a blood prize for that future to become reality. Enduring victory is not a story of triumph against unbeatable odds, what we have assumed until this moment to be the case based on the data points we found across the world. It's a blood sacrifice. Let us think back to the data points we examined at the beginning of this video. They read a whole lot more like tragedy now, don't they? When I say tragedy, I use that term in the classical literary sense. Of the humanity that Elizabeth Sobeck belonged to, has suddenly stepped into the role of tragic hero. The Old Ones have risen higher, and dared to dream greater dreams than our lowest people ever could. And on a level above that, this future civilization, from the player's own perspective, is greater than our own, has fixed so many of the sociopolitical issues that plague early 21st century society. But like in classical tragedy, the hubris of the Old Ones eventually brings them to destruction. And that awakens pity, and fear in Alloy's heart, and judging by personal experience in the player's own as well. Back to the data point perception shift. What Horizon does here is not far from what a good mystery thriller does. It allows you to build conjectures through a set of evidence, then follows a paradigm shift. Some key piece of information transforms the way you look at the puzzle. And what you thought was a firm foundation for your beliefs is suddenly unmoored, dismissed by incontrovertible proof. You lack the correct frame of reference through which to view the structure of the problem in the first place. With this clever series of revelations, the main quest of Horizon succeeds in uprooting your preconceptions. It breaks free of genre conventions, and rises above its generic motifs. And so earns a spot among the best written stories in gaming. If you enjoyed this video, please like it, share it with your friends, and don't forget to subscribe. Any thumbs up help, so do comments. So leave me one, tell me what you think. Did you notice this shift I have tried to capture here? Do you think it's as smart as I do? Because I have to tell you, I have nothing but admiration for the writing staff at Guerrilla Games. And I'm beyond impressed with what they've achieved here. It has been an experience and a half, and I'm looking forward to talking more about my thoughts on Horizon. Until then, I'm Philip Magnus, see you next time. Bye!