Today’s PlayStation State of Play featured our first ever look at Horizon Forbidden West gameplay. After a five-hour long countdown featuring imagery of the various environments you’ll visit in Horizon Forbidden West, PlayStation Studios and Guerrilla Games finally showed off 14 minutes of gameplay.
You can watch the full presentation, including developer commentary on Aloy’s new abilities, in the video below:
The new gameplay featured a small hint at some of the story, as well as some looks at very impressive foliage. We also got to see Aloy in combat against a few different machines and raiders, as well as the swimming that was teased in last year’s reveal. The trailer showed some of the new machine-animal hybrids, like the Tremortusk—a wooly mammoth-like machine that was under the control of a group of raiders—that Aloy inevitably ends up in a battle against. The demo ultimately ends near “the old bridge,” which turns out to be the Golden Gate Bridge that was featured in screenshots released last year. We see a mysterious item appear to set off a strange storm with red lightning.
Aloy can still override machines to make them friendly, using them as mounts to move about the open world a bit more quickly. She retains her signature bow, but appears to have acquired a few new skills along the way that promise to open up the tactical nature of exploration and combat. There’s a strange red blight that’s spreading across the world, choking out all life. Aloy is the only one who can stop it, and she’s forced to head west in order to discover the secrets of the rebels who can also tame the machines, stop this creeping threat, and uncover a number of other mysteries that will come up throughout.
The Horizon Forbidden West State of Play did not reveal a release date, however. Sony remains adamant that the game is coming sometime in 2021, but it looks like Guerrilla Games isn’t ready to commit to an exact date just yet. They’ve said they’ll update fans “very soon.”
Thanks for watching our #HorizonForbiddenWest gameplay reveal! We don’t have an exact release date just yet, but development is on track and we will have an update for you very soon – thank you as always for your ongoing support!
— Guerrilla (@Guerrilla) May 27, 2021
Horizon Forbidden West is a PlayStation console exlcusive coming to PS4 and PS5 later this year.
