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https://blacknerdproblems.com/horizon-forbidden-west-review/
Forbidden West Side is the Best Side
You know what it is! Your girl Aloy is back on the block like Omar with the sawed-off to talk to these machines! When you walk through Horizoooon, better watch yo’ back! Do you remember how detailed Horizon: Zero Dawn was? With the weapon wheel and the crafting of every weapon and variation of a weapon? With the trading and the tiny hidden llama statues with the indigenous-style stories? Oh yeah, with the precision aiming to knock specific pieces off of machines and hunting in a post-dystopian landscape? Not to mention beefing all around the open world with a group of well-organized Mad Max types in cahoots with the IRL voice gawd Lance Reddick? Yeah, all that. In Forbidden West, crank all of that up a few notches. More weapons, more crafting, new species of machine animals, more sub-genres of side quests, and more sun-blown vistas! It’s all there for the open-worlding in Horizon: Forbidden West.
Gameplay
While much of Horizon: Forbidden West is rocking with the ‘bigger and better’ model for the sequel, that includes much more detail added to an already highly detailed game, the world is huge, even in comparison to the first game when you add in the Frozen Wilds DLC. It feels like the developers, Guerilla Games, literally took every mechanic of Zero Dawn and zoomed in on it to make it more player-involved. Crafting components into weaponry can now be skill treed to be done faster.
Maybe I’m telling on myself with my antiquated last-gen hardware, but some of the details go by the wayside in Forbidden West. Sometimes the camera gets a bit wonky, latching onto areas and keeping you from seeing during intense action. Quite a few times Aloy would fall through pieces of rocks and trees, and more than a few (dozen) times the lighting mechanics would load in late and make me think an explosive was going off somewhere. A few updates have come out since it dropped, so there might be hope for us PlayStation 4 owners to have a fully-realized experience comparable with PS5 (*cough* hoarders) owners.
Sound Design
One of the highlights of the game is its use of sound. Not just the kinds of sounds, the full soundscape of natural and technological working in concert and conflict. A breeze on a high cliff rustling through sparse tree limbs and the whirring of robotic parts is just one instance of the kind of symphony Forbidden West might conjure at any given moment. The slurring and stretching when the weapon wheel slows time, Aloy’s various grunts, the tech ‘screech’ that accompanies the lens flare that tells you a machine can see you. The engineering is immense on a game like this, and the intention is so clear. Definitely play this one with headphones. There are some moments where the background dialogue mixes with the main dialogue, and it can be disorienting without subtitles to help differentiate. But by the by, Forbidden West delivers.
Story & Voice Work
Horizon is a world filled to the brim, and Forbidden West holds fast to the legacy of having narrative tucked into every nook and cranny of the map. Sylens is back at it again with Hades, but add an interstellar wrinkle and the fact that Sylens has a few Aloy-types in his employ. Put that in the mix with a plague called The Blight and you have the general story. To be fair, it’s a great setup for expanding this universe. But to keep it really real, it’s too much story. You can tell there’s too much story when every NPC interaction has more than two minutes of narration. Great for immersion, bad for attention span. The voice work in Horizon: Forbidden West is wonderful, not groundbreaking save for the variation of voices. There are so many different kinds of voices, a genuine practice of diversity still rare in triple-A games.
Visuals
Y’all. The game is gorgeous. Rich and vast, lush and textured. The Focus overlay is more detailed and also more streamlined and capable. It took me a long while to realize the pulse function allows players to see exactly what is and isn’t climbable terrain. But once I knew, I was hitting that pulse every few minutes for all the information possible. You can take in more sights by adjusting the HUD to be as limited or omnipresent as you are comfortable with, which allows for deeper immersion into Forbidden West. The use of color, sound, and texture to separate the two worlds, the natural and the technological, is done with great detail. Let the award nominations come. You know they’re coming.
Verdict
Take Zelda: Breath of the Wild and make it post-apocalyptic and you get Horizon: Forbidden West. Not a jab and not in jest, but all of the mechanics for crafting and cooking and shooting and fighting are so similar they might as well be skin-swapped. What sets the two apart is the deep and foreshadowing storytelling. The graphics and mechanics are pushed to the limit, and the level of detail is really mindboggling. All in all, Forbidden West does what needed to be done. Not just bigger, but a more overall intentional game that delivers on expanding the mythos and the world-at-large. If you rock with the first one, don’t wait any longer, you’ll definitely love this second outing.
Enjoying the Horizon series? Find BNP’s other reviews of the series here.
Cover image via iGamesNews.
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The post Coming with the Bigger and Better Model: ‘Horizon: Forbidden West’ Review appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.
Forbidden West Side is the Best Side
You know what it is! Your girl Aloy is back on the block like Omar with the sawed-off to talk to these machines! When you walk through Horizoooon, better watch yo’ back! Do you remember how detailed Horizon: Zero Dawn was? With the weapon wheel and the crafting of every weapon and variation of a weapon? With the trading and the tiny hidden llama statues with the indigenous-style stories? Oh yeah, with the precision aiming to knock specific pieces off of machines and hunting in a post-dystopian landscape? Not to mention beefing all around the open world with a group of well-organized Mad Max types in cahoots with the IRL voice gawd Lance Reddick? Yeah, all that. In Forbidden West, crank all of that up a few notches. More weapons, more crafting, new species of machine animals, more sub-genres of side quests, and more sun-blown vistas! It’s all there for the open-worlding in Horizon: Forbidden West.
Gameplay
While much of Horizon: Forbidden West is rocking with the ‘bigger and better’ model for the sequel, that includes much more detail added to an already highly detailed game, the world is huge, even in comparison to the first game when you add in the Frozen Wilds DLC. It feels like the developers, Guerilla Games, literally took every mechanic of Zero Dawn and zoomed in on it to make it more player-involved. Crafting components into weaponry can now be skill treed to be done faster.
Maybe I’m telling on myself with my antiquated last-gen hardware, but some of the details go by the wayside in Forbidden West. Sometimes the camera gets a bit wonky, latching onto areas and keeping you from seeing during intense action. Quite a few times Aloy would fall through pieces of rocks and trees, and more than a few (dozen) times the lighting mechanics would load in late and make me think an explosive was going off somewhere. A few updates have come out since it dropped, so there might be hope for us PlayStation 4 owners to have a fully-realized experience comparable with PS5 (*cough* hoarders) owners.
Sound Design
One of the highlights of the game is its use of sound. Not just the kinds of sounds, the full soundscape of natural and technological working in concert and conflict. A breeze on a high cliff rustling through sparse tree limbs and the whirring of robotic parts is just one instance of the kind of symphony Forbidden West might conjure at any given moment. The slurring and stretching when the weapon wheel slows time, Aloy’s various grunts, the tech ‘screech’ that accompanies the lens flare that tells you a machine can see you. The engineering is immense on a game like this, and the intention is so clear. Definitely play this one with headphones. There are some moments where the background dialogue mixes with the main dialogue, and it can be disorienting without subtitles to help differentiate. But by the by, Forbidden West delivers.
Story & Voice Work
Horizon is a world filled to the brim, and Forbidden West holds fast to the legacy of having narrative tucked into every nook and cranny of the map. Sylens is back at it again with Hades, but add an interstellar wrinkle and the fact that Sylens has a few Aloy-types in his employ. Put that in the mix with a plague called The Blight and you have the general story. To be fair, it’s a great setup for expanding this universe. But to keep it really real, it’s too much story. You can tell there’s too much story when every NPC interaction has more than two minutes of narration. Great for immersion, bad for attention span. The voice work in Horizon: Forbidden West is wonderful, not groundbreaking save for the variation of voices. There are so many different kinds of voices, a genuine practice of diversity still rare in triple-A games.
Visuals
Y’all. The game is gorgeous. Rich and vast, lush and textured. The Focus overlay is more detailed and also more streamlined and capable. It took me a long while to realize the pulse function allows players to see exactly what is and isn’t climbable terrain. But once I knew, I was hitting that pulse every few minutes for all the information possible. You can take in more sights by adjusting the HUD to be as limited or omnipresent as you are comfortable with, which allows for deeper immersion into Forbidden West. The use of color, sound, and texture to separate the two worlds, the natural and the technological, is done with great detail. Let the award nominations come. You know they’re coming.
Verdict
Take Zelda: Breath of the Wild and make it post-apocalyptic and you get Horizon: Forbidden West. Not a jab and not in jest, but all of the mechanics for crafting and cooking and shooting and fighting are so similar they might as well be skin-swapped. What sets the two apart is the deep and foreshadowing storytelling. The graphics and mechanics are pushed to the limit, and the level of detail is really mindboggling. All in all, Forbidden West does what needed to be done. Not just bigger, but a more overall intentional game that delivers on expanding the mythos and the world-at-large. If you rock with the first one, don’t wait any longer, you’ll definitely love this second outing.
Enjoying the Horizon series? Find BNP’s other reviews of the series here.
Cover image via iGamesNews.
Want to get Black Nerd Problems updates sent directly to you? Sign up here! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram!
The post Coming with the Bigger and Better Model: ‘Horizon: Forbidden West’ Review appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.
Sarah Jones courageously turns her angst into art by creating a part scripted film part documentary to transform her one-woman show Sell/Buy/Date into a moving nuanced deep dive into the complexity of sex work and the debate for and against decriminalizing sex work. This film is fantastic. The most compelling stories come when writers write their life experiences honestly. It’s not easy to let go of the ego and show yourself warts and all. The breathtaking part about Sell/Buy/Date is the unorthodox nature of how Sarah Jones chooses to make a film of her one-woman show. It’s very meta.
In case you don’t know her work, here’s a little background. Sarah Jones is a master storyteller. I saw her Tony award-winning one-woman show Bridge and Tunnel when it was first produced off-Broadway at the 45 Bleecker Street Theater (now called The Lynn Redgrave Theater) in NYC back in 2004. She wrote the show and played immigrants of all ethnicities from NYC’s boroughs with her superb acting, a few costume pieces, minimal set, and creative stage lighting. I believed I was watching all these different people tell me stories about their lives that moved me to tears.
Sarah Jones’ most recent one-woman show Sell/Buy/Date was another off-Broadway hit and got backing to be made into a feature film, and then all hell broke loose on the internet. Sex workers were up in arms on social media when they found out about a film being made about sex work by a “civilian” (someone who has not done sex work). Sex workers who hadn’t seen the play heard about the film project and immediately voiced their outrage about culturally appropriating sex work. They even showed up at events to promote the upcoming project to protest Sarah Jones in real life.
The film Sell/Buy/Date opens with Sarah Jones backstage, half-dressed on a cot in her dressing room the morning after what must have been a great closing night party. The characters she plays in the show are characters in the film who interact with Sarah Jones in real-time with, Sarah playing all of them.
The first character who wakes Sarah Jones out of her closing night haze is Lorainne, “the 84-year-old Jewish Bubbe.” Then Bella, “a college sophomore whose major is sex work studies, and is ashamed of her white privilege” takes her place in the dressing room to warn Sarah not to check social media.
Then (the ethical consciousness of the film and my favorite character) Nereida, a “half Dominican, Half Puerto Rican all proud girls/women’s rights advocate,” gets everyone organized to vacate the premises and get Sarah to her mother’s house in Queens away from any possible protesters. Driving the Uber is Rashid, “the entrepreneur” who drops gems of wisdom throughout the film. I still can’t get my mind around the editing of this masterpiece. One actor playing all the roles edited together flawlessly. Amazing.
The structure of Sell/Buy/Date is masterfully constructed to lead the audience on a journey through a tough subject allowing space for nuance, complexity, and intersectionality of perspectives without being preachy. Sarah places her own narrative dealing with the possibility of being canceled by sex workers on social media center stage.
She shows the real impact of what happens when a Black woman is on the verge of being canceled. Sarah Jones struggles with how or even if she should make the film is the journey of the film. The first wisdom bomb Jones’ character Nereida drops is: “The crisis is Sarah Jones. She’s so busy trying to be the “wokest” and please everybody that her play has now pissed off everybody.”
From there, Jones goes on a journey from NY to LA to Vegas, interviewing sex workers to get their point of view. The first person she connects with is a sex worker who responded to Sarah Jones on IG to meet up and talk IRL. Jones and Lain meet, and Lain shows how depictions of sex workers in dominant culture dehumanize women. It’s depressing to see American pop culture’s long history of ridiculing, devaluing, and disrespecting sex workers. Lotus Lain emplores Sarah Jones to let sex workers speak for themselves if she decides to make a film about sex work.
From there, Jones Tish Roberts, a human rights activist, shares her heartbreaking introduction to sex work through an older white male high-school teacher. He singled her out as a young Black girl who had little access to resources who wasn’t seen by her family or culture. He gave her attention and lured her into secret, sexual interactions in exchange for money when she was a 17-year-old child.
Then Jones meets an ex-Mormon pole dancing instructor in Brooklyn who talks about embodiment and the freedom she found performing as a porn actress. Jones gets her mother’s take which is rooted in concern and judgment. Then, the unorthodoc goes on a deep journey when Sarah’s told by her manager that there are backers for the film who want her to present at The Upfronts, so they want to meet with her in LA.
So Sarah Jones and her character friends all go out west. Rashid, Bella, and Nereida all set Sarah up with people who have had all kinds of success doing sex work, sex work advocates who want to decriminalize sex work, survivors of sex work, and anti-human trafficking advocates.
The most poignant part of Sell/Buy/Date was after Sarah Jones visits a legal brothel in Nevada. Nereida gives us the difference between agency and power. As we saw in the film Zola, in sex work, white women and Black and Brown women have a different value. The opportunities just aren’t the same. Transgender Latina activist Esperanza Fonseca takes the film to a deeper level as she simply states the physical danger that transgender women of color face as sex workers that give a whole other perspective about the possible negative impact of decriminalization.
Then, Sarah Jones meets PhD Student Jennifer Marley Tewa, a queer indigenous feminist who talks about the connection of oil extraction projects that create “man camps” where sex trafficking flourishes on native land and how when these workers come to excavate sacred lands native women experience a higher level of violent assaults and go missing. There’s so much that I didn’t know about sex work before experiencing this film. Sell/Buy/Date is spectacular and it left me in tears.
Sell/Buy/Date screened at the 2022 SXSW film festival.