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Horizon Forbidden West machines machine hunting guilt meat murder after Zero Dawn spoilers Guerrilla Games

Machine Meat Is Murder in Horizon Forbidden West

This article about the guilt of killing machines in Horizon Forbidden West contains major spoilers for Horizon Zero Dawn.

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If meat is murder, machine meat is murder squared. Thatā€™s the questionable conclusion Iā€™ve come to after playing Horizon Forbidden West and being racked with guilt almost every time Iā€™ve dispatched one of the gameā€™s mechanical animals.

I say almost because those giant mecha-snakes can go to hell, but itā€™s not just a matter of size, offensive capability, or how adorable the machines are. Even if a Bristleback can dispatch Aloy in a couple of hits, I still feel like the post-apocalypseā€™s biggest shitheel for rummaging through their mechanical guts.

Conversely, I couldnā€™t give two hoots about Forbidden Westā€™s ā€œrealā€ animals, and thatā€™s coming from someone who spent a significant part of their life as a vegetarian. Maybe Little Billy Woodland Creature does keep asking his mother when daddy is coming home, but that hasnā€™t stopped me from slaughtering a small continentā€™s worth of boars.

In fact, I have so much ā€œrich meatā€ hoarded away, I could use it to craft some kind of horrifying flesh golem. I donā€™t know where Aloyā€™s storing it, unless sheā€™s taken to shoving it into her cheeks like a hamster, showering NPCs with flecks of flesh when she speaks. If a living, breathing beast bounds into sight and itā€™s bigger than a squirrel, itā€™s getting turned into a pincushion, no questions asked.

Horizon Forbidden West machines machine hunting guilt meat murder after Zero Dawn spoilers Guerrilla Games

Likewise, I have zero issues dispatching Horizon Forbidden Westā€™s human foes. So what makes the machines so different? Itā€™s a question Iā€™ve asked myself an awful lot, because my reluctance to dispatch them is definitely making Horizon Forbidden West harder. I inwardly cringe whenever Aloy plunges her spear into the neck of some mechanical beast, then fills her pockets with its component parts. Just roaming around and seeing people clad in robot parts has me raising an eyebrow, and I did a double take when Aloy was presented with a tiara made out of what appeared to be machine scales.

One reason why is that thereā€™s no mess when it comes to killing and pillaging the machines of Horizon Forbidden West. Red Dead Redemption 2 might be oversimplifying matters with how easily you can skin an animal, but there is at least a visceral element to it. Killing a machine in Horizon Forbidden West and then whipping its components out feels too easy. You havenā€™t gotten your hands dirty, particularly if itā€™s a stealth kill, and it feels like you havenā€™t ā€œpaidā€ for the kill. One minute a Burrower is walking around, the next youā€™re strapping chunks of it to your arrows.

Thereā€™s also the question of why condemning them to ā€œdeathā€ is the only option. Knock an NPC unconscious and thereā€™s every chance youā€™ll do some serious damage. And yet with the machines, which are only hostile when you get too close, death is the only option. You can knock them down and stagger them, but thereā€™s no local off button, which is surprising given what they were built for.

That brings me to the real reason, on reflection, I feel guilty every time I kill one of Horizonā€™s machines. These machines are ultimately the saviors of humanity ā€“ of the planet as a whole. Itā€™s revealed in the first game that a group of self-replicating robots, albeit initially man-made, destroyed the planet. They stripped the planet of its biomass, which they used for fuel, and yes, that probably included eating people. Itā€™s a pretty horrifying scenario.

Horizon Forbidden West machines machine hunting guilt meat murder after Zero Dawn spoilers Guerrilla Games

The machines you encounter in Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, however, are not those robots. They were constructed to reseed the planet, to terraform Earth from the barren rock it had become to a place that could, once again, support human life. Sure, some of the machines were diverted from their purpose, and you could definitely question why a water filtration robot needed to look like a giant crocodile. But at the end of the day, humanity exists and continues to exist because of them.

In the real world, animals go extinct all the time and the consequences for the food chain can be dire. But again, Horizon Forbidden West does away with that middle layer as you dispatch machines that, even though they may be operating less efficiently than they once were, are keeping the world alive.

The underground factories in Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West called cauldrons do make more machines, but with each kill I felt I was making the world a fraction less livable. Plus, some of the machines you can kill are the ones that harvest fallen machines ā€“ meaning the more you kill, the less chance there is that the cauldrons will have the resources to make more.

I barely felt a twinge of guilt when I was killing machines in Horizon Zero Dawn, partly because of the sheer novelty factor of taking down a giant mechanical dinosaur. But Zero Dawnā€™s story, and the thinking space Iā€™ve had between both games, has given me serious second thoughts about robo-slaughter. And since the game doesnā€™t impose any penalty, my brain has been left to bring the guilt.


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Image of Chris McMullen
Chris McMullen
Contributing Writer
Chris McMullen is a freelance contributor at The Escapist and has been with the site since 2020. He returned to writing about games following several career changes, with his most recent stint lasting five-plus years. He hopes that, through his writing work, he settles the karmic debt he incurred by persuading his parents to buy a Mega CD. Outside of The Escapist, Chris covers news and more for GameSpew. He's also been published at such sites as VG247, Space, and more. His tastes run to horror, the post-apocalyptic, and beyond, though he'll tackle most things that aren't exclusively sports-based. At Escapist, he's covered such games as Infinite Craft, Lies of P, Starfield, and numerous other major titles.
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