Horizon Forbidden West gameplay reveal: Swimming with tropical robo-saurs

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  Another successful robo-safari for Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West. [credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Guerrilla Games ]

Aloy, the braided-hair hero of Sony's 2017 smash Horizon Zero Dawn, is set to return to consoles later this year in the series' first sequel, and on Thursday, we finally learned how that sequel video game will look.

On the cusp of 2021's kinda-sorta virtualized E3, creators Guerrilla Games premiered an uninterrupted, 14-minute gameplay sequence from this year's upcoming (and undated) Horizon Forbidden West. The sequence centers on an early-game mission to save a captured ally, and it has all the hallmarks of a flashy press conference reveal: familiar characters, slow-motion pans over insane-looking robot monsters, and a conveniently linear path full of perfectly placed midbattle dialogue.

Performance savings via new hairdo?

Still, what we saw actually looks like a real-deal, Horizon-branded video game—and arguably one that will neatly scale to Sony's past-gen PlayStation 4 console, since it leans less on flashy new tech like ray tracing or uninterrupted landscapes. This gameplay reveal was advertised as running on real PlayStation 5 hardware, however, so exactly how the game will downscale to base PS4 consoles remains to be seen. (Lower frame rates? Fewer water effects? Aloy's signature braids chopped off and replaced with a buzz cut?)

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