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Horizon Zero Dawn / Tropes N to Z

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Tropes #-M | Tropes N-Z | The Frozen Wilds
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    N — P 
  • Near-Villain Victory: In the end, the final battle with HADES' Deathbringer takes ten minutes at a maximum. Any longer, and the Faro Plague would be fully reawakened, with no hope of stopping them.
  • New Eden: The ruins of human civilization have been reclaimed by lush plant life. Considering the entire world was destroyed and "reborn" as a whole new Earth, probably an intentional parallel.
  • New Game Plus: Added in patch 1.30. One can replay the game with their items and skill tree carried over from the previous playthroughnote . This includes things like the Shield Weaver Armor, the Tearblaster, and other items that the player can't acquire until after they've unlocked the entire map and/or beaten most of the game. In addition, Adept versions of the armor and weapons are added that come with an additional modification slot. The catch is that difficulty level is locked, unlike in a normal game where the difficulty can be toggled back and forth if they player finds a particular area too difficult.
  • Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The entire plot of the game is based on this: HADES sees Aloy, mistakenly believes her to be Elisabet Sobeck, and orders the Eclipse to kill her so that she can't interfere with its goal. This directly leads to Aloy being chosen to investigate why Eclipse attacked, learning the truth about Zero Dawn and HADES, and realizing she has to discover a way of stopping it. If HADES had never seen Aloy through Olin's Focus, or not panicked when it did, the plan would have gone off without a hitch and no one would have been in any position to stop it. On the other hand, HADES was never intended to be more than a Necessary Evil subsystem of GAIA to terminate life where necessary in order to start over again with a working biosystem, and any critical thinking skills it developed were due to the virus infecting it and Sylens teaching it how to manipulate the superstitious Eclipse Carta to serve as hard labour and viable muscle where necessary. HADES literally can't think of a way to resolve the problem that doesn't involved killing it — and in that regard, it at least is willing to use extreme firepower to do so.
  • Nightmarish Factory: Cauldrons are run by machines for the purpose of making more machines to keep the biosphere running. Since they were never meant to have humans in them, they have no reason to appeal to their sense of aesthetics. Inside, the entire complex appears to be what would happen if the Nostromo collided with the weapons factories from Terminator Salvation. To the humans of the era, they must look downright eldritch.
  • No "Arc" in "Archery": Arrows generally fly straight and true without the need to account for projectile drop, though this depends on how much the bow is charged when you release—a fully charged shot from the Banuk bows will travel in an almost straight line, but a rapidly fired shot will generally have a noticeable drop.
  • No Blood for Phlebotinum: In the last days of the Old Ones, coffee has become a rare and heavily conflicted resource due to global warfare and environmental damage. Coffee companies and coffee-growing nations actually purchased war machines from Faro Automated Solutions specifically to fight each other. Part of Travis Tate's willingness to participate in Project Zero Dawn was hope that it had coffee stockpiles.
    Travis: Hey — don't supposed you got real coffee in this place? You know — blood coffee? Conflict cappuccinos?
  • No Flow in CGI: Averted, everyone's hair and clothing move in a fairly realistic fashion. Heck, sometimes Aloy's braids move around too much. Though the large loop bracelets that the Nora matriarchs wear and the heavy draping sleeves the Carja priests favour remain stiff and perpendicular to the wrist, even when their hands are raised, and when Aloy lowers her head her hair doesn't fall down along the sides of her face.
  • No-Gear Level: When Aloy gets captured by Helis at Sunfall, she starts out fighting a Behemoth without her gear and needs to find a way to get a hold of her weapons before she can even think of facing it.
  • Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack: Ice ammo doesn't damage targets, unless the bow or sling shooting it is specially modified, but enough of it will turn an enemy slow and brittle, at which point all damage dealt to it is amplified. Players are intended to then switch out their direct-damage weapons and start whaling on the target.
  • No OSHA Compliance: Justified in the Cauldrons, as they were built as completely autonomous factories that were never intended to have humans inside them.
  • Notice This:
    • Justified, the device Aloy found as a child provides her with an Augmented Reality interface and scanner.
    • Climbable edges are painted either yellow or orange if they're artificial, or off-white if they're natural. They can still be surprisingly hard to spot at times, especially the latter. This becomes a little ridiculous when one side quest in The Frozen Wilds has you follow a group of murderers who climbed trees to avoid leaving a trail - every tree they climbed has a yellow rope dangling off of it.
    • Tall grass you can hide in has bright red tufts at the tips. At night, fireflies gather above the grass.
  • Nuke 'em: One of the strategies the Old Ones tried in their attempt to stop the encroaching Faro Plague, but they quickly stopped it again, partly because of the morale and environmental impact it was having, but mostly because it didn't have an effect on the enemy. You know things are bad when nuclear carpet bombing does diddly-squat to your targets. Some of the present-day documents Aloy can find imply that the nuclear detonations' legacy still scars the land in regions like the Forbidden West.
  • Odd Name Out: Of all the AIs the make up Project Zero Dawn, Minerva stands out as the only one named after a Roman deity, unlike the others who are named after the gods of Greek mythology. Its project leader was also the only military leader in the group and it had the most military function of any of them, and Minerva's Greek counterpart Athena was the goddess of wisdom and war — which would have gone great with the theme. According to writer Ben McCaw, this was merely due to them liking the Roman version better.
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
    • Most of Operation: Enduring Victory. Faced with a self-replicating, virtually unstoppable swarm of machines that consume biomass, there is very little hope for humanity. Instead, to buy enough time for Project Zero Dawn, every human being alive performed a Heroic Sacrifice to delay the machines for over a year. Most of them had no combat training whatsoever — the military just handed them guns and shipped them to the front. And they fought until they died anyway. Many other civilizations would have fallen in a fraction of that time.
    • There's also a significant chunk of Sun-King Avad's recent backstory. Fleeing his mad royal father and escaping with a foreign slave to her lands, gathering support there and among his own people, returning with an army and taking the holy city and being forced to kill Jiran.
    • When you think about it, the survival of the earliest humans released from ELEUTHIA facilities. No doubt countless numbers died, but it's an astonishing feat of collective intelligence, experimentation, and drive that hundreds or thousands of teenagers with a kindergarten-level education clawed their way into what became several new civilizations.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • HADES broadcasts "System Threat Detected" over its entire Focus network forcefully enough to cause a momentary painful short in the Focuses upon the mere sight of Aloy through Olin's focus. Including through Sylens, who was eavesdropping ever since he went rogue from Eclipse.
    • Mere minutes before Aloy finds out that Ted Faro deleted all of the old humanity's knowledge and killed all the alphas, she can find several recordings of a crazed Faro. One has him saying that the knowledge of APOLLO is poison, and another has him saying he's found a "solution" to make it all better. Aloy says aloud "I don't like where this is headed" after hearing the second one.
    • There's no shortage of people who try to double-cross Aloy, lure her into ambushes or otherwise underestimate her badassery. Most of them lose it when their attempts inevitably fail and Aloy comes gunning for them.
  • One-Woman Wail: The game's main theme several other pieces from the soundtrack, and even the map screen.
  • Operation: [Blank]: The "Zero Dawn" Project, which was supported by Operation: Enduring Victory. The latter consisted of countless separate engagements, each with its own name that followed the same pattern.
  • Organ Drops:
    • A mechanical variant — Aloy can rummage through defeated robots to scavenge mechanical odds, ends, and tidbits such as lenses, springs, heating coils, power cores, and sundry robotic components. By virtue of half-feral machines making up most of the setting's "wildlife", an at least passable knowledge of mechanics and the ability to efficiently salvage technology from wrecks is an important part of being a hunter.
    • Wild animals can be looted for assorted cuts of meat, hides, and bones.
  • Outside-Context Problem:
    • The event that triggered the entire plot in the game's present time: an unknown signal attacks GAIA, causing her subroutines to go rogue and at least some of them to become hostile. For all the efforts of the Zero Dawn team, none of them could have anticipated this. The Sequel reveals just how far outside of context for the team the event was, such that there was no way they could have prepared for it.
    • Aloy herself is this to HADES and by extension, the Eclipse. She's a random Nora woman from a backwards society, and doesn't even occupy a position of important or respect within her tribe, but the second their master learns of her presence, he panics, and mobilises as many forces as he can, including Helis to commit an attack on the Nora lands, including the use of corrupted machines to overwhelm them. Since their master is a being incomprehensible to them as none of the Eclipse can understand the concept of an Artificial Intelligence they're worshiping like a god, nobody understands his reason to consider her a threat. This is precisely what draws Aloy to Sylens' attention, and through their uneasy alliance, they each discover the context behind the Master's fears of her and how they relate to his own original and the world of the Old Ones.
    • Aloy is this again to Dervahl. He's a Genius Bruiser who's on the cusp of achieving his destructive revenge against Meridian and the Carja sundom. He's successfully lured the only person who could be a Spanner in the Works to him into a trap and incapacitated her, faking her death to remove her far from the Sundom and his plans, and so he can take his sweet time torturing and mortally wounding her in retribution for her betrayal of him prior to the liberation of Meridian. He's successfully smuggled in a large cash of blaze explosives into the city to blow it all all the cargo to hell and has a way to sneak into the Sun King's palace, armed with a new sound-based weapon that gives him an overwhelming advantage against the Carja guards futilely defending Avad from his Revenge. However, right as he's on the cusp of victory, Erend, the dumb, unimportant brother of the greatest threat to his plans brings in a random Nora woman to the city as a personal favour to help get closure on his sister's 'death' This Nora can somehow see what others cannot, can identify the truth of his deception with Ersa's death even long after he kidnapped her, can track her location with unerring accuracy to his hidden camp, is skilled and capable enough in combat to fight her way through all his guards and machines, locates Ersa in time to be told of his plans in Meridian with her dying breath, tracks down his hidden explosives to disarm them and then interrupts him right when he has Avad at his mercy, overcoming him in battle and even destroying the machines he summons as a last-ditch effort to kill her. Dervahl had planned for everything to utterly destroy Avad and the Sundom regardless of what happened, but Aloy's interference was something he couldn't have predicted at all.
  • Overheating: Dealing fire damage to Corruptors and Deathbringers triggers an unique status ailment called "Overheat". A temperature gauge with thermometer icon appears above their heads and gradually fills with red color as the heat level builds up, forcing the Corruptor or Deathbringer to temporarily shut down and expose a number of hidden vulnerable heat sinks while cooling down once completely filled, granting a large damage multiplier when hit. This is, by far, the most efficient method of rapidly depleting their health bar or even killing them, especially on higher difficulty settings.
  • Oxygen Meter: Aloy has a fairly standard green meter for when she is stealth-swimming; and can safely hold her breath for up to about thirty seconds at a time. If she is still underwater afterward, she loses health rapidly until she either surfaces or drowns.
  • Panthera Awesome: Actual big cats don't appear in the game despite the fact that cougars live in Colorado but the Sawtooth machines are based on the Smilodon fatalis. All the cougars got eaten by the Faro Plague anyway and GAIA hasn't gotten round to replacing them yet.
  • Percussive Shutdown: A sidequest ends with Aloy finding a lure that a merchant had brought into a city, causing Glinthawks to attack. When the merchant stammers that he doesn't know how to shut it off, Aloy gives him a contemptuous look before stabbing it with her spear.
  • Photo Mode: Comes with many saturation options and provides a set of poses and facial expressions for Aloy. The time of day can be changed for photos.
  • Point of No Return: Invoked twice:
    • Sylens indicates this to Aloy before she goes underneath the Sun-Ring. After this mission, Aloy can no longer approach Sunfall without wearing a specific outfit, and the Nora's Sacred Lands are devastated by the Eclipse's attack.
    • The final Point of No Return is before "A Looming Shadow", in which the game itself will warn you that starting the mission begins the endgame, locking out all sidequests.
  • Post-Apunkalyptic Armor: Although it's been nearly a full thousand years since the apocalypse, Bandits will attach bones, machine parts, et cetera to themselves in this manner. Even standard armors that Aloy can wear, such as the Nora Protector line, have this aesthetic including polymer-looking machine parts as bits of armor.
  • Powered Armor:
    • The Old Ones had this by the time of their demise, although whether it acted as just environmental/self-contained protection or also offered augmentative ability is unknown. During the ending voice-over, Aloy finds Elisabet Sobeck's body still in her suit at the latter's home ranch.
    • Aloy can secure a prototype for herself to use (which ends up stitched to the outside of a regular garment anyway) that provides a rechargeable shield. Don't expect to use it to steamroll through the game, as most fights will still require some finesse to avoid being overwhelmed.
  • Powerful, but Inaccurate:
    • All heavy weapons deal massive damage but have piss-poor accuracy. It's not uncommon for Eclipse Heavies to unload dozens of shots at Aloy with their Firespitters without hitting her even once, and the other big guns are only marginally better.
    • The Double and Triple Shot abilities trade accuracy for damage. A fully charged Triple Shot to a vulnerable component deals horrendous damage to just about anything, but you'll need to be pretty close to the target for all three arrows to connect.
    • With enough Damage mods, the Rattler can become this, especially against Frozen machines.
  • The Power of Friendship: It's not stated, but demonstrated in the ending. Aloy, despite her various hangups about social conventions, is ultimately a very compassionate person who helps anyone in need that crosses her path. This results in a large number of people returning for the final battle to help, some of whom are critical to her ultimate success. If Aloy lacked such a compassionate soul, the world would have ended. This is in contrast to Sylens' more self-centered view of the world.
  • Practical Currency: The main currency that merchants will buy and sell things for is metal shards, which are also one of the primary ingredients for item crafting.
  • Precursor Killers: The "Old Ones" (pre-apocalyptic humanity) were wiped out by the Faro Plague — an army of self-replicating, biomass-feeding war-machines that went out of control. Unable to kill them off, Project Zero Dawn was created to shut down the Faro Plague, restore the biosphere and reintroduce humanity. HADES' Evil Plan is to use the same antennae MINERVA used to shut the Faro Plague off to bring them back so that they could wipe out the planet all over again.
  • Precursors: The Old Ones, who lived in a "world of metal" and communed with machines, until they grew proud and their hubris destroyed them. Even before the spoilers start hitting, it's obvious they refer to contemporary modern humans.
  • Pulling Your Child Away: During the tutorial, young Aloy (who's shunned in the Nora tribe for apparently having no mother) tries to gather berries with the other kids, only to have the adult with them look horrified, and hastily warn the other children to shun her.
  • Purple Is Powerful:
    • The best equipment in the game is colored purple in the menus.
    • The Frozen Wilds introduced a new machine tier that's even more powerful than "corrupted": "daemonic". These monsters are easily recognizable by their purple highlights both on their models and in the Focus.
  • Pyrrhic Victory: Helis has set himself up in a no-win scenario. Either his attack on Meridian and the Spire fails and he dies along with most of his followers or it succeeds and HADES' plan (of which Helis is admittedly unaware) goes into action and all life ends, Helis and the Shadow Carja included.

    R — S 
  • Ragnarök Proofing:
    • Zigzagged. After nearly a thousand years the ruins of human civilization look the part, though functional technology still exists in the form of machines that resemble animals. Turns out the machines themselves are fairly new — one individual Thunderjaw being operational for several years makes it venerable — and more are being made all the time... by facilities that are Ragnarok Proofed, though not all are untouched by elements or human interference. Then again the Frozen Wilds has a Cauldron that was constructed within the past five years of the main events, so these facilities are likely actively being maintained.
    • The Focus devices work remarkably well for nearly millennium-old electronics, and also apparently never need to be charged or otherwise maintained, though this is justified in-universe as they run on an early form of Faro's "eternity" chips, which are meant to run almost indefinitely. A possibility is that it could employ a minuscule version of how the "Peacekeepers" use biomatter as fuel, as they are made by the same company.
    • Vantage Spikes - recording devices that offer Aloy a glimpse into the distant past at Vantage Points - have a stated lifetime of 50,000 years. Seeing how most contemporary electronics can consider themselves lucky if they survive five years without defects, this is beyond impressive, even more so in a hypercapitalist society like the Old Ones' where the industry would prefer devices with short lifespans because technical longevity directly translates into lower sales numbers.
    • All of the GAIA systems were specifically designed to withstand the centuries, as they had be able to operate autonomously long after humanity was gone.
    • Most of the Faro Plague's Scarab and Khopesh units are still fully functional after almost a thousand years of hibernation. Some are damaged, like the immobilized first Khopesh Aloy fights, and the Scarabs have developed a weakness to fire, but those are pretty minor defects after a millenium of being buried deep in the earth. Their weapons still work well enough every time you face them. As mentioned above, they run (or more likely are directly based) on Faro's "eternity" chip architecture, meaning they could potentially run indefinitely so long as they can convert biomass into fuel. Makes you wonder how little it would probably take to reawaken the dormant but intact Horus Titans if someone put their mind to it...
    • Aloy downloads audio recordings and written datapoints from small, handheld computer-like devices that she finds just lying around on the ground. Despite having been left there for a millenia, they are still accessible, and even the ones with the worst data corruption are still intelligible. To make matters worse, while most are found within bunkers and structures, some are found completely free and exposed to the elements.
  • Railing Kill: Possible to pull off on human enemies. It's most notable when attacking bandit and Eclipse camps with watchtowers and elevated walkways along mountains. A good shot can send an enemy tumbling over the railing and falling a long way down.
  • Random Drop:
    • While every machine type has a list of common resources it's guaranteed to drop, the color-coded uncommon, rare and very rare items only drop at random. Skills can be unlocked to increase the drop rate of uncommon (bones, lenses) and rare resources (skins, hearts) gained from killing animals and machines, respectively.
    • Coils and Weaves have a second layer of randomness. Not only do they drop randomly, their stats are also randomized within a specific range that depends on their rarity. They can also have up to two additional properties (called secondary and tertiary) that are, you guessed it, chosen from a semi-random pool that includes "nothing" as well.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: The Proctors in the Proving (with the exception of Resh) treat Aloy respectfully even though she is an outcast. One points out to her that she just needs to finish the Proving to become a Brave and he shows genuine concern when she decides to take the old path, which is so dangerous two people died the last time it was used. The last Proctor refuses to believe that she cheated.
  • Red and Black and Evil All Over: Bandits and the Eclipse in a nutshell.
  • Respawning Enemies:
    • In the mission to destroy the Shadow Carja base in the old world ruins, the game will spawn new soldiers to replace the ones Aloy kills, assuming you pass a certain threshold, until Aloy sets off the blaze stockpile. This is to make sure the final battle with the rest of the Nora war party has an equal number on both sides.
    • With the exception of special encounters, machines will repopulate an area you're cleared after a while, so there will always be a source to hunt.
  • Rewatch Bonus: Practically everything Teersa says holds special weight. Actually, the entire Nora mythology in general will take on a different significance on the second go-around.
  • Rock Beats Laser: Hunter-gatherer tribes destroy advanced (war) machines using spears and arrows.
  • Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Another major theme of the game, particularly the interaction between the environment and old/new human technology.
  • Reclaimed by Nature: The game has quite a bit of it, along with a bit of Ragnarök Proofing for a select few bunkers, although the natural environment is still contrasted with the eerily organic looking machines who now dominate the Earth.
  • Recorded Spliced Conversation: Some audio logs are from a soldier who kept audio correspondence with his wife. The last two of those are an original message, and the military's obviously-spliced version (his original message was a lot less hopeful), and the wife calling his number, pointing out he doesn't sound like himself and she's getting the runaround when she tries to find out anything about him.
  • Regenerating Shield, Static Health: The Shield-Weaver outfit provides Aloy with a personal Deflector Shield salvaged from a prototype armor of the Old Ones. It can absorb a certain amount of damage (which decreases in higher difficulties) before needing a few seconds to recharge and reset. While recharging, any damage directly reduces health points as usual, which can still only be recovered through potions, the medicine pouch, or a rare Banuk armor from the DLC that regenerates health.
  • Rewarding Vandalism: You get an achievement for finding and knocking down every single Grazer training dummy in Nora territory. Good luck doing so without a guide, though.
  • Robots Think Faster: In the blink of an eye note , GAIA got disrupted by the Mysterious Signal, HADES started revolting, GAIA formulated her response plan to "reinstantiate" her creator, Elisabet Sobek (who became Aloy), write a message to Aloy in the Cradle facility she was conceived and born in, and got her plan nearly thwarted by HADES corrupting the Codex that locked the Cradle's front door.
  • Say Your Prayers: First time Helis, a Carja who revers (among other things) the sun, attempts to kill Aloy, he tells her to "turn [her] face to the sun." Echoed by Aloy when she defeats and kills him.
  • Scavenged Punk: The clothes and things that people use are made from parts that are taken from the machines and scavenged from the ruins then cobbled together with primitive materials.
  • Scenery Porn: The ruins of civilization have never looked this green and pretty since The Last of Us, and since this game is set even further After the End that's quite the accomplishment.
  • Schizo Tech:
    • Hoo, boy. "Schizo" barely covers the Technology Levels. Most of the world is stuck at "tanning" like the Nora, with the Carja head-and-shoulders above them... at "stonecutting." Despite that, all the biodiesel-powered robot animals running around for people to hunt makes gasoline (Steampunk!) and smelted metal readily available, along with 20th century tech like elemental weapons and precision explosives — and the Eclipse tool around with recovered 21st-century fully automatic weapons. Some people have actually managed to salvage 21st century Augmented Reality interfaces, and Sylens is basically The Cracker.
    • The Nora themselves, and Aloy in particular, display this in their bows, which are advanced recurve and even compound bow designs that any contemporary competition archer would be proud of. Compound bows were only invented in 1966, providing a particularly harsh contrast to the rest of Nora technology.
    • The Shield Weaver outfit consists of an array of ultra-advanced personal Deflector Shield emitters that was cutting-edge technology even to the Old Ones, stitched on a traditional Nora garb made from tanned leather, feathers and beads.
    • The Oseram, who are possibly the most advanced of the tribes, have mastered the art of smelting and forging metal. In a grand display of Irony, their gear looks the most primitive because it is made to fit by hands and hammers, instead of cobbled together from Cauldron-fabricated machine-scraps of roughly the right size and shape. Some of the most brilliant Oseram tinkerers are figuring out primitive electronics.
  • See No Evil, Hear No Evil: In the opening cinematic, a Machine enters the frame moments after Rost's narration mentions their existence for the first time. Once on screen, it makes loud mechanical noises as it moves, which should have also been audible during its off-screen approach.
  • Sequel Hook:
    • By the end of the game, GAIA is still offline and yet to be rebuilt, HADES is still active as Sylens' prisoner, and it is emphasized that a mysterious third party was responsible for prematurely activating HADES in the first place, much less empowering it enough to make GAIA desperate.
    • Most of the other GAIA AI subordinate programs are unaccounted for as well, including ARTEMIS (the sub-function responsible for the world's fauna) and POSEIDON (marine life).
    • Somehow, the Stormbirds have learned about a new threat, one that involves "the Metal World, but not the one before". The oracle who drank their blood prophesized Meridian on fire and Aloy dead, classic apocalypse stuff.
    • Far Zenith, a plan to use a colony ship known as the Odyssey to colonize a distant planet, is mentioned several times as an alternative to Project Zero Dawn. Except the Odyssey is later revealed to be lost after an antimatter explosion. Or not...
  • Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Bandits, machines, and infected machines will fight against one another on sight, which can be taken advantage of. This is the main purpose of the override mechanic, other than acquiring mounts: if there's a large group of dangerous machines in an area, sneaking up and hacking one of them will result in a fight that will at least thin the herd, if not result in total victory. However, if the machines are infected or Daemonic, this tactic is unavailable.
  • Ship Tease: A few men and women hit on Aloy throughout the course of the game, which either goes unacknowledged or is met with blunt rejection. Varl and Vanasha are maybe the only ones she seems to return some feelings towards, but it's complicated by her not really knowing how to act on them, as well as by Varl's limited and superstitious worldview clashing with her knowledge of the truth and discomfort with the level of reverence he and, to a much greater extent, the rest of the Nora develop for her later in the game.
  • Shop Fodder:
    • Most valuable items are required at least once to trade for weapons or outfits, but some only exist to be sold for shards. These are usually decorative relics of the Old Ones that serve no practical purpose anymore, like polished coins, ancient jewelry or artificial heart implants. They take on a whole new horrific twist upon considering the fate of the Old Ones: they're remnants of a person consumed by the Faro Swarms; any medical implants, jewelry or pocket accoutrements that were inedible to the biofuel harvester nannites.
    • Meridian also has a literal trash vendor, who sells actual junk at high price; the only thing the junk can be used for it to trade with another merchant for reward boxes.
  • Shotguns Are Just Better:
    • The Tearblaster. It's a sonic shotgun; think of it as a five-round Fus Ro Dah that will blow the armor and components off a machine at close and even medium range, possibly stunning the machine as well. Not only is it more effective than the Tearblast arrows from a Sharpshooter bow (on any difficulty level, it is 100% effective with each shot), but each set of Tearblaster rounds only costs one Metal Vessel and one Echo Shell, a fraction of the cost of a Tearblast arrow.
    • The Rattler is essentially a bundle of crossbows firing small salvos of metal bolts with each pull of the trigger, and has pathetic range and accuracy. It's worthless against smaller targets, even at point-blank range. However, against larger machines where every shot can connect, it effectively becomes a primitive auto-shotgun, especially if the machine is Frozen. Even the mighty Thunderjaw becomes short work for the bold and sufficiently-prepared.
    • The Double Arrow and Triple Arrow skills also fall in this category, sort of. They severely reduce your accuracy, but if you can get close enough for all arrows to connect, the damage output is massive.
  • Shout-Out:
    • During Horizon's development, Aloy's name was originally spelled "Eloi", referring to the society in H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, one of the game's influences.
    • Aloy's name blessing ceremony, culminating with Rost holding her out towards the rising sun is highly evocative of the opening of The Lion King (1994).
    • Three of the ancient items one can find (The Stranded Figure, The Stranded Shackles, and The Stranded Necklace) are from a then-upcoming Kojima Productions game called Death Stranding, which happens to be using an engine created by Guerilla Games. Collect all 3, and you can trade them in to a particular merchant for a lot of boxes and a pair of warm socks. The items in the trade menu even bear the Kojima Productions logo. Proof.
    • The "Archive Abuse" datapoint is an email from Dr. Samina Ebadji rejecting the addition of Torture Porn films to the archives including several Eastern European torture flicks and sixteen installments of a series called Making a Millipede, a nod to the infamous The Human Centipede films.
    • GAIA's human hologram form bears a resemblance to Captain Planet's Gaia.
    • Ted Faro's "I did it three minutes ago" line, regarding the deletion of the Apollo archive is highly reminiscent of the iconic line from Watchmen. As is opening the room to let cold depressurized air in to kill underlings.
    • This shot◊ from Aloy's Dream Sequence while she's injured after the Proving is a recreation of this one◊ from Aliens.
    • The design of the AI Cores specifically HADES which is a giant ball looks like the cores did in Portal 2 albeit much larger.
    • When Aloy recovers her weapons while in the Sunring she breifly puts her arms out to the side doing the same pose Maximus does in the "are you not entertained?" scene in Gladiator.
    • The game has numerous influences from the works of Hayao Miyazaki. For instance, The Corruption takes the form of red and black worm-like things not unlike that of the Boar Gods in Princess Mononoke and the way the machines have blue "eyes" that turn red in combat resembles the Ohmu in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Not to mention that the setting and even (to a lesser extent) plot is also highly reminiscent of Nausicaa, especially its manga version.
    • One of the Far Zenith members is named Erik Visser, after the protagonist in the 1988 Dutch thriller Amsterdamned. Considering that Guerilla Games is a Dutch developer, this makes perfect sense.
  • Shows Damage: Most machines, especially the larger, more robust models, clearly show whatever damage you inflict on them. Armor plating, weapons and support components can be removed, internal tanks blown up, motive systems rendered inoperable. Heavily damaged machines start spitting sparks from joints and unprotected parts as if they're bleeding, and some even adopt the behavior of a wounded animal. Sawtooths for instance start limping and holding one front paw close to their chest when near death. This mechanism becomes particularly important on Ultra Hard difficulty due to enemy health bars being disabled, leaving visual signs of damage the only way to judge a hostile machine's condition.
  • Simple, yet Awesome: The Tearblaster has only one firing mode and can't be upgraded at all, but a single hit is all it takes to tear off most machines' armor plating and external components. Its ammo is cheap to craft, and its spread and respectable range mean that a quick salvo at the start of a battle makes the rest of it much more manageable. It functions the same regardless of difficulty, making it a powerhouse even in Ultra Hard.
  • The Singularity: From what we discover and find of the Old Ones, they had advanced their technology to incomprehensible heights. Aside from the Focus, they had holograms everywhere, rampant automation, and acceptable levels to AI sentience. Not to mention Project Zero Dawn (an operation to terraform the entire earth) is done in a remarkably short time (even with the best and brightest working on it).
  • Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration: Deliberate, approaching Perfect; every gameplay element that isn't 100% natural is provided by Aloy's Focus tool, which provides an ultra-tech Augmented Reality interface. When she's provided with her first bow and arrow, it actually recognizes it and helps her learn how to use it!
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Very idealistic, all things considered. Both the old and the current world were/are far from ideal, and the game can get incredibly dark at times, but there's always a ray of light that refuses to be snuffed out. In the distant past, the whole of humanity could've just lain down and surrendered in the face of the Faro Plague, but the Zero Dawn Project gave them hope and inspired them to fight back, against the extinction of all life. Sure, there was no shortage of sceptics, but the ones with the means to make it happen believed in it and gave everything they could to ensure life would continue no matter the odds or the sacrifices they had to make. In the current age, for every asshole Aloy meets there're ten good people trying to make the world a better place. If she decides to help them, it works out marvelously most of the time, and in the end she unites almost her entire world against a common foe with basically just the force of her personality (her One-Woman Army status certainly doesn't hurt, of course), thus laying the groundwork to usher in a new era of peace and progress.
  • Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence:
    • The Old Ones had advanced to the point of standardizing and legislating it, under the name of the "Turing scale", though there's not much information on what the points on the scale actually are, just that it involves several subtests. They encountered an interesting problem with developing artificial intelligence: the closer to human the intelligence is, the harder it is to predict, because it starts encountering all those messy human emotions on its way up the scale. Like fear. ELEUTHIA Cradle servitors are at Turing 0.4, noted as being enough for "low-grade empathy and limited improvisation without undermining adherence to codified behavior sets". Turing 0.6 is the legal limit but even scores in the 0.5 range are high enough that continued monitoring is 'strongly advised', and the known record was Turing 1.38. When Elisabet launched GAIA, she was at 0.6 and spun up from there, somewhere past the record.
    • In The Frozen Wilds CYAN's creators knew that despite this element of unpredictability she'd have to be more complex than was legal to perform her function, and so in mandatory testing some scores were falsified so she appeared to be Turing 0.54, with an earlier test putting her at Turing 0.61 ruled as a false positive.
  • Slobs vs. Snobs: Lorund, an Oseram tribesman, and Smiling Rainin, a Carja tribesman, are constantly bickering partners in a scrap business. Their constant bickering is framed by this trope. The pair could be viewed as a microcosm of Carja/Oseram relations at large.
  • Small Role, Big Impact:
    • One of the audio files Aloy finds at Faro Automated Systems contains an argument between Ted Faro and an unnamed programmer who worked on the Chariot line's codebase. Apparently Ted had told his people that he didn't want the machines to have any backdoors into their systems, so this guy not only obliged by ensuring their code was more secure than the most secure military networks in the world, but no one caught it before the line was launched. What Ted most likely meant was "no backdoors that our competitors could exploit", but not leaving any option for FAS itself to get into the machines systems meant that they were pretty much guaranteed to lose control at some point, which they did.
    • Elisabet Sobeck's mother is the one who instilled Elisabet to use her knowledge to help and love all living beings. Prior to this lesson, Elisabet was rather apathetic when one of her experiments accidentally caused a fire that killed the chicklets on top of a tree.
  • Socketed Equipment: Usually, outfits will have sockets available for protective weaves to be inserted into for extra protection against a chosen damage type. This, plus the fact that some modifications have multiple bonuses that overlap with the armor itself, means its possible to become immune (or near-immune, on higher difficulties) to a specific element or type of attack. Note that most machines will have a multiple types of attack, such that even if you're immune to a Bellowback's jets of flame, a flaming boulder from a Fireclaw will still hurt a lot. Some types, like melee and missile damage, can be maxed out at only 80%, so some damage is still inevitable.
  • Sound-Coded for Your Convenience: Most of the different types of machine have distinct-sounding footsteps, allowing the experienced player to tell if (for example) a Watcher, a Sawtooth or a Tallneck is nearby without even checking the Focus. The distinctive purring hum of the stalker, and the whine of their proximity mines, are particularly useful, as their cloaks make them hard to spot visually.
  • Spanner in the Works: Multiple.
    • Ted Faro deleted APOLLO, the program meant to give the new generation of humanity all the knowledge of the Old Ones. While he claims this was to preserve their innocence, at least part of it was to hide his own culpability for what happened. Sylens blames him for every crime that has happened since, such as the massacres at the Sun Ring. In a (slightly) more immediate way, the childcare robots raising the new generation had no idea what to do without APOLLO, and just kept the children inside the Cradle facilities until they ran out of food. The first generation were therefore unleashed onto a wild world with nothing more than kindergarten education.
    • Nineteen years ago, an outside signal caused all GAIA's subordinate functions to suddenly uplift themselves into true AI — including HADES, which would have resulted in the extinction of all life on Earth as he un-terraformed the planet without her guidance. GAIA destroyed herself to stop this, but not before setting Aloy's birth in motion so that she would be able to restart GAIA eventually.
    • And then that plan got derailed when HADES unleashed a virus that broke his shackles, as well as those of all the other subroutines, and they escaped GAIA's control. One of the side effects was that the Alpha Registry at Mother's Heart was corrupted, meaning the door would not recognize Aloy. GAIA admits her plan has failed, but she trusts Aloy will find a way regardless.
    • And then Aloy's propensities and very existence in turn became one for the machinations of HADES and Eclipse. Repeatedly, she disrupts and thwarts their plans through simply trying to find out the true nature of her conception and birth, because the two are closely related and opposed.
  • Spikes of Villainy: Bandit forts and outfits are very spiky affairs. Eclipse officers are a subdued example due to their collars, which are fashioned from countless bullets and/or casings of various calibers.
  • Spiritual Successor: Lead Writer John Gonzalez previously worked on Fallout: New Vegas and even beneath the surface it's very apparent that he wasn't done with the themes, and in an esoteric way, locations of that game and specifically its Honest Hearts DLC.
  • Star-Crossed Lovers:
    • Avad, the Carja Sun-King, and Ersa, a freed slave and Oseram warrior. They can't be together because their respective people are still hostile to each other even after the Red Raids, and such a marriage would cause an uprising in Meridian and possibly renewing another war.
    • One of the sidequests involve tracking down a noble Carja girl that apparently ran away from home, only to find out she's been having a secret romance with a Shadow Carja soldier. Neither of them can tell anybody about their relationship for obvious reasons. And naturally it doesn't end well.
  • Stealth Clothes: The Nora Silent Hunter outfit line shields Aloy not from the harm of foes' attacks, but from the gaze of their eyes. The top-tier suit in the base game looks like a tribal rendition of a Ghilly Suit, and its top-tier stealth buff can be made even higher with sneak-buffing outfit weaves. Other outfits with a plentiful amount of outfit weave slots can be made into impromptu stealth clothes, but sneak buffs are inherent to the Silent Hunter outfits even with no outfit weaves.
  • Sticky Bomb: The Blast Sling and its upgraded variants all can fire sticky bombs that detonate 5 seconds after hitting something. They're the most powerful single-shot weapon in the game, but you can only carry a few shots for them (base 3, upgraded ultimately to 12) and they fire really slowly. The best thing about them is that they don't alert enemies to you until they start exploding, so you can stick several of them onto a target and switch to a different weapon to finish off the now heavily-injured foe. Also, they're really effective against Helis, who normally tries to block projectiles with his bracers.
  • The Stinger: HADES attempts to find another Metal Devil to inhabit, but gets intercepted by Sylens. Sylens then wonders who initiated the signal that awakened HADES in the first place, and says he intends to interrogate HADES to find out the answer, as he makes his way towards a Metal Devil.
  • Stop Worshipping Me: With the reveal that the Nora's supposed "goddess" GAIA created Aloy to save humanity from HADES, the Nora Tribe are quick to bow to Aloy as "All-Mother's Anointed One". Having been treated as nothing but a curse by them her entire life, this only makes Aloy furious, seeing this as nothing but the unwelcomed opposite extreme that it was. She demands they stop bowing to her, hoisting several up from their knees with her bare hands, and tears into them.
    Aloy: First you shun me, now this!? I will not be worshiped! I am not your "Anointed"! I don't belong to you!
  • Story Difficulty Setting: The developers add a "Story" difficulty in a patch a few months after the game was released. For perspective, this mode more than tripled damage dealt by the player compared to the amount dealt in the easy mode.
  • Subsystem Damage: The defining part of combat is the ability to dismantle hostile machines piece by piece. Most machines have external weapons or support components that can be shot off to various effects in addition to dealing high damage. Removing a weapon makes the machine unable to use it anymore while sometimes Aloy can pick it up to turn it on its former owner. Destroying power cells, fuel canisters or cooling systems triggers huge elemental explosions and often puts the machine in an elemental state like shocked, burning or frozen. A few components like processor units or heat sinks simply inflict massive damage upon their destruction. The effectiveness of this tactic varies from machine to machine, and high-grade models often protect their vulnerable components with armor plating that must be removed before the part itself can be damaged, but there's no doubt that targeting subsystems is always the most efficient way to take down a robotic enemy.
  • Suddenly Significant Rule: Outcast children are allowed to compete in the Proving to become Braves, thereby rescinding their status as Outcasts. The Nora generally don't banish children, however, and the few that they have never showed up to compete (understandably so, being thrown out to survive on their own is about as good as a death sentence). It provides the perfect opportunity for Aloy, who has the unique benefit of having been raised an Outcast and thus survived long enough to exercise the rule.
  • Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: Most machine types are ridiculously heavily armed for the function they were originally built for. To elaborate, all but the few Combat-class machines are terraforming devices - Stormbirds clean up Earth's ravaged atmosphere, Snapmaws do the same to the water, Acquisition-class machines like Grazers, Striders, Chargers, Behemoths and Tramplers collect resources to keep the terraforming network running, and so on. Yet almost all of them carry weapons of varying sophistication that often have little obvious use as terraforming tools, and it's always been like this even before the Derangement, which merely made the machines act more aggressively but didn't change their designs.
  • Suspicious Videogame Generosity:
    • When you're exploring a linear level like a Cauldron and come across a congregation of medicinal plants and/or supply crates near the door to the next area, stock up on everything you can, proceed stealthily and prepare for a fight.
    • During the quest "Queen's Gambit", the campsite where you meet Three-Toe Huadiv has a number of supply crates around it, filled with quite a bit of consumables. This is helpful, since you will be fighting a Rockbreaker and Corrupted Thunderjaw nearby in the course of the quest.
  • Swords to Plowshares: The Sun-Ring was a structure used by Sun-King Jiran to execute and sacrifice enemy combatants during the Red Raids. After Jiran's son Avad ended the raids, he converted the Sun-Ring into a memorial and a place of worship.

    T — Z 
  • Take a Third Option: Implied to be how Aloy wound up being raised as an outcast by Rost. After the unusual circumstances of her birth, High Matriarch Lansra wanted her cast out, essentially a death sentence for an infant. Teersa saw her as a gift from All-Mother and wanted her raised by the tribe. The compromise looks to have been to have Aloy raised by the honorable outcast Rost, meaning she would be raised by a good man, but outside of the tribe.
  • Take Your Time: With the exception of a few set-pieces where the player is locked into a scenario until it is completed, the player is free to explore the world and pursue whatever side quests or activities they want to at any time - even if the circumstances of the main story suggest she should be travelling to her next destination with extreme urgency. This also applies to sidequests - Aloy is free to put off tracking down missing persons in immediate peril for in-game weeks, they'll remain in that state until she arrives on the scene, whenever that is. This is typical Gameplay and Story Segregation of course, but does make for some amusing irony if Aloy chooses to enter the DLC region under certain story conditions. A character will warn her that the antagonists won't sit around and wait for her, but... in gameplay terms, they will, actually.
  • Take That!: To flat-eathers. In one scene, Sylens starts to explain to Aloy that the Earth is round, not flat like she thought. Her response is to casually dismiss the idea that she ever thought the Earth was flat, pointing out that she's seen how shadows on the moon are curved during an eclipse. Since Aloy is from a tribe with basically no modern scientific knowledge and was raised as an outcast even to them, this can be taken as pointing out that even someone with the most basic of observational skills should be able to figure out that the Earth is round.
  • Talking Down the Suicidal: At the end of the sidequest "Sun and Shadow" Aloy has to break bad news to a teenaged girl suspected of suicidal tendencies, then stop her and talk her into seeing that life is Worth Living For.
  • Tank Goodness: The Old Ones had some very spiffy tanks in their armories, with an oversized turret that carried two enormous BFGs. Aloy occasionally comes across their crumbling wrecks near ancient military outposts, but since these weren't part of the Faro Plague, we never get to see them in action.
  • There Are No Therapists: Averted at Project: Zero Dawn. The people in charge were fully aware of how psychologically devastating the truth about the situation is, and did their best to provide both counseling and humane alternatives for those who refused to participate.
  • Thinking Out Loud: Rost and Aloy noticeably do this, as do other outcasts, as a probable result of their isolation. As they're not allowed to talk to anyone, even one another, outcasts will instead make a general remark or a prayer to All-Mother which happens to convey their intended meaning.
  • This Is My Boomstick: During the attack on the Proving, one of the Cultists kills Vala and Bast with a heavy machine gun, demonstrating to the new Braves (and the player) that modern weaponry still exists in the Future Primitive world.
  • Throwing the Distraction: Aloy can throw rocks to distract enemies and draw them closer to her for stealth takedowns or further away to get past them. Some enemy bases also have alarms that opponents will activate if they spot you and get back to it before you stop them, but Aloy can also set it off herself in order to draw all her opponents to the same location.
  • Thrown from the Zeppelin: Downplayed non-villainous example: the titular project was an attempt to Fling a Light into the Future against an undefeatable self-replicating Robot Army by resurrecting life years after the planet was destroyed. In order to buy as much time as possible for the project to reach fruition, the already doomed public was given false rumors that the project was a superweapon that could wipe out the robots if completed in time, to rally as many people as possible to fight a losing battle. Those told about the real purpose of Zero Dawn, and not interested in joining, were given the choice between prison until its completion, or suicide, to prevent the truth from getting out. Aloy sees recordings that indicate the project was completed without a day to spare.
  • Timed Boss Battle: The final battle against HADES' Deathbringer gives you 12 minutes to destroy it before HADES reawakens the dormant Faro Swarm and wipes out all life on Earth again.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Ted Faro basically fills out every checkbox required to start a Robot Apocalypse. Build armies of heavily weaponized autonomous robots? Check. Give them the ability to replicate themselves? Check. Allow them to convert biomass into fuel and manufacturing materials, giving them essentially infinite operation time? Check. Give them "beyond military-grade" operating systems with no backdoors so there's no way to shut down or override them if they malfunction? Double check.
  • Trick Arrow: The base game alone has no fewer than nine different arrow types spread out across three bow classes. Some just deal more physical damage while others cover the whole elemental range, make enemies go berserk for a short time, yield more resources from kills, or are particularly effective at blasting off components and armor segments. In short, there's a special arrow for pretty much any situation, and you will make use of them all at one point or another.
  • Trip Trap: Tripcaster weapons are used to deploy these. The wires come in fire, shock, and blast varieties. Simply fire the rods at two points and the wire will deploy between them, triggering if a machine or human crosses it. They're extremely potent, with greater elemental/direct damage than any other weapon in the game, assuming you can get your foe to walk into it. It's best used when the enemy is unaware of your presence, as the wires can be deployed into their patrol path. Even in combat, however, most enemies will charge right into them to reach you, assuming you can spare a second or two to deploy them.
  • Turbine Blender: In "Maker's End", one of the text datapoints discusses the Banda Sea Incident and describes the process by which the Faro Plague converted organic matter, i.e. living beings (animals, plants, humans) into biofuel:
    Apparently a fisherman in the Banda Sea captured video of a Hartz-Timor Horus unit refueling via biomatter conversion along the shoreline of Pulau Wetar. On a pod of endangered dolphins, no less, quite possibly the last of their kind. Not to get graphic, but it looks like what happens inside a blender, as if the robot was whipping up a big pink swirling milkshake of dolphin chum.
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change: Cauldrons generally adhere to the same formula of exploring a fully automated assembly line populated with various machines, culminating in a miniboss battle against a specific machine with some backup that ends in an unimpeded exit for Aloy. This makes it quite surprising when Cauldron XI turns out to be a heavily damaged shell of its former self that's crawling with human Eclipse troops. When Aloy gets to the core, overriding it triggers a Hold the Line sequence against an onslaught of more Eclipse baddies that devolves into a Mêlée à Trois when a host of angry machines joins the party. The final part then consists of fighting her way back to the surface through a gauntlet of Stalkers and a few terrified Eclipse fighters trying their best to hide from them, and once Aloy makes it out of the Cauldron, another large-scale battle between Eclipse and machines is raging at the front door.
  • Ungrateful Bastard: One sidequest involves Aloy saving a Nora member from being locked within his own house in order to retrieve the Dreamwillow and while he is initially grateful, as soon as Aloy reveals her status as an outcast right after he vocally express his disapproval of them, he immediately becomes hostile to her and begins to shun her. Note that this conversation happens even after Aloy has already become a Seeker or the Annointed One.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: After Aloy obtains the Shield Weaver, absolutely no one reacts to her walking around in a garment with a force field surrounding it. Although, as the item is only available late in the plot, it could be that by this point everyone is just used to her using strange equipment.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
    • Besides the creation of HADES and HAPHEASTUS who have turned on humanity, the Zero Dawn team also put a restriction on GAIA forbidding her from interacting with humans until they completed their education via APOLLO. This means that when the later was destroyed, forcing the humans to stay in ELEUTHIA, GAIA couldn't simply intervene with her hologram to mitigate the damage and tell the humans what was happening and expected to the best of her abilities, instead she was forced to leave them to be raised by the inadequate Servitors in ELEUTHIA.
    • Sylens, due to being the one who awakened HADES and founded the Shadow Carja, as HADES grew corrupt and decided to restart the Faro Plague, and using the Shadow Carja to attack Meridian.
  • Use Their Own Weapon Against Them: Certain enemies (Ravager, Thunderjaw, Deathbringer, Scorcher in the DLC) have a heavy weapon that can be shot off them and then turned against them. Aloy will move at a snail's pace while wielding them and they have a limited magazine, but they do tremendous damage and kill or at least severely injure the machine that you took them from.
  • Uterine Replicator: The first generation of the existing humanity were all bred in so-called "Ectogenic Chambers". Aloy was born from such a machine as well.
  • War Is Hell: Not shown up front for most of the game, but in the time of the Old Ones with Operation Enduring Victory, and in The War Sequence at the end of the game, the full power of an army of Mecha-Mooks is shown, to terrifying effect.
  • The War Sequence: In the final mission, Aloy and her allies have to hold off a ton of almost every single type of combat machine (barring Rockbreakers and Thunderjaws) as HADES tries to break through Meridian to get to the Spire. To aid in the defense, they make use of Petra's BFGs from Free Heap.
  • Warfare Regression: Amongst the Ruins of the Modern Age, humans now fight mainly with spears and arrows, made from or modified with machine scrap to allow for things such as compound bows, auto-loading crossbows, and tripwire and snare launchers to allow them to survive against the machines. All of humanity's technological knowledge up to 2066 was lost due to Ted Faro's deletion of the APOLLO archives, and so the humanity that came after did not possess the know-how to make technology more advanced than said spears and arrows, leaving them at a hunter-gatherer level. The Nora in particular seem to have an intense aversion to (and fear of) entering the ruins of the Old Ones, which they consider to be cursed by All-Mother.
  • We Used to Be Friends: Data points, audio logs, and other bits of information picked up throughout the game show that Elisabet Sobeck and Ted Faro used to be friends before they had a falling out over their opposing philosophies. After Ted's company left the environmentalism business and went into military contracting, and Elisabet split to continue working on her calling, he hit her with a dozen lawsuits, but he respected Elisabet and was willing to swallow a lot of pride to call her for help when the glitch in his Chariot robots was worse than expected, and it's clear her death did not help his Sanity Slippage either.
  • Wham Episode:
  • Wham Line: In the conclusion of the game, it's revealed that Sylens' Lance is not in fact intended to delete HADES, but return it to his control. Sylens said that he would do it all again with more safeguards. He's off to a good start, having come to a brilliant realization — HADES was prematurely activated. It did not try to destroy all life out of turn purely of its own volition;
    Sylens: Hello, old friend. Remember me? We've still so much to discuss, so much you never revealed. Your Masters, for example. The ones who sent the signal that woke you. Knowledge has its rewards, don't you think? Well... let's begin.
  • Wham Shot:
    • During the attack on the Proving, things are obviously bad for Aloy and the other braves, but nothing they (and you) haven't encountered and dealt with up to this point—the enemy is coming at you with spears and arrows much like yours. And then one of the attackers walks up with a minigun in hand.
    • The last scene of the game shows Sylens planning to interrogate a captured HADES as they are seen approaching the wreck of a HORUS-class titan.
  • Why Won't You Die?: Helis develops this obsession towards Aloy, and rationalizes it that he is chosen to kill Aloy at an appointed time... except, each time, Aloy gives him the slip or ultimately finally kills him instead. He was millimeters from cutting Aloy's throat wide open at the Proving massacre before Rost has his Obi-Wan Moment fight with Helis, she then defies his attempted spectacle of her sacrifice in the Sun Ring under the trample of a corrupted Behemoth (which she flips around and kills instead), she then gets extricated from a subsequent fight against two Corruptors by Sylens (whom Helis also rages at)... and then Aloy finally manages to kill a still-delusional Helis in the final battle.
  • Wilhelm Scream: If a player has the skill where jumping while aiming at something slows everything down, then shooting wildlife while the aimed slowdown happens will yield a slightly warped version of a Wilhelm scream. Proof.
  • Word Salad Title: "Horizon Zero Dawn" is admittedly an odd jumble of words that don't make any sense without context. It makes much more sense as you learn more about Project Zero Dawn and how it shaped the world after it came to an end. Project Zero Dawn as a title itself makes more sense when you learn about Zero Day — the day when no life remains on Earth.
  • Wreaking Havok: A great many world objects can be destroyed through the application of sufficient force. Aloy's prehistoric weaponry is incapable of doing thisnote , but large machines frequently leave a trail of destruction in their wake when they get involved in a battle. You think a dense forest or some huge boulders will keep you safe from that rampaging Thunderjaw on your heels? Think again while you watch the monster smash through almost any obstacle like a T.rex-shaped battering ram. One main story quest actually requires you to exploit this.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: Experienced huntress Aloy must spend a skill point to learn how to whistle so she can lure enemies to her location.
  • Zerg Rush: A key reason the Faro Plague was so unstoppable was that they could replicate faster than humanity could kill them. It didn't matter if humanity used the best armor/guns, their own squads of scarabs (corruptors), EMPs, or even nuclear warheads. Anything thrown at the Faro Plague would be at best one battle won in a Hopeless War.

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