Horizon Forbidden West review – an eccentric adventure with robot dinosaurs

For a big-budget blockbuster game, Horizon Forbidden West is extremely weird. It is a detailed science-fiction story about a red-haired outcast warrior, the tribes that inhabit a post-apocalyptic Earth a thousand years in the future, and a bunch of robot dinosaurs. It's a tangle of different ideas and complicated systems that only reluctantly interact with each other. It's also a damn good time, and especially on PlayStation 5, a stunning example of just how good video games can look in 2022. You kind of get used to its beauty while you're playing, but I found that whenever I returned to the game after making a cup of tea I was newly struck by whatever awesome scene was frozen on the pause screen: Aloy mid-roll away from a murderous mechanical hippo, or standing in the foreground in her war paint with an extraordinary view of mountains and snow behind.