Guerilla Games’ latest open-world adventure, Horizon Forbidden West, sees Aloy travel to the distant reaches of the post-apocalyptic United States in her journey to stop a climate catastrophe. In her hunt for the rogue AI that threatens the Earth, she comes across many deadly forces that stand in her way. From killer machines to futuristic cultists, the world of Horizon Forbidden West is fraught with danger.
One such danger Aloy can encounter are the ruthless bandits who terrorize the peaceful tribes of the Forbidden West. Whipped into a frenzy by Horizon Forbidden West's Tenakth rebel leader Regalla, these fearsome warriors will attack Aloy on sight and kill her if she isn’t prepared. Despite the threat they pose, one Horizon Forbidden West clip shows how video game glitches can render the dangerous into the absurd.
Posted by user xLumos on the r/horizon subreddit, the video shows Aloy killing one of Horizon Forbidden West's Tenakth warriors and seeing some unexpected behavior. After the Tenakth takes some swings at Aloy, xLumos begins to blast him with one of the game's heavy weapons. Once the Tenakth’s healthbar is depleted, he begins his death animation, ready to drop dead. Instead of falling to the floor, however, he starts to slowly slide along the ground in a battle-ready position. As xLumos looks on in confusion, they take time to loot his animated corpse, following him on his journey.
Looking like a tribal skateboarder, it’s evident that the body still has collision enabled, as Aloy walks in front of him and he slides gently past her. xLumos captions the clip “legend says he is still sliding,” building mythos around this single Tenakth warrior and his own spiritual journey – a tale possibly more interesting than Aloy’s own adventure in Horizon Forbidden West.
This isn’t the first time that absurd glitches have appeared in the series, as players of Horizon Zero Dawn’s PC port were sometimes stuck playing the main game as Aloy’s childhood self from the prologue. Guerrilla Games has also worked to patch the issues Horizon Forbidden West players dealt with in the months following its release, though it appears the game isn’t yet in a completely polished state.
First aiming for a 2021 release, Sony pushed back the release date of Horizon Forbidden West to February 2022 to avoid crunch as development wrapped up. Nevertheless, as user dontplaydead27 suggests in the comments under xLumos’ clip, they “feel like this game coulda cooked just a couple months longer” to avoid these issues. No game will ever be fully polished and there will always be bugs to squash, but perhaps with a more consumer and developer welfare approach to game design, fewer of these weird and immersion-breaking bugs will appear.
Horizon Forbidden West is currently available for PS4 and PS5.