If you’re picking up Horizon Forbidden West without having played Horizon Zero Dawn, you’re not alone, and the good news is that the game is playable without prior knowledge. That said, there’s a real difference between playable and fully understood, and this guide covers what you should know going in, whether you need the first game, and a spoiler-light recap of the key story beats so the opening hours make sense.
Do You Need to Play Zero Dawn First?
Horizon Forbidden West is a direct sequel to Zero Dawn and picks up roughly six months after the first game’s ending. Mechanically, you don’t need any prior experience. Aloy’s abilities, the machine-hunting systems, and the crafting mechanics are all explained from scratch, and the game includes a brief recap sequence near the start intended to remind returning players what happened rather than fully explain it to newcomers.
That distinction matters. The recap is more of a refresher than a full summary, so if you go in completely blind you may find some character reunions, references, and emotional beats land with less weight than intended. Several major characters returning from Zero Dawn, along with the overall threat facing the world, carry more context than the recap alone provides. If you have the time, playing through Zero Dawn first is genuinely the best way to experience Forbidden West’s story fully. If you don’t, a story recap video or the summary below will get you close enough to follow along comfortably.
The World: Machines and a Dying Earth
Horizon is set roughly a thousand years after a global catastrophe destroyed civilization as we know it. Humanity survives in tribal societies scattered across a landscape now dominated by robotic creatures called machines, ranging from small deer-like Watchers to towering combat units the size of buildings. Aloy, the protagonist, was raised as an outcast among the Nora tribe and spent Zero Dawn uncovering the truth behind the old world’s collapse and the origin of the machines.
What Happened in Zero Dawn (Light Spoilers)
Without diving into late-game specifics, Zero Dawn revealed that the old civilization was destroyed by a runaway swarm of self-replicating machines, and that a project called GAIA was built to terraform the planet back to life afterward using a network of subordinate systems. Aloy discovered she was a clone of the scientist who created GAIA, and over the course of the game she uncovered that a rogue subsystem had gone dark centuries earlier, threatening the fragile balance keeping the machine swarm in check. By the end of Zero Dawn, Aloy had stopped an immediate threat to her home region, but the underlying problem with GAIA’s fractured systems remained unresolved.
Where Forbidden West Picks Up
Forbidden West opens with a new, more urgent crisis: a mysterious blight is killing plant life across the land, threatening the food chain and, eventually, human survival itself. Aloy sets out to find a backup of GAIA’s original programming in hopes of restoring balance before the blight spreads further. This search takes her west, beyond the lands explored in the first game, into a region that spans what were once California, Utah, and Nevada, now transformed into a beautiful but dangerous frontier.
Along the way, Aloy encounters new tribes with their own customs, politics, and relationships to the machines around them, including the desert-dwelling Tenakth, the peaceful farming Utaru, and the coastal Tanaghan. Each tribe adds new context to how different groups of survivors have adapted to life in the machine-filled world, and much of the early game involves earning trust and navigating tribal tensions as much as fighting machines.
Key Returning Characters
A handful of characters from Zero Dawn return in supporting roles throughout Forbidden West, and their history with Aloy carries far more weight if you experienced their original arcs firsthand. Rather than spoil those specific relationships here, know that the game treats these reunions as emotionally significant moments, so newcomers may want to look up brief character backgrounds if a returning face doesn’t ring a bell.
Beginner Tips for Starting Out
Once you’re in control, a few habits will make the opening hours smoother. Use Focus scanning constantly, both on machines to learn their weaknesses and on the environment to spot climbable surfaces, resources, and points of interest. Don’t rush past side quests and errands early on, since many reward skill points and useful crafting materials that make the main story’s combat encounters far more manageable. Prioritize unlocking the Pullcaster and Shieldwing traversal tools as soon as the story offers them, since both dramatically open up how you explore the map.
Combat difficulty can be adjusted at any time from the settings menu, so don’t hesitate to lower it if early machine encounters feel overwhelming while you’re still learning weapon types and elemental weaknesses. For a full breakdown of weapons, skills, and every major system in the game, check out our complete Horizon Forbidden West guide once you’re ready to go deeper.
Should You Watch a Recap Instead of Playing Zero Dawn?
If time is the main obstacle, a story recap video covering Zero Dawn’s major plot points is a reasonable middle ground. It won’t replicate the experience of discovering Aloy’s origins firsthand, but it will fill in enough background that character interactions and lore references in Forbidden West make sense. Just be aware that recap videos typically cover the ending of Zero Dawn in detail, so they carry the same spoiler weight as playing the game yourself.
Ultimately, Forbidden West is built to welcome new players, and its world, combat, and character writing hold up well even without the full context of the first game. Going in prepared with even a basic understanding of what came before will only make the journey through the Forbidden West richer.