Horizon Zero Dawn

Guerrilla's 2017 game is set a thousand years after the fall of industrial civilisation, in a world where tribal humans hunt robotic animals whose components they cannot manufacture. Aloy is an outcast with a spear, a bow and a Focus that scans machines for weak points, and combat is about disassembly: shoot the freeze canister off a Thunderjaw's back, pick it up, and use it as a cannon against its owner. Each machine is designed as a legible puzzle with armour to strip, elemental vulnerabilities and a movement pattern, and the tools - tripwires, override, elemental arrows - make encounters into setup problems rather than shootouts. The human-facing story is slower, but the actual mystery, which is about what happened and why the machines exist, is a genuinely strong piece of science-fiction writing that pays off in documents and audio logs rather than cutscenes. The Frozen Wilds expansion is substantial. Its 2020 PC port was rough at launch and has since been thoroughly patched.