Horizon Zero Dawn: Liberation by Anne Toole and Ben Maccaw
Art by Elmer Damaso

(Titan Comics, 2022)

Reviewed by John Dodd

(Minor spoilers for the video game Horizon Zero Dawn.)

Novels based on video games fall into two different categories for me, the ones that give us something that we were utterly unaware of, and those that tell a story that expands on something we already knew.

I love the lore of games, particularly in video games where the temptation must surely be to paper over the cracks in the lore with more action and hope that no one notices. The more that time goes on, the more that games designers realise that many are just like me, they want the story, they want all the things that go with it, they want to know everything.

This also brings the temptation to tell all the stories that were covered in brief in the game, and do not need expanding on, and being honest, this is what I felt had occurred here. It’s a story of Erend, brother to Ersa, who dies during the events of the video game, and how Ersa came to challenge the status quo, which in turn led to the events that led to her death.

What the story doesn’t do is expand the character of Erend all that much, he’s still everything that we found in the video game, and there’s no expansion of his personality, or indication that the person that he is in the game was once someone else. This isn’t an origin story, it’s something reinforcing the things we already knew, and it follows the well-known trope of the soldier who became a slave, the slave who became a gladiator, and the gladiator that challenged a ruler.

It's not a bad story, and there’s enough interesting things in it that someone picking this up with no knowledge of HZD might well be interested by what they find to check out the game, but as with all game adaptations, if you’re not familiar with the game in the first instance, you’re not very likely to pick up a graphic novel of it.

It’s not a long story, and quite a lot of it is action. This is befitting a game like HZD, but wouldn’t increase my enjoyment of the game. Equally, if I hadn’t played the game, knowing that one of the characters’ sisters dies (which is a strong section of the game) would remove the drama of that moment from the game.

Not taking anything away from the writers or artists, it’s well written, and the artwork is good with some interesting vignettes at the back of the book. The knowledge and story held within this book would have been interesting had it been put into the game as a side quest, but that’s the problem.

It feels like a side quest…

This felt like a book that didn’t need to be written, like something that would be an interesting aside if you wanted to pursue it. If it had been what Erend did after the events of HZD, or how he came to be who he was and why he does what he does, that would have added something to the game. As it is, it’s a requiem for a minor character, and as with all DLC, while it adds something to the universe, it isn’t something I’d have sought out.

Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.