Horizon Zero Dawn on PS1 doesn’t look half bad
Aloy was Lara Croft all along
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Horizon Zero Dawn has been thrown back to the low-polygon world of the original PlayStation, in a fan demake that reimagines Aloy’s post-apocalyptic adventuring in the graphical style of the retro console.
Created by RedditorZeoNyph, the minute-long video gives us a glimpse of whatHorizon Zero Dawnmight have looked like if it had been released in the mid-’90s. The game’s graphics have been massively downgraded with plenty of low-resolution textures and blocky environments you’d usually see on a CRT monitor. Aloy’s character model is still recognizable, though, with her braided red hair and bow.
The video is pretty short, showing a mockup main menu screen and a brief gameplay segment. Aloy starts by a campfire in a nod to the original game’s save system, before jumping her way up a cliff with some rudimentary platforming animations. There, she meets a Watcher who takes her out in a single hit – she must have had low health.
ZeoNyph saysthe demake’s style was inspired by the original Tomb Raider games, and it’s not hard to see the similarities between them. The environment, camera angles, graphical style, and draw distance all evoke Lara Croft’s original adventures. Even Aloy’s death animation bears a remarkable similarity to the way Lara flops to the floor like a ragdoll in the original 1996 release.
They also said the video had been uploaded in the painfully pixelated resolution of only 320x240 for “added authenticity”, although that doesn’t make it any easier on the eyes. We reckon Aloy’s quick death is also a nod to the exceedingly high difficulty that characterizes many retro games.
The whole video was reportedly modeled, rendered, and textured using the rendering software Blender, so don’t expect ZeoNyph to release a playable version of the demake. It’s essentially an animation, rather than an interactive game.
Converting triple-A games to the low-polygon graphical style of the PS1 has become something of a trend in recent years. FromSoftware’sPS4action RPG Bloodborne recently receivedthe demake treatmentand wasreleased for free on PCafter a year of development.
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Callum is TechRadar Gaming’s News Writer. You’ll find him whipping up stories about all the latest happenings in the gaming world, as well as penning the odd feature and review. Before coming to TechRadar, he wrote freelance for various sites, including Clash, The Telegraph, and Gamesindustry.biz, and worked as a Staff Writer at Wargamer. Strategy games and RPGs are his bread and butter, but he’ll eat anything that spins a captivating narrative. He also loves tabletop games, and will happily chew your ear off about TTRPGs and board games.
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