I finally got around to playing this and it was such a great experience. It has a lot of the trappings of your standard open world game, but it incorporates them in interesting ways. Ubisoft towers? They're cool roaming giraffe monsters. Collectibles? They're snippets of poetry, flashbacks to the world before, unique religious trinkets. Side quests? They're pretty basic but the people you help are actually good characters and many of them show up throughout the game.

The writing is mostly great and the voice acting, though sometimes spotty, is absolutely stellar across the board for the main characters. Most of all, HZD excels at world building. This feels like a super well thought out and well realized world. I do wish some of the secrets of the story were revealed to you earlier, but discovering these secrets in the main mission bunkers makes sense in the fiction. The story really feels compelling toward the end of the game as you discover more and more about why the world is the way it is.

It's definitely not perfect. It has even worse climbing than Uncharted and some of the things that make sense in the fiction don't make for fun gameplay e.g. standing around listening to five audio logs all left in the same room. But despite some poorly implemented ideas, it is clear a lot of love went into this and I cannot wait for the inevitable sequel.