Horizon Forbidden West

The pitch is still daft and still brilliant: a far-future Earth reclaimed by machine animals, and you take them down with a bow. What sells it is the engineering underneath — each machine is a puzzle of weak points and parts to strip, so a big fight is half action, half problem-solving.

The West itself is gorgeous in a way that made me stop and gawp — sunken cities, coral reefs, red-rock canyons. The new traversal tools (the glider, the grapple) finally make moving through it feel as good as looking at it.

It's a sequel that does the sequel thing — bigger, more systems, more menus — and occasionally that tips into clutter. Aloy also still narrates her own puzzle-solving out loud, which I could do without. Small prices for the best-looking game on the console.