Horizon Zero Dawn Demake Video Takes Us Back To The PS1 Era

Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel Horizon Forbidden West are both incredibly detailed games, with Guerrilla Games’ Decima engine offering graphics that seem almost impossible on modern consoles. But would Horizon be just as good with PS1-era visuals that barely even qualify as 3D? Luckily, now we know.

YouTube creator ZeoNyph wondered that, as well, and created a pseudo-demo for a Horizon Zero Dawn demake using Blender. Blender is a 3D graphics program that lets users animate their own content, and though it can be used for advanced visuals, that’s not what ZeoNyph had in mind.

As you can see in the video above, Horizon Zero Dawn was reimagined as a PS1 game from 1996, complete with the classic PlayStation splash screen and blurry 320×420 resolution. The game’s own title screen even includes a selection option for the Frozen Wilds expansion, and the audio has a nostalgic crackly tone and lack of fidelity that anyone with a PS1 should recognize. There’s something soothing about a game that seems like it’s being held together with duct tape and paper clips.

For the “gameplay,” we see Aloy move past a bonfire–one that is pretty clearly a 2D file meant to give off the appearance of 3D–before a machine quickly notices her and attacks. Because this is an homage to classics from the era, it cuts to a black screen as Aloy collapses, dead.

On second thought, maybe it’s better Horizon didn’t come out until 2017. For more from ZeoNyph, check out the True Detective Season 1 intro video redone with Life is Strange characters.