There was a time where the idea of remastering old games seemed like a net positive. Much in the same way movies would receive new remasters for high definition, it seemed logical for games to do the same. Just take the existing game and up the resolution and make it run on modern hardware. Didn’t seem like a difficult prospect from the outside looking in. Back in the PlayStation 3 days where Sony started porting some old PS2 games up following their abandonment of backward compatibility, it felt like a decent compromise at the time. Hardly a solution for proper backward compatibility, but it at least kept some older games playable in some form (outside of emulation, of course).
Remasters have since trended away from porting up older games and toward becoming an easy excuse to release a new “better looking” version. Sony in particular is invested in this idea, having done this a couple of times now with games that didn’t need a visual touch-up. Did The Last of Us really need a remaster, let alone two? What about Until Dawn? Neither of those games look any worse than they did upon their original release. Remastering them doesn’t add anything. They exist purely as a desperate justification for these consoles and their increased power. Remember these games? Look at what we can do with them on this new hardware!
Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered feels the same. In my time playing, I couldn’t tell you what’s different apart from the load times being faster (though I assume the PS4 version isn’t that much slower, if at all, when played on the PS5’s hard drive). If I looked closely at a side-by-side comparison, I could likely see what’s changed, but I can’t imagine it’s anything truly meaningful. Horizon already met the bar for looking good that all big-budget games do by showing off how lavishly expensive the production was. Graphics have advanced to the point where whatever gains can be made are becoming smaller and smaller, ever more imperceptible unless you’re explicitly looking for differences or counting pixels. The pursuit of better graphics has never been more pointless.
But of course videogames have been built on leveraging advancing technology, so they’ll keep applying whatever new minuscule “upgrades” they can. There’s always something to be improved, something to change to bring it closer to “the original vision.” Reid McCarter wrote about this for Bullet Points Monthly as part of the site’s issue on the Dead Space remake in his piece “One Day, This Videogame Will Be Perfect:”
That this game was remade speaks to a desire not only for safe profits but, in its glowing reception, a medium-wide grasping at some sort of wispy, Platonic ideal of every videogame yet released. The promise of the remake is the promise of another step toward that perfect version—one that’s meant to await tantalizingly just ahead in a future where better lighting techniques, artificial intelligence programming, or technical advancements we haven’t dreamed up yet await. At some point, videogames teach us, perfection hides just at the golden line of the horizon. The past has nothing to offer but dusty historical notes and an education in how to do it better next time around. The present is a series of temporary satisfactions and disappointments in the ephemeral joys of fleeting accomplishments.
The same applies to these remasters. It all stems from the same place.
If you’ve played Horizon: Zero Dawn before, this remastered version is the exact same game. Nothing’s fundamentally changed. It just has a new coat of paint. You already know whether this is something you’re interested in. You don’t need a review to help you decide whether it’s worth paying for again. If you haven’t played Horizon before, this isn’t necessarily better or worse than the original PS4 game. It’s a baffling option, however, given the original PS4 version already got patched to run better on PS5 back in 2021. In a time where videogames exist in an ever precarious situation, between studio closures and rampant layoffs, it’s hard not to wonder why this is what gets made in place of anything else.
Callum Rakestraw is the Reviews Editor at Entertainium. You can find him on Bluesky, Mastodon, and his blog.
