Horizon Forbidden West’s Burning Shores DLC is out this week, and with it comes the revelation that protagonist Aloy is queer. And never solely that, it lastly offers the hero, who famously tends to attempt to tackle an excessive amount of alone, the choice to enter a romantic relationship for the primary time within the sequence.
Spoilers for Horizon Forbidden West and Burning Shores observe:
The DLC launched April 19 on PlayStation 5, with the PS4 model notably not receiving the enlargement on account of technical limitations. The $20 replace brings new content material and a few quality-of-life modifications, however it additionally sends Aloy to Horizon’s post-apocalyptic tackle Los Angeles, California. As soon as there, she meets a girl named Seyka, portrayed by actor Kylie Liya Web page. Aloy ropes Seyka into her quest to avoid wasting the world from the space-faring Nemesis machines which might be on their technique to destroy the planet as revealed on the finish of Forbidden West. On prime of delving into Seyka’s private story involving her fraught relationship along with her sister and her previous as a marine, the 2 bond over feeling disenfranchised from their houses, the incoming (second) apocalypse, and discovering hope in a seemingly hopeless state of affairs.
As the 2’s story unfolds all through the enlargement, it turns into clear there’s romantic rigidity between them. Aloy, who’s normally fairly stoic and assured, is overcome with awkward nervousness. It’s fairly obvious of their early interactions that she’s battling this, and she or he even says as a lot in a monologue earlier than the climactic romance scene, admitting that she doesn’t perceive why she’s so nervous to see Seyka.
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When Aloy meets up with Seyka, the latter admits her emotions for our hero, and the participant is given the choice to both confess Aloy’s personal emotions or flip Seyka down. If you happen to select to pursue the connection, the 2 share a kiss. After this, each of them acknowledge they’ve a whole lot of work forward of them and don’t know once they’ll see one another once more, however Seyka asks Aloy to not overlook about her, to which Aloy guarantees she gained’t. This kind of appears like a manner for the writers to acknowledge that Seyka isn’t a part of the primary recreation, so once you return to Forbidden West’s post-game, you are able to do so with out questioning the place your new girlfriend is. She’s out doing her personal factor, and y’all can meet up later. Most definitely this can be in both a future replace or within the eventual third Horizon recreation Guerrilla is little doubt engaged on after Forbidden West’s cliffhanger.
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Earlier than this, Horizon video games sometimes had flirtatious dialogue choices with male characters, however these interactions by no means escalated to a full-blown romantic relationship. Inevitably, there can be some predictable homophobic detractors who declare that, as a result of the romance with Seyka is optionally available, Aloy might be headcanoned as straight, however even the choices to show down the connection aren’t framed as her saying she isn’t considering girls, however relatively that she’s not on the lookout for a relationship whereas saving the world. So regardless of the way you slice it, Burning Shores does make it clear Aloy is queer.
That mentioned, I’m a bit upset that Aloy’s queerness is sequestered right into a post-launch DLC relatively than expressed in the primary recreation. I felt equally again when The Final of Us did the identical for Ellie, revealing her to be a lesbian within the Left Behind DLC. Hopefully Horizon follows The Final of Us’ instance and makes up for this by making Aloy’s relationship with Seyka a central a part of the subsequent recreation like The Final of Us Half II did with Ellie and Dina.