Horizon Zero Dawn is a foundation rethinking of Alloy’s post-apocalyptic adventures in retro console graphic style, returning to the original PlayStation low-poly world.
Created by Redditor ZeoNyphThe one-minute video gives you a glimpse of what the Horizontal Zero Dawn would look like when it was released in the mid-’90s. The game’s graphics have been significantly downgraded, with lots of low resolution textures and blocky environments commonly found on CRT monitors. However, Alloy’s character model is still recognizable by her braided red hair and bow.
The video is fairly short, showing the mockup’s main menu screen and a simple gameplay segment. Alloy starts with a campfire in favor of the original game storage system and then jumps over cliffs with some basic platform animations. There she meets a watcher who takes her out with a single hit – she must have been in poor health.
Zeo Nyph says The style of demake is inspired by the original Tomb Raider game and it’s not hard to see the similarities between them. The environment, camera angles, graphic styles and drawing distances all evoke Lara Croft’s original adventures. Even the alloy’s death animation has a surprising similarity to how Lara flops to the floor like a ragdoll in the original 1996 release.
They also said the video was uploaded in a painfully pixelated resolution of just 320×240 to “add reliability”, but that’s not easy on the eyes. We believe that the sudden death of Alloy is also in favor of the very high difficulty that is characteristic of many retro games.
The entire video was reportedly modeled, rendered and textured using the rendering software Blender, so don’t expect ZeoNyph to release a playable version of the demake. It’s not an interactive game, it’s essentially an animation.
Converting triple-A games to PS1’s low-polygon graphic style has become a trend in recent years. From Software’s PS4 Action RPG Bloodborne recently received demake treatment Free release on PC After a year of development.