Ending Explained - Horizon Forbidden West Guide - IGN (2024)

Horizon Forbidden West builds upon Aloy’s journey in Zero Dawn, introducing a brand new portion of her world, or as we know it, the western United States, new tribes and their politics, and a host of indelible new characters. It also pushes Aloy to overcome new obstacles and enemies, and contend with the lingering questions hanging from her previous outing.

All of that comes to a head in an ending that not only culminates Aloy’s journey into the Forbidden West but sets her and her companions up for new adventures. So if you've got thoughts on the ending of Horizon Forbidden West, or simply looking to jump ahead and see how the game ends, we've got you covered in our Ending Explained guide below where we dig into all the biggest mysteries and breakdown what the future may hold for the series.

Breaking Down the Events of Singularity

The main focus of Horizon Forbidden West’s final mission and cutscenes shouldn’t leave players too confused - Aloy and her gang, including Alva, Erend, Kotallo, Sylens, Zo, and even Regalla if you chose to spare her life earlier in the story, as well as the seemingly turned (but as we’ll still learn still nefarious) Far Zenith Tilda, plan a big infiltration mission of the Far Zenith headquarters off the coast to rescue Gaia and Beta, as well as prevent the group’s alleged plans to wipe out Earth and rebuild it as they wish.

The plan, as players will know, goes surprisingly well for the most part, as everyone splits off to accomplish their own tasks, some of which Aloy has hidden from Tilda, including a key move Beta will make. That move turns out to be an absolute life-saver, as the gang reconvenes to discover that their opening salvo has alerted the Zeniths to their presence. Their response? A frightening tidal wave of Specters that would be absolutely unstoppable for a handful of humans. Luckily, Beta injects Hephaestus, the machine-creating AI who proved most problematic for Aloy to hunt down, into the Zenith network, which allows it to take advantage of their advanced printing matrices. And that means the robot-building AI can create A LOT of machines very quickly.

Sylens also notes this move means the typically independent AI will likely slip back into the cauldron network producing all these machines. Aloy assures him we were able to capture it once and can do it again, potentially setting up a thread that could be explored in either DLC or a future game. After all, Horizon Zero Dawn’s DLC The Frozen Wilds ultimately focused around one specific AI subfunction of Gaia’s, but Hephaestus leaking back out into the world after spending some time on the Zenith network has major implications. Not only does it naturally facilitate more machines being manufactured in cauldrons, but it’s possible Hephaestus learned to create some new robots from their data. The Specters show the Zeniths didn’t necessarily stick to animal types for their machines, so we could end up seeing this particular AI get creative with some of what it creates. Though Sylens muses that with the Zenith copy of the Apollo sub-function, they might not need to go reclaim this particularly pesky AI.

The fate of Hephaestus is perhaps the biggest lingering question of the mission before Aloy’s final showdown, though it’s also worth noting you might have missed a scene depending on your earlier choices. If you previously chose to have Regalla killed, you earned a powerful bow from her. But if she’s along for the ride, she’ll sacrifice herself as a horde of Specters ambush Aloy. Finally, she gets the death she wanted - one dying in battle for a cause… even if it’s a cause she only just joined.

The remainder of the group marches on, Sylens’ shield-breaking weapon does its job, and a combination of Aloy’s army and the newly printed machines starts to wipe out the group from existence. Only a couple come into play as Aloy begins her ascent up the tower. Erik overrides an elevator that would have made her path quite easier and forces Aloy into a skirmish. But his death comes at the hands of Zo, seeking out some relief from her grief and a large dose of revenge for Varl’s crushing death a few missions earlier.

Aloy now is able to take the elevator up to where she needs to…oh wait, no, sorry. Gerard, the lead Zenith, gets in her way, locking down the system and forces her to climb the rest of the way up. On the way there, Aloy learns some very important details from Alva’s dive into the Zenith network - namely, that there are a ton of flight paths showing the Zeniths always intended to leave, and references to something named Nemesis. And, no, not the kind that likes to wield a rocket launcher around Raccoon City.

For the moment those remain mysteries, as Aloy reaches the top of the tower and comes to a beautiful outdoor conference room, where Beta is restrained and jacked into the Zenith matrix. Aloy frees her bonds and has her dig into the truth behind these late-game revelations.

A New Challenger Approaches - What Does This Mean for the Future of the Series?

Beta’s investigation reveals some sort of mass of machines, or something with an astronomical energy level hurtling toward Earth, seemingly in the same path the Zeniths took from Sirius. Aloy comes up with a quick theory and is easily able to put it in place, as Tilda appears, blasting Gerard to death and seemingly remaining as the last of her group. And she isn’t cagey with information, providing key insight into a lingering Zero Dawn mystery, and obviously setting up the next Horizon.

As Aloy and Beta surmised, a natural disaster isn’t what caused the Zeniths to flee - it was this Nemesis, which, as Tilda reveals, is a failed collective copy of the minds of her community. An abandoned experiment as the Zeniths sought not just physical immortality, but digital as well so that they could exist in any form, Nemesis didn’t quite work out, but rather than destroying it, they quietly forgot about it. This left a failed collection of these pretty selfish people’s minds to fester for years, and as it did it grew sentience and, naturally, resentment of the versions of itself that locked it away.

With all that hatred brewing for decades, it broke free of its containment and wiped out their systems in hours, hacking everything thanks to all the knowledge it already had, with the intent of total annihilation. So the Zeniths fled, and seemingly found respite on Earth… but Nemesis still had a mission to kill. It is revealed that this hodgepodge of these terrible people was in fact the one that sent the extinction signal of previously unknown origin to Gaia Prime before the events of Horizon Zero Dawn, causing the chain of events that would see all the subfunction AIs to splinter off, and particularly for Hades to attempt to fulfill its protocols that Aloy eventually worked so desperately to stop in Horizon Zero Dawn. Nemesis sent that signal in the hopes of wiping out the Zeniths, though it ultimately failed.

This revelation satisfies a lingering question from Zero Dawn and neatly ties so much of this world together. Had the Zeniths not done all this, had they not created Nemesis, and had it not sent the signal, then Gaia may never have created Aloy in the first place to save Earth. So the events of the whole series, functionally, can be traced back to these rich dirtbags trying and failing to achieve new levels of immortality. But, of course, life found a way, and so when those plans failed, Nemesis left Sirius to, like Thanos, finish the job itself.

With a terrifying, devastating AI hurtling toward Earth, Tilda’s plea to Aloy is… to come with her on the Zenith shuttle so they can escape. Find some random planet in some random solar system and hide out from Nemesis. They can even take Gaia with them and rebuild the world, just as Elisabet would have wanted but somewhere else. And if you didn’t have every conversation possible with her beforehand, you might not know, but Tilda reveals here that she didn’t just work with or run in the same circles as Elisabet during the end of days. She loved her and regretted leaving her behind to perish, and Aloy is her chance to honor Elisabet’s memory and her dreams, at least in the way Tilda sees it. She doesn’t really ask Aloy to come so much as demands it (and won’t even settle for Beta because Tilda sees her as a lesser version), so the two duke it out when Aloy, understandably, refuses.

After a battle against Tilda’s megazord, Sylens is the first to make it to the top of the tower, and tells Aloy about how he knew everything regarding Nemesis and how to circumvent the Zeniths’ shields from his time with Hades. He wanted to get to this point - of taking the Zenith knowledge base for himself and finding salvation - and so he gave Regalla and her rebels machine mastery to help sow discord and create problems for the Zeniths. He never looped Aloy in because she never acts sensibly in front of impossible odds. And by allowing her to go at her own pace, he still got to where he wanted to, though not fully by his own design.

So he’s going to leave aboard the Odyssey, take Apollo, and perhaps try to do what the Zeniths couldn’t. He extends the same offer Tilda did to Aloy, but doesn’t fight her for her choice, which is, of course, to stay behind and save her friends and their families from Nemesis’ incoming attack. Seeing it as a lost cause, he makes to leave just as the rest of Aloy’s team arrives, triumphant in their victory against the Zeniths though ignorant of the looming threat. He sees all this rejoicing, and decides to stay, though, let’s be honest, Sylens has never acted purely out of good intentions. He must see some value, and potential success, in staying behind rather than fleeing. For the moment, Aloy doesn’t tell the group of the battle ahead, but a virtual depiction of Nemesis from Beta’s hacking looms large over the group, and is clearly set up as the main threat for Aloy to contend with in a next-possible adventure. As the scenes fades out, the light from Nemesis’ image is the very last thing to remain on screen, a looming reminder that even in this moment of triumph, a new battle awaits.

Before credits roll, Aloy sets her team off on their new assignment - with the knowledge of a battle on the horizon, she sends Alva, Erend, Zo, and Kotallo off to their respective tribes to stir up support. Everyone and everything they’ve created is worth fighting for, is the legacy Aloy believes Elisabet would want her to fight for, and this time, she doesn’t have to do it alone. She has Gaia, and her sub-functions, which from the ending we now know includes those the Zeniths had a copy of but were thought to be previously lost. (Hephaestus is naturally absent.) Her new friends and their vast network of tribes are also along for the ride, and, of course, a sister in Beta. For the first time she’s truly not alone in the fight.

Horizon Forbidden West concludes in appropriately dramatic and rather straightforward fashion, but along the way answers a major Zero Dawn question - we now know who sent that extinction signal all those years ago. In several major ways, it also sets the stage for Aloy and her team’s next journey. Rather than a solo quest, she is very much leading a massive charge against a looming threat unlike any she’s faced. And it’s one that could have worldwide implications, not just for the world-ending threat but because it could see civilizations across the world coming together. The ending shows a delegation of Alva’s Quen sailing across the sea back home; as we know, the continental U.S. isn’t the original home for this advanced civilization. And Sylens can also be seen studying a hologram of the entire globe in the ending, assumedly meaning he finds hope in knowing life may exist on other shores.

And the ending doesn’t spell total doom just yet - key to Tilda’s explanation is that Nemesis used all its knowledge of the Zeniths and their creations against them, which is how it so easily thwarted their new colony. Coming to Earth without a Zenith in sight, Nemesis will have to face off against tribes of humans not relying on the same security protocols, weaponry, and fundamental beliefs. And with a beefed-up Gaia on their side, something the Zeniths didn’t have, they theoretically stand a much better, or at least unique, chance against Nemesis.

And, of course, Nemesis will also have to contend with having its primary goal stolen from it, though presumably the hate it felt for the Zeniths will be easily translated to others of their species. Still, this big showdown seems primed to be the main struggle in the next Horizon, though with Forbidden West’s complex web of new and returning tribes, personal stakes, and of course whatever Sylens is plotting, it’s safe to say there will be much more for players to discover.