If you managed to crash at just the right time in Guerrilla Games PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn, you can play through segments of the title while still locked in a kids body.
The timing appears to be right around the point where Aloy grows up; crashing to desktop and restarting will greet you with the apparently impossible task of running around as kid Aloy where adult Aloy should be.
At the moment, it doesn’t appear feasible for the game to properly progress as users are trying to play through as the littler version of Aloy; abilities such as zip-lining and climbing are greatly strained as the movement appears to be intentionally hamstrung; making sense as Guerrilla aimed to give players the experience of playing as a clumsy kid.
We give it a month before speed-runners learn how to use this to some wild advantage where the hitbox changes drastically between the two versions, leading attacks to fall flat when they would have otherwise connected.
Further, child Aloy doesn’t have a death animation; you shouldn’t be able to actually die as child-version of Aloy, meaning she stretches oddly when the player drops off of a cliff.
To the credit of Guerrilla, they’ve been keeping their ears close to the ground as they explore the possible pitfalls of porting the title over to PC; they caught the post on Reddit ten hours after it was up to ask additional questions about how the user managed to create this bug; it involved crashing multiple times throughout the tutorial.
You can watch this fascinating oddity yourself thanks to Leo via YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdAHNQRqmCI
It’s admittedly strange, but one of the more interesting bugs that have seemed to plague the title since it’s rough release.
Oddly enough, the majority of the fan base hasn’t even approached the actual gameplay of Horizon Zero Dawn itself, from the sidequests where everyone dies immediately after talking to you, to the need to shove multiple arrows into the skull of an enemy before they do you the credit of dying.
Instead, that vast number of reviews (at least that are based on Steam) merely discuss whether or not the game can actually run; once fixed, Guerrilla should likely experience a wealth of positive reviews from users that can’t refund and are simply grateful that they can finally play what they’ve purchased.
Porting to PC can be difficult, even more so when you have an inexperienced team finding themselves in the strange waters of PC gaming instead of consoles, where Guerrilla typically resides; as long as they make right by their consumers at the end of the day, we can all appreciate the stranger issues that crop up.
