Every good survival tale needs a menacing villain threatening the world's existence at large, and the RPG scene has witnessed an influx of titles with dramatic villains in 2023. Forspoken and Final Fantasy 16 feature a corrupting mechanism forming a core part of their plot, for example. Although Forspoken's experience admittedly missed the mark, Final Fantasy 16 had great success with the Ultima Collective's desperate fight to escape the Blight. Similarly, the Horizon franchise features an existential threat to the human race, and the legendary Faro Plague that brought humanity to its knees shares a few commonalities with Horizon Forbidden West's Nemesis.

Apocalyptic settings are a staple of modern games, with the Fallout franchise thriving in a storyline centered around the aftermath of a Nuclear Armageddon, and several other titles also feature humanity in a dogged battle for continued existence. Horizon is one such gaming series that has soared to stardom with Aloy's adventures in its machine-dominated post-apocalyptic climate, and with Nemesis inching closer to Earth's atmosphere as gamers await the threequel's arrival, there are a few parallels that liken the entity to the Faro Plague of old that afflicted the planet.

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Nemesis and the Faro Plague Have Common Origins

History often repeats itself. Guerrilla Games embodies that idea in the Horizon series with its Far Zenith faction, as the franchise's timeline of events reveals the Forbidden West's antagonists' unwillingness to learn was instrumental in their destruction. The Faro Plague wiped humanity off the face of Earth as Chariot war machines rampaged all over the planet's landscape. Initially founded as a peacekeeping unit by Faro Solutions, the Chariot robots were outfitted with the ability to hack and seize control of enemy automated machines.

To prevent his robots from suffering the same fate, Ted Faro secured them with an encryption protocol that would take an obscene length of time to hardwire -- without any failsafe mechanism. Years later, a Chariot swarm stopped responding to its owner's commands as it gained sentience. The lack of remote backdoor access to shut it down proved fatal for humanity, as the swarm consumed every inch of biomatter on Earth, obliterating all life in the process. Dr. Elisabet Sobeck's valiant efforts in creating Project Zero Dawn's GAIA AI restored life centuries later, but Nemesis is a new threat on the horizon.

While much of humanity died away in the wake of the Faro Plague, the wealthiest people in the world formed the Far Zenith consortium, speeding up the reconstruction of the Odyssey and escaping to the Sirius star system. The group blossomed scientifically on their new planet, making remarkable advancements and practically becoming physically immortal through lifespan extension. However, human greed led the group to seek digital immortality by uploading their minds through the Nemesis experiment.

Although the trial was unsuccessful, the project was never destroyed, and Nemesis eventually escaped its isolation and rampaged after gaining sentience, just like the Chariot robots. Nemesis hacked the entire Far Zenith civilization with a thirst for vengeance, and the surviving members fled back to Earth to escape its wrath.

However, the AI tracked the group across space and followed them to Earth, sending an extinction signal that gave HADES sentience to wipe out all life on Earth for the second time to render it uninhabitable for the Far Zenith as they fled -- inadvertently kickstarting Aloy and GAIA's struggles with the rogue AI in Horizon Zero Dawn. Nemesis is the Far Zenith's rebooted Faro Plague in Horizon Forbidden West -- an oversight that came back to destroy their civilization -- and the chickens have come back to Earth to roost, setting up an epic showdown for Aloy in the threequel.

Horizon Forbidden West is available now on PS4 and PS5.

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