Broadening Horizon

<p> Increasingly digital games center their narratives during or after the apocalypse. In 2017 the action role-playing game <I>Horizon Zero Dawn</I> offered a new take on society after the end of the world. <I>Horizon</I> has since become a multimedia franchise with a second video game released in 2022 in addition to comic books a board game and other adaptations in development.</p><p> This collection analyzes the <I>Horizon</I> franchise and its presentation of the apocalypse ecology gender history and more. Game story and game mechanics are fundamental to each essay and contributors offer a close reading--or close playing--of the games from perspectives as diverse as hauntology postcolonialism contemporary feminism and historiography. This first collection on the <I>Horizon</I> franchise argues that we now live in an Apocalyptic period in the same way previous periods were known as Romantic Modernist or Realist Periods and makes the case that <I>Horizon</I> belongs at the crest of this new Apocalyptic Period and at the center of contemporary gaming and of game studies.</p>