Horizon: Forbidden West - Soundtrack (DLC) (PS5)

Let's be clear about what this is: a soundtrack DLC, not a game. If you landed here hoping for new quests, machines to topple, or more of Aloy's surprisingly layered characterization, you are in the wrong place. This is the musical companion to Horizon Forbidden West, the open-world action-RPG that dropped Aloy into a lush, post-post-apocalyptic American West ruled by robotic megafauna and fractured human tribes. The base game and its Burning Shores expansion are sold separately. The score itself, composed primarily by Joris de Man alongside Niels van der Leest, Oleksa Lozowchuk, and Ashitaka, is genuinely worth owning on its own terms. It leans into a hybrid of orchestral sweep and tribal percussion, mirroring the game's central tension between ancient technology and primitive-feeling culture. Tracks tied to machine encounters punch hard, with aggressive low brass and driving rhythms that hold up as standalone listening. The quieter ambient pieces, those sparse, almost meditative cues that play while you scan a ruin or watch the sun set over the Golden Gate skeleton, are where the score quietly shows off its range. For RPG and narrative-game fans who already completed Forbidden West, this is a solid nostalgia delivery mechanism. The music is dense with cues tied to specific story beats, so if you remember the emotional weight of certain late-game sequences, the corresponding tracks will hit exactly as intended. That said, if you never finished the main story or found the pacing in the middle chapters a slog (and some of those tribal-politics fetch quests absolutely were), the emotional resonance of the OST will be diminished. Context matters with game soundtracks. From a pure audio quality standpoint, the tracks deliver the full dynamic range you would expect from a first-party Sony production. Surround sound and stereo options are listed as supported features, which suggests the PC release is not just a file dump. Whether you are using it as background music for another RPG session or actually sitting down to listen critically, the production holds up. There are no Steam reviews to aggregate sentiment from at this time, so community consensus is absent, but the pedigree of the composers and the quality of the source game give reasonable confidence. Bottom line for the practical buyer: if you loved Horizon Forbidden West and want the music in your Steam library for easy access, this does exactly that job. If you are on the fence about the main game and stumbled here first, go play that instead and come back for the soundtrack after the credits roll. Monika, Scout Team