Horizon knock-off ripped apart by fans for "shameless" copy

Horizon fans are calling out a new open-world game for allegedly copying the Guerilla Games RPG series.

Earlier today, Tencent studio Polaris Quest announced Light of Motiram. It’s an open-world RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world overran with big mechanical monsters.

There’s also a red-haired heroine who uses a bow to fight these machines.

Sound familiar? No, you haven’t gone back in time to when Sony announced Horizon Zero Dawn in 2015. That is genuinely the new game from Tencent.

Speaking of Horizon, the first game recently got the remaster treatment. Check it out.

It’s not just the premise of Light of Motiram that sounds identical though. Even by glancing through the images in the embedded post below, it’s hard to tell if the screenshots are from Light of Motiram or one of the Horizon games.

Take a look for yourself.

Looking through the released images and reveal trailer, it certainly looks Polaris Quest has taken a lot of inspiration from Guerrilla Games’ RPG series. And users have not been shy about comparing the two.

“What in the Horizon is this?” writes Reddit user ‘LoKSET’.

Meanwhile, another user in the same thread called it a scam, writing: “Is this a new meta to scam for funding, make a high quality trailer of a mishmash of popular games together?”

Over on X (formerly Twitter), the sentiment was pretty similar. Content creator Genki posted “This is shameless,” along with four images of the game.

Underneath the post, another user posted four screenshots from the Horizon games to help people compare the two.

I get it. Art inspires art, and you’ll never truly have a creative work that is separated from its inspirations. But the similarities here are far too on the nose that I can’t help but make a “We have Horizon at home” joke.

The whole thing is reminiscent of Palworld’s obvious Pokémon similarities, which resulted in Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filing a lawsuit against developer Pocketpair in September this year.

There’s no doubt Sony’s lawyers are already combing through Light of Motiram’s reveal trailer for anything that may infringe upon the rights of their flagship RPG series. However, as of now, the company is yet to comment on the situation.