It doesn't seem all that long ago that I donned animal skins, made a few rudimentary weapons and hunted large beasts for sport/survival/kicks.

That's because it wasn't.

Far Cry Primal is only a year old and fresh enough in my memory to get distracting flashbacks while pounding the first few hours of Horizon: Zero Dawn.

To be fair, HZD has a whole lot more going on than Ubisoft's splendid early-man outing. It's the far future - so far that humans as we know them have apparently obliterated themselves in a blaze of hi-tech mystery, and the globe's intelligent bipeds have reverted to a far more basic society among the remnants of the past.

And its robotic dinosaurs.

No, it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense but as one of Horizon's principal mysteries, it's quite a peach to get your teeth into. Ridiculous, but juicy.

Our heroin, Aloy, has questions of her own, however. Like where she came from and why her cantankerous carer Rost, who raised her from an infant, was ostracised by their local tribe.

In order to peel back the skin of these ponderous circumstances, Aloy pops across the known land sandbox-style, killing or controlling dinobots, using their parts to make nifty things, digging up the past's techie toys and using them to her advantage, and generally doing all the things that back a good open-world game tick metronomically.

It's all very solid in the places where it needs to be, except one. The script and its delivery are so face-tearingly earnest, with every inner thought and plot detail expounded in a way that no real person does, unless it's part of a deliberately poor TV drama made for satirical purposes. It won't ruin your enjoyment of HZD, there's too much going on for that, especially once you start taking control of Dino and his electric friends.

I just want natural delivery; the Uncharted, Borderlands and GTA series get this. Why can't everyone else?