It’s a worthy contender and it deserves to be a nominee on every single GOTY poll, but I’m afraid that ZBotW and Mario Odyssey have it beat in the gameplay department and games like NeiR Automata have it beat in the ‘art department. Horizon Zero Dawn is a great game but in a way it’s also fairly generic in that it does everything well ( amazingly well ) but in a way it doesn’t do anything that ‘we’ haven’t seen before and as such it can often feel very routine and generic.