New Tencent survival game looks eerily similar to Horizon Zero Dawn and Palworld

Palworld and Horizon Zero Dawn have a super similar new rival thanks to an upcoming survival game from publishing behemoth Tencent.

Given that thousands of games come out every year, it’s inevitable that there’s going to be some crossover. Half-Life, you might argue, is a derivative of Doom. Cities Skylines is a lot like SimCity. There’s common ground between Stalker and Fallout. But a new crafting and survival game from Tencent, the publishing and development giant which has stakes in Ubisoft, Riot, Paradox, and dozens of other major companies, seems to wear its inspirations very prominently on its sleeve. If you’ve played Horizon Zero Dawn, Horizon Forbidden West, or Palworld, the freshly announced Light of Motiram may look extremely familiar.

Human civilization as we know it is gone. The lustrous, overgrown landscape is now teeming with ‘mechanimals,’ huge, cyberpunk-esque robots that look and behave like dinosaurs. Equipped with a bow and arrow, you play as a young woman who can fight, capture, and tame the metal monsters. There are crafting, open-world, and survival game elements in equal measure. But no, this isn’t Horizon Zero Dawn. Light of Motiram is created by Polaris Quest, a division of Tencent, and its Steam page has only just gone live.

Aesthetically, Motiram bears close comparison to Sony and Guerilla’s beloved open-world game, but mechanically, there are also some similarities to Palword. As well as gathering resources and using them to build your own settlements, in Motiram you’re also charged with discovering and herding the mechanimals, and taming them to become your companions. Naturally, every creature has its own unique abilities and characteristics, and different biomes contain different species.

You can go it alone, or team up with nine other players for co-op. While a lot of the mechs are passive and pastoral, the biggest and baddest can only be domesticated by defeating them in gigantic boss battles.

Another Tencent game, Tarisland, has previously been compared by players to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, even prompting a response from Warcraft executive creative director Chris Metzen. As for Light of Motiram, it definitely looks like Horizon Zero Dawn, and, based on the footage and descriptions shared by Polaris Quest so far, seemingly plays the same, plus some inspiration from Palworld. It’s similar. We’ll have to see if Sony or Pocketpair – which, ironically, is itself facing down a lawsuit from Nintendo over alleged patent infringement in Palworld – will consider it too similar.

In the meantime, try some of the best open-world games, or maybe the best crafting games available on PC.

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