But on top of more meaningful sidequests and little details that brought Chainscrape to life, there is a wider swath of side objectives I encountered in and out of town. There will be multiple melee fight pits throughout the world; there are Vista Points, in which Aloy must line up a vision on her focus with a location in the world (a more complex take on Zero Dawn's Vantage Points it seems), and Salvage Contracts, which tasks Aloy with hunting down specific machine parts in a longer quest for an incredible outfit. And look, in today’s open-world market, you can’t not have your own in-universe game like Gwent or Orlog. And Forbidden West's Machine Strike is shaping up to be a pretty damn entertaining one. It sees the player taking on opponents on a board made of various tiles representing different terrain, with an arsenal of carved machines going up against each other. Machines have different health, attack, and movement stats, and each type of terrain can have negative or positive impacts as you try to take out your opponent’s fleet. I only played a few tutorial missions, and there will be plenty more matches to play, game pieces to collect, and strategies to ascertain, but it already had its hooks in me, particularly thanks to little twists that adapt the real robot’s armor plating, the Overcharge ability, and more.