Horizon Zero Dawn’s worldbuilding is delivered almost entirely through audio logs and holographic recordings found in ancient underground facilities. The densest concentration of lore is in Project Zero Dawn’s FARO Automated Solutions offices — accessible mid-game — which contain recordings of Ted Faro arguing with GAIA about the ethics of the Cradle program.
The recordings reveal that Faro, whose robots caused the extinction, personally deleted ELEUTHIA’s language databases late in the project — ensuring the survivors of the Cradle vaults would have no knowledge of the old world. His stated reason was that knowledge of what happened would be too psychologically damaging for the new humanity to process.
GAIA’s response — her last recorded audio — is a statement of grief rather than anger. She had built safeguards against Faro’s access and he bypassed them anyway. The final Faro recording is him, alone, in a room with the extinct world, making a decision he believed was merciful.
Guerrilla built this as the true origin of Aloy’s world: not a natural catastrophe but a deliberate erasure, committed by the man most responsible for the original catastrophe. The audio logs are all optional. Players who skip them understand the world’s history at a surface level. Players who find them understand Faro.