Last week, Sony sued over Light of Motiram, a survival game which the PlayStation parent calls a “slavish clone” of the Horizon series. The results of that lawsuit remain to be seen, but for now it seems to have been enough to convince the devs to scrub Light of Motiram’s Steam page clean of its most incriminating Horizon-like elements.
Light of Motiram, in development at Tencent subsidiary Polaris Quest, once proudly emblazoned its Steam page with screenshots of robot mastodons, repeated descriptions of other “colossal machines,” and banner art of a girl who could easily be described as “anime Aloy.” (You can still see an archived version of the page.) There was even an animated gif of a human character doing battle with a giant mech atop a robot horse, which you could easily squint to mistake for a shot from a Horizon trailer.
Much of that material has now been scrubbed from the Steam page, as noted by The Game Post. You can still draw some Horizon parallels with the futuristic tribal aesthetic, but now it looks a little bit more like a game that simply exists in a similar genre aesthetic rather than “we have Horizon at home.”
Of course, Light of Motiram has been billed from the start as a co-op survival game, which would make it fundamentally different from the single-player, open-world gameplay of the Horizon series. But its aesthetic similarities to Horizon were drawing criticism as far back as last year.
I’m reminded of the early controversy over Genshin Impact, which offered some pretty obvious allusions to Breath of the Wild in its early marketing materials. Of course, MiHoYo’s game turned out to very much have its own identity, and the same might be true of Light of Motiram – but then, I guess Genshin Impact was never brazen enough to earn a lawsuit from the publisher of its inspiration.
Maybe someday we’ll be laughing about this as Light of Motiram reigns among the best survival games on the market.
