Death Stranding 2 is a graphical masterpiece and that’s good news for Horizon Zero Dawn fans just as much as it is for Kojima stans.

We shouted out the gorgeous world in our Death Stranding 2 review, and players have been noticing just how good Kojima Productions’ take on Australia looks since launch last week. There’s clearly some technical wizardry at play, but that’s also got fans of a very different studio excited.

Death Stranding 2 was built using the Decima engine, which Guerrilla Games, the developer of Horizon Zero Dawn, created. First used for Killzone: Shadow Fall, the engine hasn’t been handed out very often since then – outside of Guerilla, who used it for Zero Dawn, Forbidden West, and a VR sports game, Decima has only been utilized by Supermassive Games for Until Dawn, and by Kojima Productions for the Death Stranding games.

That means it’s been a few years since we’ve really seen the engine in action. Its last outing was more than two years ago, when Decima got a chance to flex on the PS5-exclusive Horizon Forbidden West expansion, Burning Shores. Guerilla has long been known as a studio that pushes the graphical envelope, but it seems that Kojima Productions has spent the last two years working out how to get even more out of the Decima engine.

That’s excellent news for Aloy fans, however, as the progress that Kojima and co make on Decima is likely to be shared with Guerrilla. That’s a detail that hasn’t gone unacknowledged by fans, who have started discussing how the advancements being made in Death Stranding might manifest in the Horizon Forbidden West sequel that Guerrilla has been hinting at since 2022. Taking the five-year gap between the first two Horizon games, we might not see Horizon 3 until 2027, but if this is how far the Decima engine has come in the last two years, imagine how much further it might go in the next two.

Hideo Kojima says “I’m happy with the scores, thank you” as Death Stranding 2 settles at 90 on Metacritic, overcoming his fears that it might be too likable.