In Horizon Forbidden West, crouching is an essential mechanic that you need to learn very early on. Without knowing how to crouch in Horizon Forbidden West, you will struggle tremendously.
Unlike in other titles where crouching makes you smaller and more difficult to hit, in this title, the crouching mechanic is of crucial importance for your overall success in combat, completion of quests, and more.
When we played this game for the first time, eliminating enemies was a challenge, to say the least. And once we figured out the importance of crouching, that changed everything for us. We could finally explore the map of Horizon Forbidden West with ease.
But, before we show you how to crouch, let’s first go over the importance of crouching in Horizon Forbidden West and where it comes in very handy.
Why You Need to Crouch
Even before you head into the Forbidden West, you’ll face a lot of situations where you need to crouch in order to keep yourself in the shadows. Else, the machines and other enemies will spot you, which will force you into fierce and challenging combat.
When you enter a battle against an enemy, they are significantly tougher to beat than if you were crouching, approached them stealthily, and hit them with a single (in most cases) silent strike. The silent strike takes most of the smaller mobs out with a single hit and comes in super handy when there are a lot of them that you need to take out.
The great thing about crouching, playing stealthily, and taking out mobs with the silent strike is that nearby mobs don’t get alerted unless they are right next to the mob you’re planning on eliminating.
That way, rather than having to fight off 3, 4, or 5 mobs at once, you can take them out one by one without risking getting yourself eliminated and set back to your last autosave.
In other cases, if your plan is to just sneak past mobs and go about your day, crouching generally does the job extremely well. You can’t just sneak past while standing up or running as you will be spotted and forced into combat.
Sometimes, you will also have to go out hunting for meat and other ingredients. Unless you want to chase around wild animals and risk attracting unnecessary attention, crouching and slowly approaching them will give you the opportunity to eliminate them with ease.
How to Crouch in Horizon Forbidden West
Crouching in Horizon Forbidden West is as simple as clicking a button. In my instance, as I play the game on PlayStation 4 with a controller, it is the square button. This is set by default so unless you’ve played with the different control settings, it will be the square button for you too.
Now, if you play on a console with a mouse and keyboard, then the crouch mechanic will most likely be triggered by pressing the CTRL button as that would be the default. You can, however, change the setting to whatever you like.
The developers of Horizon Forbidden West have done a great job by allowing players to customize the control settings to their liking. In other words, you can set your crouch to be triggered when pressing the RS, LS, or even R1 if you wanted to save the rest of the buttons for more crucial in-game mechanics.
