While feature-level and media-specific frameworks are used throughout game scholarship, genre-focused analysis remains underutilized. This absence stems from a misunderstanding of genres as lists of deployed features. Rather genres shape and are shaped by audience expectations and reinforced through interactions within a discourse community. Understood in this way, genre-focused analysis is a socio-cultural-technologically mediated contextual framework that anchors context-driven analysis of interactive digital narratives and other forms of interactive storytelling. This study demonstrates genre-focused analysis by elevating feature-level analyses of Horizon Zero Dawn. While existing scholarship identifies a thematic incoherence in Horizon Zero Dawn, this study argues that these issues are a result of tension between the ecocritical and open-world genres within a particular moment in time. The work demonstrates genre-focused analysis’ necessity, implementation, and value in game studies and IDN scholarship.