I still think Horizon is worth playing. I really enjoyed the story and mechanics of it. but, i left large swaths of the world unexplored. I played it as a very linear action game, and it was fun like that.

To your point about this being a “map” game, when i was looking for those end game hard to find shrines in BoTW, opening the map and zooming into named locations really helped. “Oh, i don’t see a visited shrine in this named valley, I should probably check that place out, not sure I’ve been there”.