im finding it really difficult to not level up dramatically in horizon
... there's just an absurd amount of side content. i'm already level 35 or whatever but still am fairly early in the story. reached meridian and did maybe one main quest since then. the recommended level for the main quests right now is like 15-18 iirc, and i'm already lapping that. with that being said, leveling only gives you 10 HP or so (in addition to skill point) so it doesnt really make the game that much easier. and the HP does next to nothing when a single attack from a heavy machine still rips off 80% of my health
but at the same time i still have a bunch of side quests/errands that have recommended levels of 10-15.
last thing i did was getting all the blazing suns at all hunting trials, so i unlocked some pretty sweet weaponry. i still have 1 cauldron to go after for the override ability. the third one i did was pretty lame, though. the cauldron was entirely empty and the only thing i had to do was fight one thunderjaw. not that taking down a thunderjaw is necessarily easy, but i had already seen a couple in the wild and hunting trials. the other cauldrons had puzzles and a bunch of enemies within.
i still think this game is great though... if comparing to other open world action games, imo the gameplay is more fun than red dead 2 (though red deads story felt novel-level tbh)