Forza Horizon 6 is at its best when nobody is racing

Here is a thing Forza Horizon 6 does, and no other racing game does. It builds a faithful, scaled recreation of the Daikoku parking area under the Shuto Expressway in Yokohama—the most famous unofficial car meet in the world, the place where for forty years Japanese tuners have been parking their builds and standing around in the sodium light at two in the morning—and then it does not put a single race there. You drive in. You park. You look at other people's cars. Other players show up. You can browse what they've built, copy a livery, save a tuning preset. Nobody competes. Nobody starts a timer. The game has built a system, with menus and netcode and persistence, entirely around the proposition that you might just want to stand near some cars.

This is the sixth Forza Horizon. Officially it is a racing game. Playground, Xbox and everyone else will tell you it is a racing game. The wristbands, the festival, the showcase events all behave like a racing game. But forty hours in, what I keep noticing is everything else. The system that lets you stand near cars. The fictional food delivery company in Tokyo that hires you to drive a kei truck through Shibuya at midnight. The aftermarket Subarus parked at the side of the road with a 'for sale' sign in the window. The day trips where an NPC reads you trivia about the Izu Skyline while you cruise it at sixty kmph. Playground Games has spent fourteen years pretending its biggest series is about going fast. Horizon 6 is the one where they finally let the mask slip.

A country drawn around a mountain

Japan was the setting Horizon fans had been asking for since the second game, which came out in 2014. The wait outlasted the Xbox One, the Series X launch, and most of the people who were running Playground when the request first started showing up in comment sections. The team spent years dropping references without committing—an Initial D livery in Horizon 4, a Daikoku poster in 5, the video game equivalent of a friend who keeps saying he's going to come visit and never books the flight. By the time it was officially announced, the expectation had calcified. Whatever they shipped was going to be measured against fourteen years of imagined versions.

What they shipped is shameless about its rearrangements. Hokkaido's flower fields sit south of Toyama's snow walls. Irabu Bridge, which lives in Okinawa several hundred kilometres south, has been airlifted northeast of Tokyo. None of this is geographically true and none of it pretends to be. The point is that you can drive from cherry blossoms to snow in twelve minutes. The point is that the coastal road up to Mt. Haruna runs through three biomes and four times of day if you let it. Mt. Fuji is the through-line, parked in the middle distance of nearly every drive, hazy or sharp depending on the weather. The whole map is clearly drawn around it.

What carries this is the verticality. Past Horizons were wide. This one is tall. You climb. You descend. The country looks different from each height, and the road down is never the road up. The mountain passes near Mt. Haruna are pulled from Initial D, hairpin for hairpin. The Akina Pass is in there. So is a section of the Shuto Expressway. So are kei trucks and S-Cargos and silver-painted taxis, the bottom shelf of Japanese motoring that most racing games would never bother including, and which Playground includes because somebody on the team clearly cares.

Tokyo is the exception. It sits at the base of the map as a full region, the most ambitious city the series has ever attempted, and visually the best one. Elevated expressways spiral over alleyways like badly tangled fairy lights. Neon catches on wet asphalt. The Shibuya Crossing is there. You can drift through it at three in the morning, and you will, because nobody is stopping you.

The Crossing has no pedestrians. The konbini are empty. Traffic is so thin you start to notice the cars that are there. Real Tokyo runs on its crowds, and Playground's Tokyo is permanently between shifts. A Tokyo with proper density couldn't let you do 240 kmph through Roppongi, so the design call makes sense. It also makes Tokyo the strangest part of the map. The city is better looked at than driven through. Cruise the Ito coastline at sunset and the skyline glitters across the bay, and the place does what cities do, which is sit there and be beautiful from a distance.

Cars get found, not bought

Past Horizons handed you a Lamborghini in the first hour. You were in an S-class supercar before you'd worked out which direction to turn the wheel. Six pulls back. You arrive in Japan as a nobody. You qualify in C-class events. You pick between a tired Toyota Celica, a Nissan Silvia, or a GMC Jimmy as your starter. The wristband system from the original Horizon, the one from 2012, is back, gating off faster classes behind seven tiers of progression. It is, by the standards of modern AAA design, almost rude.

It also works. By the time you actually roll into Daikoku in a tuned Skyline, the moment lands, because you climbed to it. The Skyline was not waiting in the garage on hour one. You went up the mountain and brought it down with you.

The smartest extension of this is the aftermarket car system. Tuned, modified rides sit parked around the map, often a kilometre or so from a race they'd be perfect for. You can test drive them. You can buy them at a discount with the work already in. The Subaru BRZ that tears through the A-class cross-country event you've been struggling with shows up two minutes before the A-class cross-country event you've been struggling with, parked at the roadside like a setup waiting for the punchline. Past games made you shop in menus. Six makes you find cars the way they actually get found in real life. A sign in the window. A guy nearby. A handshake. The whole system is essentially Playground saying, quietly, that the part of car culture they want to model isn't the podium. It's the parking lot.

I learned Tokyo from a kei truck

Raku Raku Express is a fictional food delivery outfit that hires you to drive across Tokyo in a kei truck. Specifically a kei truck. You cannot do these missions in a Ferrari, which I respect. The missions are short and odd and just gimmicky enough to keep being interesting. One needs you to hit a drift quota before you arrive, because the order has to be shaken. Another locks you to a minimum speed for the whole route. A third asks you to keep the RPM low, because the food is fragile and apparently has the ears of a music critic. None of this should work. Crazy Taxi did this in 1999. Almost everyone who has tried since has been forgettable.

It works because the Honda Acty works. The truck has a 656cc engine, the aerodynamics of a postbox, and a top speed roughly equivalent to a man on a kick scooter who has had a coffee. It handles unlike anything else in the game. Slow. Tippy. Gasping on hills. Everything else in the garage has more power and grip and speed, which is exactly why none of it is as fun. The Acty has personality. The Lamborghini has stats.

I caught myself one evening doing a delivery I didn't need to do, in a part of Tokyo I'd already mapped, because the streetlights were hitting the wet road in a way I wanted to keep looking at. I am not, generally, a person who is moved by streetlights. The Acty does this to you.

It slows the game down to a speed where you start noticing things—the way the rain pools in certain expressway dips, the way the eclipse lighting under the elevated sections actually behaves like eclipse lighting, the way the city sounds different in different districts. I have learned more about the geography of digital Tokyo from food deliveries than from any of the road races, because the road races ask you to ignore everything that isn't the racing line.

The festival is still there. The touge races down Mt. Haruna's switchbacks, two cars head to head at night, are the best new race format the series has added in years. The driving model sits between arcade and sim and leans arcade, deep enough that turning the assists off opens up real tuning depth for people who want it. None of this is the problem. It just isn't the part that stays.

Some things miss. The Estate, a build-your-own-playground feature, is half-cooked and likely to remain so until the community works out which tricks the engine doesn't catch. The Showcase event against a giant unlicensed mech is silly when the Shinkansen was right there in the source material, doing 300 kmph and looking spectacular. Legends Island, the endgame zone, is a side room with a few extra races and a lot of empty land. The character writing is still rough. The festival hosts will not stop talking. Most of this is forgivable. Some of it you can turn off in the menu.

The Ferrari, the Skyline, the Cosworth, the Warthog are all in the garage. They have been for days now. Horizon 6 is the Forza Horizon that finally noticed the cars you collect and the cars you drive aren't the same cars. The festival is still there. The driving is the part worth showing up for. I am in the Acty, taking the long way back to Daikoku.

Forza Horizon 6 is out now on Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Game Pass, starting at Rs 5,499.