Silly Season

Playground Games Plays The Long Game In Forza Horizon 4.

- Phil Savage

It’s autumn. The fields and fells are a rolling sea of reds, browns, and yellows. Light rain falls on the screen, and small puddles shimmer in the sunset as I drive across windswept grasslands, skid straight into a stone wall, and drift across picturesque farmland, catching a hill at just the right angle to lift my car off the ground— raising my skill chain combo multiplier a little bit more. It’s beautiful and it’s absurd, and, next week, it will all be different.

Forza Horizon 4 is built around seasons. In its opening moments you drive a McLaren Senna across autumnal country roads, race a Polaris RZR across a frozen winter lake, skid through mud in a Ford Fiesta in spring, before hopping back into the Senna for a road trip on a clear summer’s day. It’s a montage for the series’ trademark aspirational playground, here tailored to maximize the differences between its seasonal shifts.

It’s an emotive tour through what’s to come. Once you reach the festival site, you play through each season individually across a five-hour prologue that introduces Forza Horizon 4’s many different events. Had this been the game proper, it would have been enough. You complete events to build influence, hitting milestones to progress to the next season in a manner similar to unlocking new festival sites in Forza Horizon 3. But after you’ve completed a full loop—summer to spring—the game reveals its final form.