It Took Five Years For Forza Horizon 5 To Become My Antidote To Doomscrolling

2012’s Forza Horizon is one of my lifetime favorites. Earlier games like Grand Theft Auto 3 had shown me how much I could enjoy the simple experience of driving around a game’s world with a great song on the radio, but Horizon took it to the next level with its gorgeous Colorado setting, its impeccable driving model, and the relentless stream of exceptional pop tunes on Horizon Pulse, the game’s best radio station. 

And yet, despite loving the original, I’ve been largely uninterested in its many sequels. Whenever a new one has landed, I’ve spent a bit of time with it and then walked away, feeling like each one was a solid game but also just more Horizon, and that wasn’t enough to pull me back. Forza Horizon 5 came the closest, with its inviting slice of Mexico just calling out to be explored, but even then, cruising around an open world didn’t feel like an experience I needed to return to in 2021. 

And so the series has languished on my backlog, with me thinking that maybe someday I might find a reason to truly dive back in and rediscover the spark that made me fall in love with the original. At last, that time has come: I’m playing and enjoying Forza Horizon 5 every day, and the experience has taught me to think about my backlog in a different way. Rather than viewing it as a list of games that I really want to push myself to play and complete as soon as the opportunity arises, I’m coming to accept the idea that with some games, you just have to be in the right mindset. Maybe a game’s time will come and maybe it won’t, but you shouldn’t try to force it. 

Right now, my life feels like a game that mostly takes place in corridors. I get up in the morning, I walk down the same familiar streets to the same train line that takes the same route into the city each day, and at night, I make the same trip back home. Of course I’m aware that there’s a whole world beyond the confines of the narrow pathway I follow day in and day out, but the routine of my days remains pretty rigid. The constant barrage of political horrors and acts of evil, alongside the global embarrassments that come from having a raving lunatic as your president, only exacerbate the feeling that I need to escape, hit the open road without destination or obligation and focus more on the gorgeous scenery around me than I do on whatever nightmares are unfolding in the news and on my social media feeds. 

When you’re playing an Xbox game on a PlayStation console, only one customized license plate will do.

I bought Forza Horizon 5 on PlayStation 5 as part of the recent winter sale, not long after the news had broken that we’d attacked Venezuela. I’ve stress-eaten pints of ice cream before but this was, I think, my first time ever stress-buying a video game. I just wanted to be someplace else. Not fighting my way through the hostile world of some combat-heavy video game but someplace gorgeous and welcoming, where I was free to go anywhere and the scenery was full of rejuvenating natural beauty. And that’s exactly what Forza Horizon 5 is giving me. 

It’s probably not going to become lodged into my consciousness the way the first game did, both because the experience felt fresh and new back in 2012 and because the original’s Horizon Pulse is still undefeated, its shimmery pop bangers becoming fused with my sense memory of cruising around Colorado. There’s some decent tunes in Horizon 5 but nothing that’s making the pilgrimage over to my own personal playlists the way so many songs from the original did. 

And yet, don’t get me wrong, I’m having a great time with Horizon 5. The racing in it is excellent, of course, but I actually bought a fairly ordinary car, a Nissan Skyline, so I could do my favorite thing: just drive around at a reasonable speed and take in the scenery. Sometimes when I’m on the subway on my way home from work, I close my eyes and see the game’s world, with those vast, breathtaking skies, already calling to me. And yes, of course getting home and diving into Forza Horizon 5 is just me replacing one screen with another. I know that. But the screen that lets me escape into that gorgeous Mexican landscape isn’t going to fry my brain with a litany of all the latest horrors. It’s going to let me forget all that for a little while, savor the pleasure of hitting the open road, and remember why I think this world is worth fighting for. 

It’s also helping me make peace with my backlog. For years, games like Returnal and the Demon’s Souls remake have sat there, waiting patiently for my attention, and yet tackling them has just never felt right. I have little doubt that if and when I do play them, I’ll find a great deal to admire and I may even fall in love with them and wonder what took me so long, but I’ve just never yet felt them calling to me. Sometimes I’ve felt bad for not forcing myself to play them, telling myself that maybe if I just push myself over the initial hump of my indifference, everything would click and I’d be glad that I dove in. 

Maybe I would, but now I feel like maybe it’s okay to let go of that pressure, and to tell myself that if there comes a time in my life when Returnal is the game I need to play, the right game for where my mind and my heart are at in that moment, I’ll know it. For now, I have to go drive a car into a sandstorm.