Forza’s Horizon Festival Is Hell On Earth

When a game world doesn't make sense, you could simply dismiss it as being "just a game." Or, through the power of imagination, you could attempt to truly visualize it and then discuss at length how absolutely absurd it truly is. With that in mind, it's time I say it: Forza Horizon 6 and the previous entries in the series do not make sense, and the longer we think about it, the weirder it gets. If you're unfamiliar, each game in the Forza Horizon series is set at the Horizon Festival, a car show-meets-music-festival that spans a large portion of the country the festival is set in. There are racing events, all manner of records to break, and you're encouraged to explore every road on the map to find things like abandoned cars and collectibles, which you collect by driving through them. In many ways, it's kind of like the Olympics: Each festival is set in a different region, such as Australia, the United Kingdom, Mexico, or, most recently, Japan. Space is dedicated to these races; markers are put down, new dirt roads are made, and semi-permanent structures are erected to house the thousands of incoming cars. But while countries fight for the privilege of hosting the Olympics, who would ask to host the Horizon Festival?  When the Horizon Festival descends on a region, countless drivers appear and begin to wreak havoc on the city and countryside. These drivers are destroying forests, private property, and municipal infrastructure; they slam into civilian cars at hundreds of miles per hour. They take "abandoned" cars out of old barns. Maybe someone left that car there for a reason? Surely, there should be some consequences, right? But you won't find anything resembling law enforcement appearing, no matter what you do. That sounds impossible.  There's only one answer that makes this all make sense: billionaires. Oh yeah, it's all coming together. The Horizon Festival is orchestrated by billionaires for their own entertainment. They pick a peaceful-seeming place--the locations chosen for the festival are all premium vacation spots--they've decided they want to see destroyed. The region is blanketed in the emissions of some of the least fuel-efficient vehicles on the planet, and people are afraid to leave their houses. The best way to celebrate Japan's beauty? Tearing up its countryside with fuel-guzzling vehicles, apparently. As you explore the region, you can win points doing just about anything. You're encouraged not to just win races, but also to actively engage in destruction and dangerous activities. It calls to mind the government-sponsored Transcontinental Road Race in the film Death Race 2000, in which participating drivers are encouraged to win by any means necessary and to hit pedestrians for bonus points. In that film, the government covers up activity by a resistance group because the race is so popular with the general population, making sure everything is treated as fun and exciting for the viewership. The police in the region have been paid off, too, which is why they aren't showing up to crashes or putting up roadblocks to catch drivers. Sure, you can't hit civilians at the Forza Horizon Festival, but that doesn't stop you from causing plenty of destruction. As you race around the festival region, radio DJs report on your actions, telling everyone how great it is that you just set a new speed record on a public road, or won a race through the middle of a populated city. You might think it's simply a game acknowledging your accomplishments, but it's actually propaganda to make you sound like a hero not just to viewers and listeners, but to yourself. If you started to worry about the consequences of your actions, you wouldn't want to participate in this grisly affair. Billionaire sponsorship explains another aspect, too. Even if you end up somewhere like Southern Europe, the setting for Forza Horizon 2, there's no way to explain the sudden preponderance of expensive cars. You don't see the thousands of shipping containers full of hypercars and rally cars being shipped in, alongside the monopoly the event puts on all new and used cars in the region, but they're there, out of view.  These billionaires reward the dangerous actions drivers take with "credits" instead of any kind of real currency, and these credits are also assigned to the prices of the cars themselves. The billionaires sponsoring this have already purchased all of these cars, so you can't buy them with real money. You have to engage in the events the festival sponsors want you to to advance, and it's almost inevitable that even the cleanest driver will create some damage. A race car tears past a vacated residential area. Its citizens are clearly to scared to leave their homes. As you race, though, you'll see people cheering you on and cars on the roads.The standard, inexpensive cars on the road are civilians just trying to live their lives while the "drivers" zoom around them. They stay inside when they can, but the festival