Forza Horizon 5 drops the Horizon Festival into a fictionalised Mexico, on a map 50% larger than Forza Horizon 4's. Creative director Mike Brown calls Mexico almost the whole world in one country: snowy peaks, tropical jungles, epic canyons, beautiful beaches, ancient architecture and modern cities.
This route visits seven real places the game recreates, from a sea arch at the tip of Baja to a canyon with a train, and says what the game does at each. The map is a condensed Mexico, so the pins mark the real sites, not their positions in the game.
In 1986 the teenage martial artist Ryo Hazuki comes home to the family dojo in Yokosuka and watches his father, Iwao, die at the hands of Lan Di. Swearing revenge, Ryo follows the killer to Hong Kong in 1987 and on to the mountains of Guilin, and the two games turn that trail into one long walk through a living town, a harbor, a crowded Hong Kong district and a walled city.
The route follows Shenmue and Shenmue II in seven stops. Dobuita Street and Kowloon Walled City are real places the game draws on, the dojo and Bailu Village are invented, and every stop says how closely its pin matches the game.
Forza Horizon 4, released on 2 October 2018, turns Great Britain into one giant racetrack: an open world with condensed representations of Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and the Cotswolds, where seasons change every week and Derwentwater freezes hard enough to drive across. Microsoft counted 24 million players by November 2020, and Polygon found the game world a theme-park version of England where everything has "the faint whiff of an idealised 1950s about it, a place of ordered pub gardens and rosebushes".
This route drives the real Britain behind the game, north to south: Edinburgh's Old Town, Bamburgh Castle on its coastal crag, three Lake District stops at Derwentwater, Ambleside and Tarn Hows, and the honey-coloured village of Broadway in the Cotswolds. Every stop can be visited today.
