I decided to check out the first Forza Horizon, after finding the 5th game more fun than I expected to while checking it out on Game Pass in the category of "games I wouldn't really play otherwise", just to see the roots of the series. It's the second unlisted car-focused 360 game that's backwards compatible on Xbone and up that I've gotten (the first is Driver: San Francisco), but fortunately sourcing a physical copy wasn't really expensive at all. Long story short it feels pretty 2012 given the rampant dubstep and the white middle-aged stubbled male player character that can't be customized yet, plus the creeping in of microtransactions that no longer work because the servers went offline.
At least I'm having a decent time so far, even though it's more open-road than really open-world like later games, so I can't just near-constantly cut straight lines to destinations with no regard for culture or nature like I was in 5, essentially doing everything nobody should do when driving anywhere and making me wonder just how much this Horizon corporation is paying off everyone to not give a damn. The festival even has a smaller feel to it in this game so it's like seeing where things took off before snowballing into a thing that started taking increasing amounts of cities and landscape hostage for who knows how long. Also most events and activities are some kind of typical race, but at least they already had the barn find thing in this one, which due to the general adherence to having some kind of wall around most roads involves more finding the secret roads not on the map to get to wherever the car is. Interesting to see where the subseries started at least.