Disclaimer
The copy of the game used for this review was provided by the publisher at no cost to the reviewer.
Introduction
Ever since the release and my review of Forza Horizon 5 in 2021, (hereafter referred to as FH5), the potential for a fully accessible Forza title has been strong. Merely a couple of years later, we saw Forza Motorsport (2023) which I also reviewed make massive waves with its track-based approach, to deserved acclaim. As great as that was and as much enjoyment as I got out of it with friends in a casual setup, there were still flaws in that system and it wasn’t the kind of game that everyone would necessarily be interested in either. After all, the Motorsport series has always been known for its track racing and simulated racing focuses, but it was amazing to be able to enjoy the same game as some of my friends were playing at the time.
Now, with the latest instalment in the Forza Horizon side of the series taking us to Japan, the obvious question remains, even after some accessibility info was revealed at showcases: just how accessible is this latest outing without sight? Let’s find out!
First Boot
After a non-narrated message that driving depicted in game might be dangerous in the real world, as well as logos (that do not have audio description), we are greeted with an accessible title screen (shown in the above screenshot), in that narration kicks in immediately, alongside an optimistic-sounding menu theme in a synthwave-adjacent style, giving us the ability to go to the accessibility settings by pressing X.
This bodes well as it seems like things have carried over from FH5 as expected, though unfortunately there are a couple of immediate issues that are apparent when working with speech.
not only is the narration slow at the default speed (it does not seem to respect system preferences even with the system default option selected), but it also adds things like the control type in, which not everyone needs or wants to utilise.
This means that instead of hearing “settings, 5 of 5”, you’d instead hear “option highlighted, settings, option 5 of 5, control type button”. This is true for every option and every time you move in a menu, not just in, say, the pause menus that you encounter later in the game.
Thankfully, you can go and configure elements of the screen reader to your liking including the voice and speed, thus somewhat mitigating the frustrations of slower speech rates, though it does not solve the control type and option announcement issues above, which plagued me throughout my review period. A feature to turn off the narration of the control type was present in Forza Motorsport (2023), beginning an unfortunate theme of elements that could’ve theoretically been carried across to improve the experience for gamers without sight that are sadly absent from this shiny new open world festival.
Having set what I could, though noticing the inability to turn down the music at this stage from what I saw, I hit menu to save my options.
Hitting save didn’t actually continue me onwards, instead I had to hit back. Doing so took me into the main settings screen, which was useful but also a little overwhelming as there were so many tabs with innumerable options. At least that’s the way it felt at the time, when I just wanted to get playing.
Moving through the various other sets of options, I didn’t spot steering assist settings, though ANNA (the satnav-style navigation system from FH5) was referenced. How long it would be before I got a chance to see if the feature has improved was unknown at this stage of the process, but I was pleased at the inclusion to say the least.
What I’ll also take the time to say here is that, even though the majority of options like colour-blind filters and the “major new accessibility feature” (the intricately customisable high contrast mode) aren’t useful to me personally, I’m glad to see the series not only carrying over features from previous Horizon games, but also adding new elements in to allow more people to play. Accessibility is a journey and for various reasons it can progress at different speeds due to a variety of factors. Any progress is good progress and, even if this game didn’t turn out to be accessible during my time with it, I was interested to see what might be achievable over previous iterations.
It is only once I hit start game that I directly saw mention of the steering and braking assists that I knew I might need, which were supposedly available under a difficulty option that had blended into all the control type announcements I was frustrated by.
Going and finding these, which was easy considering difficulty was the top option when I re-entered the main settings screen, I selected assisted steering and braking myself, but the yes/no prompt that followed didn’t read properly, omitting the “do you wish to proceed” part of the message. A bad omen of things to come, perhaps?
selecting yes finally loaded me into the game itself, though I did have to customise the steering to be set to auto-steering to make sure I didn’t have to worry too much about hitting objects that sighted players would avoid.
The Game Itself
With an “A button skip” prompt being narrated, I realised I was in a cutscene, without the context of audio description allowing me to enjoy it. The only reason we know who’s talking is when a second character introduces them by name, after the first person has talked for a good 30 seconds or so. The subtitles being the only way that you’d be able to identify characters without careful attention to conversations, which is unfortunately all too common given the underutilisation of audio description in gaming at this point in time, is frustrating. Exemplifying this, as I went through one of the sections of the tutorial, I got a voiceover that was entirely in Japanese. Given I didn’t have OCR up at the time, I was unable to know what was being said, highlighting an accessibility barrier that is not present when audio description is used effectively.
It’s unclear when you enter gameplay exactly, only heralded by the screen reader saying “dpad down anna”. Other announcements do not have their prompts read properly, instead saying “press to accelerate” or “press to switch camera”. Quite frankly, this is frustrating as I’d have hoped that in the several years since Forza Horizon 5 had released these elements might’ve been tightened up.
With auto steering enabled, this once again becomes a process of just holding down the accelerator until you either get where you’re going or crash, both of which are possible.
Anna (mentioned earlier), is available from the start and she can even enable auto drive (via down then left on the Dpad to activate her and trigger the feature), though I only realised this later as I went through and tried to document the issues I was seeing for the sake of this review and check for consistency where I could.
This auto drive feature provides even less agency for gamers without sight, though admittedly it does work in races and some other events, as well as cut down on potential crashes (if that’s something you’re looking to achieve). That doesn’t mean it works all the time, or that it won’t need to reset the car position every once in a while, but we’ll come on to that.
My issue with this whole system though is that, as much as it is indeed useful for certain scenarios, it is nowhere near as freeing as something like Forza Motorsport’s audio cues would’ve been. At least then I would’ve had the sense of speed and independence that the horizon games attempt to give players.
By all means have auto drive available, but as a gamer without sight, I’d love to see more done for Horizon to allow me to race on my own terms in these more relaxed, deliberately unrealistic settings.
Character Select
After racing through the intro, without having pressed a single button after enabling auto-drive), I was prompted to “select a character”. However, this screen only presents you with a large number of buttons that are simply represented by the word button and a number, rather than giving you any actual information about the character you’ve chosen. This means that you have no idea of what you’re picking and you would essentially get the same experience by hitting a random selection option.
Picking one of these numerically-labelled controls and continuing onwards, the body type, skin tone and hair all suffered with lacking meaningful naming. On the other hand, hair colour, prosthetics, amplifications and identity read actually helpful information with the narration implementation, which was a strange experience in terms of consistency.
At least I knew that I could change these elements later, but having the primary elements (i.e. the starting character and the various attributes that currently don’t read) described as well would massively help, much like the racing suits were described in the Motorsport customisation menus. Having native versions of what is essentially alternative text for elements like this would allow people to be more fully immersed in the experience, instead of having to use AI to attempt to describe images (which can certainly get things wrong at times)
Selecting a name and nickname thankfully read completely fine, which leads me to question why the other sections of character creation weren’t implemented with the same degree of attention. But with a nickname chosen from an absolutely huge list of potential options, I could finally progress.
Post-creation
After creating a character, we get a very cool and dramatic-sounding cutscene with appropriately Japanese music that mentions a journal and photographic evidence, as well as street racing, none of which is audio described sadly.
With that cutscene finished, we get to choose a car, though strangely, none of the car selections are announced. hitting confirm on any of the cars does give you voice information about them to an extent, but this is not ideal and shouldn’t be the way that players have to choose their first vehicle, especially in a game where there are so many and apparently you get to drive the ones you don’t select later anyway.
As a fun side note, the get in the car prompt is not voiced correctly, saying “press to get in the car”, further highlighting strange issues and hiccups in the narration system.
Once I’d chosen my vehicle, pressing A got me into my first car and allowed me to edit the numberplate.
Sadly, this was a terrible experience, as the game uses its own keyboard interface rather than either the Xbox system keyboard or allowing you to manually enter text on PC. In practice, nothing is structured as you would expect and every single option is prefaced by the words “option highlighted” of course, making it not only difficult for you to find what you want, but a slow process to do so.
Interestingly, once I’d accepted the default numberplate which can be restored to at any time, admittedly out of frustration, you’re tasked with driving to a destination. The cool thing to note here is that auto drive is still enabled if you’d turned it on before, almost making this a game that essentially plays itself, much like an interactive movie.
Once I’d completed a race, I was tasked with using a free-cursor map, which you might’ve been expecting based on experiences found in the previous game in the series. Thankfully I seemed to be able to just press A once I was asked “what do you want to do first?”, though that wasn’t ideal as I had no idea what I’d picked to begin with.
Enabling auto drive did take me to the PR Stunt that I’d apparently selected, though I’d have loved to be able to follow a route through the lovingly crafted open world just like sighted players are able to do.
Speaking of routes, an interesting element that’s now present in the narration is route progress, noticeable during races. You’ll hear how far you are through in increments of 25%, depending on how you’ve set it up at least. Whilst it is good that I can get an idea of how far I am through an experience, that’s not the same as being able to traverse it on my own terms.
It turned out that the auto-drive, as expected, is not perfect. It not only managed to crash and prompted me for a rewind, as well as missing a checkpoint during the latter parts of my reviewing process, but also didn’t appear to announce when I was at my destination, instead just saying that I need to set a route (which I’d already done for auto drive to begin.). Strangely enough this last issue seemed to fix itself later, with the narration detailing interactible elements, when we were slow enough to activate their associated prompts, though it wasn’t an optimal experience as these prompts sometimes didn’t trigger narration.
Unfortunately, here is where I first felt like I’d got stuck. As much as I wanted to use auto-drive to get me to and from events and that should’ve, in theory at least, worked like a charm, the fact was that without being able to filter my potential events in a list (which actually does exist in the journal), using that to find their direct locations on the map so I could only progress the main story for example, I was forced to rely on ANNA’s help. Using the What’s Next feature, whilst it was partly useful, would only take me to nearby events, without respecting any filters I’d put in place. What this means in practice is that even if I had completed events before, they would show up in the What’s Next pool, thereby hampering my attempts to find those I needed to complete in order to carry on my journey.
When prompted to navigate to an event at one point, I wasn’t aware of where the game had placed me, given only the UI is announced and not the event information that is sometimes readable with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). I realised, on reflection, that the game likely put me on the destination I needed to get to, but without the name and information for the event being announced, I would not have necessarily known this, as even with OCR this information isn’t always easy to find. I did discover another related element though that might be helpful when combined with the aforementioned auto-drive.
ANNA’s What’s Next feature
Anna (the Automated Natural navigation Assistant), it turns out, does have a what’s next feature similar to what was seen with the “I need acolades” and similar prompts you can provide in the previous games. Whilst when I looked it was apparently locked, when I fast travelled back to my home and chose to drive, upon loading in to my car I had ANNA’s tutorial for this aspect appear.
When I pressed down on the DPad to activate Anna and then pressed right to select what’s next as prompted, it actually unlocked the feature for me and suggested a qualifying event, which I could then auto-drive to. It was not an ideal way to have the feature make itself known, of course, but I was finally on my way to beginning my Horizon Festival journey, using the what’s next feature to select my very first event and letting the game take over. I just had to hope that my good luck would continue.
Aesthetics and atmosphere
Moving away from the frustrations of lacking accessibility for now, let’s talk about the atmosphere.
When I heard that Japan would be the focus of this festival iteration, I was curious to see what inspiration it might take from its intended destination, given the various aspects of car culture that have drifted (pun intended) outwards from the country of origin.
The soundtrack is eclectic and relatively diverse, ranging from classical to various electronic genres to rock, but that’s only in the default mode. Once you switch to streamer mode, you are left with what can only be described as a much trimmed down playlist, without the true diversity of the full radio selection (whose stations, incidentally, aren’t read either by the narration). Thankfully I was able to put YouTube or other content on in the background whilst turning the radio off, but I understand that might not be an option for some and is far from the intended experience given how much interesting music there is to discover in the first place.
Visually, though Japan may stand out and be wonderful to look at, from an audio perspective, the game sounds very much like any other title in the Horizon series, with the names, voice acting and references to iconic locations being mostly what give any indication of a setting change, not to mention the default mode’s selection of Japanese music tracks as well.
That being said, the sound design is of high quality at least to my ear, though I’m sure the community will comment on the inaccuracy of the engine sounds and their implementation as seems to happen with every Forza release in some capacity. Running this on a surround sound rig, as I had the opportunity to do, you don’t get much of a sense of the relaxed atmosphere you’re driving through, but you will hear and sometimes feel the snow, the bamboo or the speed of other vehicles zooming by which does lend you a sense of not being on a track.
Speaking of vehicles, let’s tackle something that might be of interest if you’ve seen previous accessibility information for this game prior to its release.
Proximity Radar
Proximity radar (found under HUD and Gameplay) is an interestingly named feature. To my mind when I first heard of its existence, I thought it would be something you’d only use in races and that would likely have no accessibility for gamers without sight. Imagine my surprise then, when I saw proximity radar audio cues be an option in one of the menus.
What Is Proximity Radar?
Essentially, this feature allows you to hear when cars are in proximity, hence the name. In this instance, given my experiences, I’d describe it as being activated when surrounding drivers are very close to you, though vehicles can enter and leave your radar whilst you’re at high speed as well, with an associated cue indicating they’ve entered and left the field that this feature tracks.
As much as I didn’t think I’d have any use for this, it’s an interesting distraction whilst having auto drive on, as well as giving me a sense of when annoying cars are blocking my way or behind me in races, jockeying for position (especially when combined with race position narration which you can turn on in settings). The feature can be utilised not just in races but in general as well, meaning that even whilst casually cruising between routes I have a sense of how quickly other vehicles are passing me and their relative position in that radius around me, something that makes the game stand out from its previous entry, even if it’s not much of a change or could be seen as obnoxious at times.
Estates and Build Mode
Forza Horizon, whilst being known for its open world nature, is also known for letting you own houses. In this game, however, houses aren’t just places to fast travel to and from, they are now also destinations you can customise to your heart’s content. At least that is the case if you are sighted.
When you first enter the estate after autodriving there, of course, you are asked to help “clear the road” by Mei, with help from Jordan, another companion character. However, the interface for doing so does not provide any narrated feedback of what you’re highlighting and is, more importantly, seemingly free-cursor, meaning that even if you had narration prompts, you’d have to deal with the frustrations of getting lost and having no idea where you are.
Those who have been around here for a while might already see the pitfalls of the current scenario. Instead of having some kind of option to skip this section entirely or navigate using the DPad to find the next nearest interactible object and give you a prompt as to what it is and possible actions (the latter of which would be the most useful of the two), even if you try to leave the estate builder you are told that you must clear the road to proceed.
Even looking through the game’s main options, I could not seem to find anything about nodes. That’s for one very specific reason: The options for this mode are only accessible from within the builder system itself. This situation gives off the impression that you will be unable to play the game at all unless you clear this debris, depending on how you interpret the wording.
Thankfully, I was able to quit out of the game and resume at a different location, but given the map is also, realistically speaking integral and can’t be navigated easily without sighted assistance, I feared that I may never be able to progress with that side of the game at all which could limit my ability to complete other parts of the campaign as well; I wasn’t sure how far the free cursor frustrations would extend and how much assistance I would need.
I received assistance to look at the road clearing “minigame” directly, revealing that even with a mention of node options existing, I was unable to get past this section (and earn an attached achievement) without help to manipulate the free cursor. The camera mode setting shown in the above screenshot only has an orbit camera as the alternative, which would also be of no assistance in directly working with this setup.
Moreover, elements on screen that appear after you’ve cleared the debris don’t read either, meaning that if you could get past it without assistance you’d still have to contend with OCR, making for an overall unpleasant and disappointing experience.
Buying Other Houses
As with other Horizon games, there’s not just a single additional house that you can get access to. Frustratingly (given I can’t find those on the map myself), I discovered later with assistance for ease that each one also provides various perks to the player once purchased, as well as being the starting point when you load back into the game should you wish. I did accidentally stumble upon one during my time with the game and, fearing the worst, I prepared to quit out to avoid the building mechanics that I hoped would not reappear and disrupt my experience.
However, I was shocked and pleasantly surprised to see that all I was asked was if I wanted to buy the house and whether I wanted to make it my new home, which I did. This allowed me to continue and I’d love to see this adopted instead of having to perform building-related tasks unless I actively want to do so.
An Almost Accessible Skill Tree
Amongst the many other aspects tied to this arcade-oriented approach to racing, Forza Horizon is partly known for its skill system, which awards you for certain types of activity (e.g. drifting, passing other cars etc). I hadn’t seen a mention of this system until several hours into the game, but all of a sudden whilst trying to gain access to an event that required me to enter a grid slot (something which I only got to work once or twice, more by luck than judgement), I got a popup saying I’d earned a skill point.
Thanks to menu narration, I realised on the next screen that I actually had 2 available to me, so how I hadn’t seen this tutorial before now was a mystery.
It turned out that though all the skills and their costs seemed to read without issue, the main problem I faced was realising that you had to unlock adjacent perks, which featured skills that I didn’t have any real way to use. Specifically, though the first one gave me bonus XP for owning the car (which was fine), the second only awards drifting skills, something that I couldn’t effectively work with using the game’s current systems, as auto drive and drift are, in a word, incompatible.
Speaking of drifting…
Stories And Drift Club
Forza Horizon 6 features stories, small side missions that you can go on to learn about characters and meet new ones, as well as get a sense of how the world links together. In one of these small side missions, I was tasked with drifting and earning a certain amount of skill score. Though I couldn’t do this with auto drive, I did realise that I could attempt to drive with auto-steering enabled and apply breaks on the turns. Not exactly accurate to how you should drift in these games, but a way that might just work, if I was lucky that is.
Though it took longer than it might do for a sighted player and I did enable guaranteed story progression (just in case I didn’t meet the required threshold), I did manage to get through this mission, proving that even when auto drive is not available, you might be fortunate enough that the assist settings can get you through anyway.
That wasn’t the end of my encounters with drifting as a mechanic though, as I saw drift zones appear on the map. These are not auto drive compatible either from what I could tell, meaning that I’d have to just be lucky enough to not accidentally escape and also guess where to turn, amking for another element where lacking information makes for a less than optimal time in Japan’s racing experience.
Further woes and observations
I realised as I navigated the open world in whatever way felt comfortable, whether that was holding down the accelerator and releasing when ANNA advised me to turn left or right, or even just leaving the game to casually play itself, that auto drive wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, even with events. Though there are some parts of events that auto-drive doesn’t work with, including during stories, the game will inform you if the functionality might not work for parts of these.
whilst it’s frustrating, at least the game does tell you rather than, for instance, just making you think it’ll work without warning you at all, though it would of course be much better if features would let me get through without auto drive coming into the equation in the first place.
I also learnt, during the early hours of my event-finding exploration, that auto drive wasn’t fast enough to let me get 3 stars and neither was the auto steering functionality, at least for the specific scenarios that I had managed to get myself into. This is where the “blind driving assists” featured in Forza Motorsport 2023 would’ve come in handy, as I could’ve learnt the route and driven it myself with practice being the name of the game. This lack of auditory navigation is unfortunate as, if there are achievements tied to getting a certain number of stars, these might not be completable without assistance.
Tying into the various issues I found with narration during this review, sometimes the route setting functionality says “route set to next destination”, whilst at other times it states the name of the event you’re travelling to. Consistency is key here and having the name spoken would be far more useful. At least then you know exactly where you should end up, or whether you need to reselect an event to change the type of activity you’re doing, for instance.
Even if you can get to an event, that doesn’t mean that it’ll be available to you directly (though most often are with a simple X prompt). I attempted to get to one which I couldn’t seem to activate at all, seeing information about something resetting in a matter of days via OCR (which was confusing and also unnarrated, compounding the problem). Whether the two elements (i.e. the lack of event prompt and the reset information) were related, I couldn’t tell.
When enlisting sighted assistance to see if I could figure out what was happening, it turned out that auto-drive took me to a destination which wasn’t where the actual event start was supposed to be. Sighted assistance led me to the actual kick-off point for the race and I was able to complete it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t the only event where this is occurring due to a misplaced auto-drive destination marker.
Much like with issues I experienced with previous Horizon entries, it turns out that interact prompts aren’t always voiced, even if they are present. Similarly, there are also informational popups or dialogues that do not always read, sometimes just appearing as “ok button” with no actual text being narrated. These include car selection and customisation prompts, or rewards and prises (which don’t say what you’ve earned either during wheelspins), as well as the aforementioned estate builder system.
Implicitly speaking of the robustness of systems, narration did stop working entirely once during my review writing process, meaning I had to fully quit the game and restart it to get back to what I was doing. I discovered this was seemingly because Narration stops if you pause whilst dialogue is playing,, a massive oversight as you can’t then easily navigate menus if you’ve paused during a dialogue sequence by accident or deliberately, for example to restart an event with auto-drive enabled.
An Unaided Legend?
Now we come to the biggest question of all for some people: Could I obtain my gold wristband and thus the legendary status that comes with it in-game?
For those that may remember, the main barrier with Forza Horizon 5 was the map, as it is also technically with this game, in terms of optimal navigation and finding the next actual event you want to run and need to complete in order to progress with the Horizon Festival side of things.
As you may have figured out by now, FH6 is no exception, even with the what’s next feature combined with auto-drive helping you get to and from events.
In order to enter the hall of fame in the Mexican-set fifth main-line title, I had to get sighted assistance, live on stream, to help me manually set a route and drive to it. Whilst this worked, it was a real let down, as you might understand.
Whilst I and others had hoped that this latest entry would be different, it saddens me to say that even utilising ANNA’s help and varying degress of sighted assistance (something that very few would have access to and should never have to be enlisted ideally), after many hours and a massive amount of auto-driving, though I entered the horizon festival, I was unable to complete all of the required showcases to receive my gold wristband and the trophy for becoming a festival legend before this review was released, in part due to lacking accessibility elements for gamers without sight.
I hope that this could improve as time goes on, though given improvements have seemingly not been made to the map system and other aspects between games to make things less overwhelming and more accessible for those in other situations either, I very much doubt we’ll see the changes that need to occur in this game. Here’s hoping that future entries can learn from the pain points here and resolve those to allow an even greater audience to enjoy racing’s biggest virtual festival.
Summary
Pros
- Lifts accessible elements, including accessible onboarding flow, from Forza Horizon 5
- Anna and auto-drive are available right from the beginning if needed, only needing to be enabled once when you begin the game, even if you’ve not seen a tutorial
- Proximity radar has audio cues as well as its visual component
- Accessibility has been improved overall, which is a positive for the series in general even if gamers without sight can’t benefit directly
Cons
- Free cursor map is required for guaranteed progression
- No truly agency-driven features for driving, only autosteering and auto-drive
- Narration implementation still has holes, including some left over from FH5
Conclusions
Forza horizon 6 had the opportunity to elevate its side of the franchise to new heights, through learning from its bigger brother Forza Motorsport. However, it does not seem to have done that, merely placing a Japan aesthetic over the existing Forza Horizon formula. Whilst this might be fine for those who can utilise any usable vision they have to navigate and enjoy the scenery as well as play the game, particularly given the new high contrast mode and other accessibility improvements might make that an easier experience, as a gamer without sight, this entry is not something that I could recommend with confidence if you want agency and a fun and enjoyable experience.
If any game were to have cross-collaboration between studios and related teams inside Xbox improve its accessibility and bring it to gamers without sight, I would have hoped it would be Forza Horizon 6. Sadly, this title stands as a testament to a relative lack of change in a franchise that is enjoyed by so many, but unintentionally excludes when technology and innovations have already appeared courtesy of other teams and, studios and consultants years before.