JDM: Rise Of The Scorpion offers a free prologue of drift racing around rural Japan

JDM: Rise Of The Scorpion is a free prologue for JDM: Japanese Drift Master, a racing game about - who could guess - drift racing in Japan. It's got an open world set in rural towns to burn rubber around as well as several story missions to play. You can download it from Steam now.

Does "prologue" just mean this is a demo? Well, it's certainly designed to demonstrate the world and driving of the full game, but its story is also acting as an actual prologue, telling a separate story about a different protagonist than Japanese Drift Master proper. In Rise Of The Scorpion you play as "rebellious high schooler Hatori", who seems like an idiot jerk and I turned against him within just a few brief manga pages. Big "villain of the main game" vibes.

There's plenty to like about Rise Of The Scorpion otherwise. Its setting around the fictional Haikama Lake is lovely, peppered by small towns and back roads. It's a very different ambiance than the urban permadark of Tokyo-set Night Runners Prologue, another recent racing game demo.

The bucolic beauty matters because though I've seen every Fast and the Furious movie, and subjected myself to Tokyo Drift twice, to my great shame I've never mastered the art of drifting in video game cars. I'm so bad at drifting that in four attempts I couldn't even finish the first mission in Rise Of The Scorpion. I instead had fun playing it as JPM: Japanese Parking Master, and pulling up outside kissas and sushi restaurants in different spots where I could admire the trees, vending machines, the overhead electricity cables.

If I'd got further, perhaps I'd have seen more of the game's systems, which include cars that can be modded, a day/night cycle, and weather.

Apparently there are a bunch of driving assists, switched off on startup, that might have helped me. I'll give it another go and hopefully get good enough to be able to make progress when the full game releases, via Steam, sometime later this year.