The Playground Games team has posted a rather unusual teaser on social media for a car coming to Forza Horizon 5 as a reward vehicle: a Wordle puzzle.
Update (February 16): There’s now two Wordle cars!
If you’re somehow not familiar with Wordle, it’s the latest puzzle craze flooding the internet. The concept is pretty simple: you need to guess what five-letter word is in the puzzle.
Every time you guess a word, Wordle lets you know how close you were. A gray square means that letter does not appear in the final word, while a green square means that it both appears in the final word and you have it in the right position. If the letter appears in the final word but in a different spot, you get a yellow square. You can keep on guessing until you get the correct word.
Of course people like to share their results on social media, so if you’ve seen lines of five gray, yellow, and green squares but didn’t know what it meant, now you do!
The FH5 Wordle isn’t part of the official game, which is now owned by the New York Times, but a custom version created through one of myriad online Wordle generators, and you can see the puzzle below. If you’d like to guess it yourself, beware that spoilers continue beneath the Tweet below!
Given that numbers aren’t allowed in Wordle and similar puzzles, there’s a somewhat limited pool of possible five-letter words the car could be and it probably won’t take long to solve it. The solution is… “NISMO”.
That still leaves at least a small air of mystery about the car’s actual identity. Nismo, the specialist motorsports arm of Nissan, has been around for almost 40 years, and its name has appeared on cars for more than 30 of those — starting with, of course, a Skyline GT-R.
One Nismo model, the homologation special Nismo GT-R LM for the company’s GT-class Le Mans efforts, is in fact already in Forza Horizon 5. However other well-known examples of Nismo’s work include the R33 Nismo 400R, the R34 Skyline Z-Tune, the S14 270R and, more recently, the Z33 370Z Nismo.
The clue could also technically refer to one of several Le Mans prototypes, most notably the ill-fated GT-R NISMO LM, but the FH5 car list tends not to cover full race cars like this one.
In all likelhood then, the NISMO clue refers to either the 370Z Nismo, or one of the R35 generation GT-R Nismo cars, such as what looks to be the runout GT-R Nismo Special Edition car launched in October 2021.
We’ll have to wait to find out what the car is and when it’s going to arrive in Forza Horizon 5, but we’d expect it’s on its way for Series 5 when it begins on Thursday, March 3.
Update: The PG team has now teased another car, this time a Car Pass vehicle, with another Wordle-type puzzle. This time the answer is six letters long. Again, we’ll put the answer after the Tweet below:
Again, there’s not all that many options, especially as this puzzle doesn’t seem to be using a custom dictionary, but the answer to the clue is “TUNDRA”.
Naturally that’s going to be the Toyota pick-up truck, although we don’t know what specific model it will be — though a second-gen Tundra TRD would seem to be appropriate. However it will mark a Forza series debut for the Tundra, whichever one it is.
