JDM: Rise Of The Scorpion offers a free prologue to drift racing in rural Japan

JDM: Rise Of The Scorpion is a free prologue to JDM: Japanese Drift Master, a racing game about – guess what – drift racing in Japan. It features an open world of rural towns to smoke tires in, as well as several story missions. You can download it now on Steam.

Does “prologue” just mean it's a demo? Well, it's certainly meant to show off the world and handling of the full game, but its story also functions as an actual prologue, telling a separate story about a different protagonist than the actual Japanese Drift Master. In Rise Of The Scorpion, you play as “rebellious high school student Hatori,” who seems like a jerk and who I turned against after just a few short manga pages. Major “villain of the main game” vibes.

Otherwise, there's a lot to like about Rise Of The Scorpion. The setting around the fictional Lake Haikama is beautiful, dotted with small towns and back roads. It's a very different atmosphere to the urban permafrost atmosphere of Tokyo-set Night Runners Prologue, another recent racing game demo.

The bucolic beauty is important because although I have seen every Fast and the Furious movie and subjected myself to Tokyo Drift twiceMuch to my shame, I never mastered the art of drifting in video game cars. I'm so bad at drifting that I couldn't even complete the first mission in Rise Of The Scorpion in four attempts. Instead, I had fun playing it as JPM: Japanese Parking Master, stopping at various spots in front of kissas and sushi restaurants where I could admire the trees, vending machines, and the power lines above me.

If I had gotten further, I might have seen more of the game's systems, including modifiable cars, a day/night cycle, and weather.

Apparently there are a number of driving assists that are turned off at launch that might have helped me. I'm going to give it another go and hopefully get good enough to be able to progress when the full game comes out on Steam sometime later this year.