(Photos: Forza Motorsport) The earlier we admit it, the sooner we can start preparing for it: the holiday season, the shopping madness, and the days stuck indoors because winter has arrived and the weather outside isn’t just frightful, it outright blows. There are some days that you just aren’t up to making the trek out to the shop to spin some wrenches, and maybe you’d like to spend a little bit of time with the kids indoors, with your hot chocolate. We get that…and we’re here to help. You can set all of the blame on Charles Wickam for this, because he found it, told me about it, and I’ve been playing the demo version of it for a couple of days now: Forza Horizon 3.

The Forza Horizon series isn’t a “racing simulator” like standard Forza series. Instead, consider it an open-world free-for-all, this time set in Australia. Don’t expect the layout to be a dead-on match for what you’d find in Queensland and New South Wales, however…no matter how expansive sandbox games get, there is still a limitation on area that a gaming console can handle. Throw geographical accuracy out of the window, then, and understand that the developers had to slam the best bits of driving they could find together. That’s why the “Rainforest” and “Outback” sections are just kind of there, not quite as they should be. But that’s nitpicking a beautifully detailed map, complete with excellent driving roads, plenty of gravel roads to dive off into, and if you don’t feel like taking any of those paths…then cut your own!

Right now, only the demo is available, which I downloaded for Xbox One, and you get the area around Byron Bay, some of the Rainforest, and some open field areas to mess around with. But what about the cars? Like most other Forza games, the list is big and will keep growing, with everything from a Polaris RZR 1000 EPS to the hypercar top-tiers, like the Lamborghini Centenario and the Ferrari FXX K, but our interest lies in sampling some of the local culture, including such forbidden fruit like the 1974 Holden Sandman and the 2014 FPV Pursuit ute. The demo allows you to drive the Centenario, BJ Baldwin’s Chevrolet trophy truck, an off-road buggy, and your choice of one of four vehicles: a BMW M4, a Nissan Silvia S15 complete with some body mods, the Ford Shelby GT350R, and the Holden HSV GTS ute. I’ve driven all four in-game, and each car has a personality: the Silvia is flickable and drifty, the M4 is a corner-carver, the Shelby is a screamer that loves to run the straightaways and the Holden’s ability to fry the tires off is just too much fun to pass up.

Forza Horizon 3 will be unleashed on September 27th, so if you occasionally like to camp out with a controller in your hands, or see a possible way to teach the young ones about cars not normally seen in the States, you might want to do some investigating on your own.