'Far Cry 5' Tries to Do It All, but Fails to Be Much of Anything
Austin Walker Mar 26 2018, 11:45am
New changes to the structure are welcomed, but 'Far Cry 5' has no confidence and no heart.
By the time I hit the 20 hour mark, I was wondering what could be salvaged.
Far Cry 5, after all, was not a complete failure.
But there was little else I wanted to bring with me out of Hope County, the fictional Montanan locale where
Far Cry 5 is set. As I stared down the game’s final hours, I began to reckon with the fact that despite all of its scale, it was in many ways an empty world.
Far Cry 5 is a game that takes excess as ethos, yet, in pursuing that goal of
more-more-more, stretches itself so thin as to offer up nothing at all.
It didn’t have to be this way, of course.
Far Cry 5’s premise is potent enough: For years, Hope County has been slowly coming under control of the Project at Eden’s Gate, a well resourced cult that is preparing for the end of the world by buying up local businesses, building up a sizable militia, and converting the county’s residents through a cocktail of schlock-y Hollywood brainwashing techniques.
(It’s worth noting that, though I never saw the game never use the word “Christian” or “evangelical” to describe them, their particular brand of eschatological belief is firmly drawn from those sources, with the Book of Revelation and other scripture serving as the script’s shortcut to creepy cult talk.)
Acting on evidence that the cult’s wrongdoings have escalated from generally frightening the locals and to outright murder, your character (a rookie deputy) joins a group of other cops to arrest the cult’s leader, Joseph Seed. It all goes wrong, and, seeing this aggression as proof that his prophecies are coming true, Seed orders the county to be locked down to force a
Bundy-like isolationist standoff, and for his followers to begin “The Reaping,” an aggressive campaign of kidnapping meant to bring the citizens of Hope County into the Project’s flock (or at least into the prisons of their massive bunkers).
You’re saved from that first,
Purge-like night by Dutch, a man who, like John Seed, has been long preparing for the end of the world. (The irony is not remarked upon).
Take one of the constant refrains from both Joseph Seed and Faith, one of his lieutenants: Why do you always try to solve so many things with violence, they ask, despite their own organizations fondness of brutal torture and your inability to interact with the cult in any way
except violence.
It isn’t the first game to do that sort of thing, of course:
BioShock and
Metal Gear Solid both chided the player’s more bloodthirsty gamer-habits, though those at least let you determine your own level of violence. But even when compared to games like
The Last of Us and
Spec Ops:
The Line, which force the player down paths they may not be happy with,
Far Cry 5 falters. After all, while those games are able to linger in their chosen tonality,
Far Cry 5 spins wildly between didactic, yet contradictory sermons and a relentless, mediocre style of comedy that never rises above an echo of
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ 14 year old sketch of rural American culture, down to the UFO expert and amoral CIA agent.
This speaks to a deeper problem, albeit one that emerges from the same central flaw of being stretched too thin: Thematically,
Far Cry 5 is such an inconsistent mess of ideas that there is hardly a recognizable through line at all. Instead, the game gestures towards ambiguity as if looking for a shield to save itself with.
This is a game that undeniably knows that Donald Trump is president, but cannot decide if that fact should be punchline or key plot device. When, in two different scenes, cult leaders make oblique references to “America’s leadership” or the failures of the person “who’s in charge” as proof of the American empire’s final days, the game reaches for sincere relevance. But an hour later, you’ll be
recovering the notorious piss tape from a Russian spy in a pun-filled quest.
In some moments, it feels as if
Far Cry 5 wants to take a neutral position and represent some true complexity of rural America. Take, for instance, the fact that various characters will speak to their various opinions about the country’s gun culture, with some disappointed in our addiction to assault rifles and others “not getting the big deal” about guns.
Yet when facing more obviously troubling truths, like the racism and xenophobia that swept Trump into office,
Far Cry 5 hedges its bets. Mission after mission, NPC after NPC, there is a sense throughout the game that Ubisoft wants to make sure you're laughing along with them regardless of why you're laughing.
In one case, a white quest giver complains asked me if I was “One of those
eye-talians,” who she was concerned were stealing her jewelry. The joke, of course, is that racism is bad, and that this is a particularly unlikely form of racism, since Italian-Americans have been largely assimilated into white culture. Of course, the truth is that very similar statements are
actually made about people of color regularly, especially those in service sector jobs. The irony is that if she'd followed through and said “Hispanics," if there had been no comedy alibi for the racism, the game would have the genuine ability to test what players thought their characters would do. Instead, we got "
eye-talians."
Or consider the fact that the surprising racial diversity of the game’s cult, which I explored in
my interview with creative director Dan Hay last month, means that the Project at Eden’s Gate never quite assumes the stature of the primarily white militias that the game’s developers
heavily emphasized their
original pitch. It’s a point only further extended by the fact that you work
directly for one such militia for a good third of the game, but due to the poor job of characterization and worldbuilding, you never learn what the militia stands for, why it came into being, or what it would be doing if not for the Project at Eden’s Gate.
That last question—what would Hope County be if not for the cult?—haunts
Far Cry 5, and its inability to address it directly hobbles any meaning that could be gleaned from some of the game’s more surprising twists. Which isn’t to say that you can’t interpret the game’s story or that there won’t be a million theory videos about what is going to be one of the year’s most talked about (and most unearned) endings. But it does mean that any final interpretation wiggles out of grasp, deferred for lack of clarity.
After all, what are we to make of the Project and Eden’s Gate, itself? At key moments, when you and the resistance score key blows against them, the game offers us a brief vista of the nearby area, lit by fireworks and decorated by the raising of an American flag waving in the breeze.
Yet Joseph preaches in front of a modified American flag, and the cult’s leaders are as American as they come: A business savvy self help guru, a military vet, and a sort of pop-culture-and-drug wielding micro-celebrity. Their entire mobilizing purpose is an anxiety about the collapse of the American system, and the appeal they make for joining the cult is the ability to escape the stress of your daily news feed. Honestly, what could be more American than the Project at Eden’s Gate?
Perhaps, in a different game, the message would be clear: You, player, are the agent of the broken status quo. You’re the one working for conspiracy theorists who complain about globalists and politicians who grouse about “Obama-loving libtards.” You’re defending a culture where every member of Hope County has individually invested in a personal bunker that will never be able to provide them a life of safety and comfort, while the Project supports a collectivist vision of survival. The cult is nothing more than a scapegoat, a whipping boy for all of the problems of Hope County and America writ large.
But
Far Cry 5 doesn't earn that reading. Instead, this is a game where, in search of shock, one of the cult leader’s rips the flesh off of a living victim and staples it to the wall. It’s a game that leans all the way into debunked “brainwashing” view of cults, despite Ubisoft hosting
interviews with expert consultants who emphasize that cults work through social pressure, not drugs and programming. It’s a game that retreats from its own moments of sincerity, which is a shame, because in the rare cases where it spends time with some of its slightly more restrained characters, you can genuinely see what a better version of
Far Cry 5 might look like. Instead, we got
this version, one wrapped in a safety blanket of disinterest and reference-as-punchline.
What’s so frustrating about this is that you don’t need to look far from
Far Cry 5 to see other games manage to be both funny and thoughtful, or which offer even more content but which retain some central thematic through line. In fact, you don’t even need to leave Ubisoft’s own catalog: 2016’s
Watch Dogs 2 had some missteps but its anti-authoritarian ethos was always clear, and rung true across missions both serious and comical. Last year’s
Assassin’s Creed Origins is an even bigger game than
Far Cry 5, yet it never loses sight of its primary tension: Protagonist Bayek is torn between a quest for personal revenge and a larger responsibility to his community, and the most of quests he takes on relate to one or both of those goals.
Instead, despite carrying a premise with a lot of potential,
Far Cry 5 ends up feeling like two other recent Ubisoft releases:
Tom Clancy’s The Division and
Tom Clancy’s Wildlands, both of which scratch a certain mechanical itch but which
demand you not think too hard about them. For me, that makes
Far Cry 5 something like a vacant mansion. I can admire its shape from a distance, and I enjoy moving through its halls, walking both the old familiar steps and a few new ones. I can recognize the cleverness at work in its flowing structure, and can imagine the person who can see themselves at home here. But for me, it’s empty of life and meaning.
There was a moment towards the very end of my time with
Far Cry 5. In an effort to 100% one of the game's regions, I took to exploring some of the hills that none of the quests had taken me to hoping to find the one last mission I'd somehow missed. Suddenly, I caught the sound of guitar over a ridge, and came across a trio of folks at a campsite. One was playing guitar and singing "In the Pines (Where Did You Sleep Last Night)," while the other two danced.
It was a quiet moment, and more than that a confident one. It wasn't sticking its tongue out at the intimacy of the couple, or treating the musician's performance as a joke. And it was unmarked on the map, and that made it feel more true somehow. This was, in a sense, not
for me to find. It was simply a routine this trio would repeat until the end of time, undisturbed. Meant as a curiosity, yet in effect one of the rare times that the game felt like it understood what it could have been. Even writing this now, I feel a pang of regret that I didn't stay longer, that I didn't get a better video of the them.
I never found anything else like that moment, but again and again,
Far Cry 5 served up its opposite: Moments that were incredibly loud, but increasingly timid. And because of that,
Far Cry 5 itself will always be more of a curiosity than a destination.
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