Ubisoft
If you're looking to watch a bunch of armed white men dragging women by their feet as prisoners, "Far Cry 5" is the game for you.
- A major new blockbuster game, "Far Cry 5," launched on Tuesday, March 27.
- In "Far Cry 5," you play as a sheriff's deputy attempting to take down a violent religious cult.
- "Far Cry 5" is full of imagery and dialog that feels absurdly out of place in the modern day United States.
Last weekend, hundreds of thousands of protesters all over the United States - mostly teenagers - participated in the March for Our Lives rallies.
The protest's goal was simple: "To demand that a comprehensive and effective bill be immediately brought before Congress to address these gun issues."
Associated Press/Alex Brandon
Looking west away from the stage, the crowd fills Pennsylvania Avenue during the "March for Our Lives" rally in support of gun control, Saturday, March 24, 2018, in Washington.
The March for Our Lives protests, and similar protests prior to this past weekend, were a direct response to the February 14 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a 19-year-old gunman killed 17 students and staff members with a legally purchased AR-15 rifle.
There's no way that video game publisher Ubisoft could've known that its latest blockbuster game, "Far Cry 5," would arrive at such a contentious moment in the ongoing US gun control debate. The game comes out today, March 27, and it's hard to imagine a piece of media that's more tonally and thematically out of place in time.
Here's a brief summary: You play as a small-town sheriff's deputy in Montana, where a violent religious cult has taken over. Your job is to take down the religious cult, and you do this by exploring the game's massive open world and systematically dismantling their bureaucracy.
More simply: You shoot a lot of people, and make a lot of things explode. It's very similar to previous "Far Cry" games in this respect and, on paper, it sounds harmless.
In practice, "Far Cry 5" is a ham-fisted mess of American stereotypes and wink-wink/nudge-nudge jokes about gun violence. It feels like the wrong time to make this joke about an AR-15 considering that's the gun that was used in the Parkland school shooting:
Ubisoft
And that's the basest foundation of the kind of tone "Far Cry 5" takes with regard to American culture.
Much of the game's dialog and characters are poorly done caricatures of American stereotypes: The sheriff, the preacher, the conspiracy theorist, etc. They've all got something vaguely obvious to say, often with a subtle hint of current culture being referenced. It's all stuff that would feel right at home in a "Grand Theft Auto 5" side mission - a game that came out in 2013.
But it's 2018, and the United States is more divided than ever. White nationalists are holding rallies, teenagers are marching in the streets for gun control, and the White House seems particularly unstable.
Maybe it's not the best time for this kind of imagery?
Ubisoft
Or this:
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Or this:
Ubisoft
Maybe I'm just too precious of a snowflake, but that seems unlikely given my interests. I love many violent games, and I've argued passionately before that playing violent video games doesn't cause real-life violence. I wouldn't argue that "Far Cry 5" is an exception.
It is, however, a tasteless game from bottom to top - from weapon descriptions, to character types, to dialog to imagery. And not the good kind of tasteless that has something to say, but the juvenile kind that s--tposts on Reddit for fun.
Given the current state of the United States, "Far Cry 5" feels like something made for an alternate reality where mass shootings aren't common, where there isn't a raging culture war between so-called Red and Blue states, where there isn't yet another misinformed scapegoating of violent video games unfolding.
Ubisoft
It's a tremendous shame, because the actual game parts of "Far Cry 5" - the shooting, the sneaking, the progression system, etc. - are excellent. But when yet another bad guy rhapsodizes about the collapse of society and it sounds like a presidential campaign rally, it's hard to not be repulsed.
Previous games in the series applied the same open-world, first-person shooter formula to fictional worlds full of overblown stereotypes. "Far Cry 5" went all-in on US culture as its setting, and it stands out as one of the most anachronistic games I've ever played.
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