Montana, Still Burning

After more than a hundred hours in Far Cry 5, I swore off the franchise. The ending—trapped in a bunker with a deranged preacher while the world ended outside, despite every hour I’d put in trying to prevent exactly that—felt like a personal insult. I’d invested real time. A piece of actual feeling. Watching the game shrug and deliver the apocalypse anyway hit somewhere I didn’t want to be hit. So I was done. Never again.

Then Ubisoft dropped the first trailer for Far Cry New Dawn and my fingers were itching before I’d consciously registered what I was watching.

The Far Cry formula is not complicated. Story is always a slightly overstated word for what’s actually happening, which is: arrive in a large outdoor space, point explosives at everything that moves, occasionally allow a companion with three stock phrases to follow you into a ditch and die there. I have never once played this series stealthily. Rocket launcher, flamethrower, compressed air cannon—everything, immediately, often preemptively. It isn’t strategy. It’s landscape management.

The new game picks up in the wreckage of Far Cry 5’s nuclear conclusion—Hope County, Montana, post-apocalyptic and now pastel-colored in the way games signal both radiation and an art director who was having a good day. The villains are twin sisters, Mickey and Lou, who’ve already left a body count that makes the previous game’s cult look like a neighborhood dispute. The trailer doesn’t reveal much beyond that tone and those faces. It doesn’t need to.

I’m going back to Montana. The only rule I’m setting for myself is that I will not, under any circumstances, develop feelings for Faith again. That was nearly catastrophic last time.