The Carnival at the End of America
You go to arrest Joseph Seed at his compound and it goes wrong immediately. Not dramatically wrong—just quietly, with the particular calm of someone who already knows how the scene ends. He walks out to meet you, hands clasped behind his back, unhurried, and in the first thirty seconds you understand that he isn’t afraid of you. He has an entire county. You have a warrant. The arrest doesn’t happen. The helicopter goes down. You wake up alone in the woods, bleeding, and the game has barely started.
Far Cry 5 drops you into Hope County, Montana—fictional rural landscape, real American nightmare. Ubisoft has filled it with rivers and farmland and forests and a death cult called Eden’s Gate that has been annexing the whole thing while no one was paying attention. Joseph Seed is the prophet in charge, flanked by three lieutenants: Jacob, John, and Faith, each controlling a different corner of the county. The phone lines are cut. The roads out are guarded. As the fresh deputy sheriff who just survived the introduction, you’re stuck inside, and the only way out runs through the middle of all of them.
The first ten hours are genuinely different from everything that follows. In those early hours, every passing pickup felt like a potential threat. I was diving into tall grass to avoid patrols, rationing ammunition, treating each engagement as something that could go badly. There’s a version of this game that stays in that register—tense, low-resource, frightening. That version lasts until you start building up your roster of companions and unlocking the ability trees, at which point the whole register shifts and never shifts back.
By midgame I had two AI companions running beside me and a sonic weapon that could clear a fortified compound in under a minute. The fear was gone. I was walking into heavily armed camps, shooting everything that moved, looting, moving on. Bam bam bam, region cleared, collect the resources, next objective. The worst consequence of dying is losing a few minutes of progress. Hope County had stopped feeling dangerous and started feeling like a very large, very detailed theme park.
The game does nothing to resist that reading. Ubisoft has packed this map compulsively—every hundred meters brings a new side mission, a collectible, a prepper’s bunker with its own challenge, a fishing spot. While families are being tortured in cult compounds, a nearby filmmaker is frantically trying to finish his alien movie before sunset. Armed fanatics patrol the main highway shooting anyone who looks at them wrong, but there’s a baseball diamond just off the road if you want a game. Joseph’s followers are flaying people alive on the other side of the county; there’s also a Mars-themed prepper cache if you want a change of scenery. The tonal whiplash is so constant it stops registering as whiplash.
This is the central contradiction the game never resolves. Far Cry 5 genuinely wants to be taken seriously as a story about American extremism, about a community that failed to notice the warning signs, about what happens when someone convinces themselves God has given them permission to do anything. The setup is unsettling in exactly the right way. And then the game asks you to find thirty Clutch Nixon VHS tapes, or replicate a John Rambo stunt in a helicopter gunship, or recover a man’s stolen wine collection. The horror and the absurdism coexist without any productive tension because the game has no real position on what it’s doing.
The characters suffer most for it. I’ve put hundreds of hours into The Witcher 3, Mass Effect, Skyrim—games where I can still tell you the backstory of an NPC I met once in a side quest I barely remember completing. In Far Cry 5, I finished the campaign and struggled to name half the resistance fighters I’d supposedly been fighting beside throughout. Someone’s father died. Someone’s cat went missing. Someone’s house burned down. I didn’t care. The game has a Guns for Hire system with ability trees and upgrade paths, and the people attached to those systems are just nodes in a spreadsheet, present to deliver mission triggers and then disappear.
The three sub-boss regions—Jacob’s, John’s, Faith’s—follow identical structures in succession, and the structure starts showing its seams fast. Flip enough resistance meters, clear enough outposts, trigger the boss confrontation, move on. By the time I was working through the third region I was purely mechanical about it—running the checklist, staring at the map, wondering how many more prepper stashes before I could proceed. The answer was somewhere around fifty-three. Fine. I put on a podcast and kept moving.
The game also has a habit of forcibly kidnapping you for mandatory story sequences—one of the three sub-bosses grabs you, subjects you to something designed to be disturbing, lectures you at length, then releases you back into the world. The first time Jacob locked me in a kill room and made me race through a shooting gallery while Quiet Riot played on the PA, I thought it was genuinely strange design. By the third time, I wanted to consult a lawyer.
The bugs don’t help. I hit at least two instances where an entire area stopped functioning—enemies standing frozen in place, refusing to register as killable, the game blocking completion of the region. In a game gated on clearing those regions, that’s not a cosmetic glitch. Both times I closed the application and went back to The Witcher 3, which is a comparison that doesn’t flatter anyone involved.
And yet I kept going back. There’s something in the texture of Hope County itself, in the light on those Montana hills, the specific character of each subregion, that made me want to be inside it even when the game was frustrating me. And the smaller stories—the weird individual missions tucked into corners of the map, away from the main quest markers—hold up better than anything in the main narrative. A man who has built an elaborate trap for the people who destroyed his family. A woman running an underground network from her barn. A preacher who has clearly been through something and come out stranger on the other side. None of them are complex characters. But they’re memorable in the way brief encounters can be—a detail lands, a line of dialogue sticks, and you carry it out of the game when you’re done.
Far Cry 5 is an enormous, overstuffed carnival with a political horror story stapled to its entrance. The plot doesn’t hold up to basic logical scrutiny—how is one man running a private army in Montana with no federal response? Why not fly the helicopter to the next county and call someone? How many total residents does Hope County have, factoring in everyone I’ve shot off a moving vehicle? None of it adds up. If you need it to, you won’t have a good time here.
If you don’t—if you can accept that this is fundamentally a theme park with pretensions—there’s a lot of genuine entertainment in the fifty-odd hours it takes to get through. I came back to Hope County again and again because I felt, however absurdly, like what I was doing inside that world actually mattered to the people who lived there. Even when what I was doing was just shooting everything in a radius and looting the bodies. The stories you collect along the way are yours to keep. Nobody can take them from you. Not even a man who thinks he speaks for God.