The Carnival
Joseph Seed doesn’t hide. When I showed up in Eden’s Gate as a freshly minted deputy, him and his cultists didn’t scatter or panic—they just watched. Joseph stayed still and quiet, knowing something I didn’t: I wasn’t leaving Hope County. Not today.
A minute of dialogue later, our helicopter went down. I woke up in a cabin bleeding, and Richard Dutch
Roosevelt had already decided what came next. The phones were dead, the borders sealed, and three of Joseph’s most devoted—Jacob, John, and Faith—controlled everything outside. Someone had to go out there and take them apart.
Armed with a pistol and whatever faith I could scrape together, I started recruiting, clearing settlements, destroying compounds. Those first ten hours were tense. Every vehicle that passed felt like a threat. I’d dive into grass, heart pounding, because everyone wanted me dead. By hour fifteen, I was sprinting into settlements just firing at anything that moved. The fear had burned away completely. Two companions jogging beside me, a sonic cannon in my hands, and suddenly I wasn’t hunting cultists anymore—I was just running laps through a shooting gallery.
The problem is what Far Cry 5 is trying to do with tone. The dialogue is all Bible verses and threats. You find torture chambers, collapsed bodies, the weight of violence. Joseph and his friends are supposed to radiate menace. But the world has this carnival quality that completely undercuts it. There’s a deranged film director next to a bunker where families are being tortured. You can fish fifty feet from a firefight. I got teleported to Mars at one point. The game knows exactly what it is—a playground wearing a horror mask—and it doesn’t really care that the two don’t match.
If you try to make sense of any of it logically, it falls apart. One guy locks down an entire county and nobody from outside does anything. The story missions where you get kidnapped and tortured by Jacob or John or Faith happen on loop, structurally identical, and by the third time it made me want to quit the game entirely. The map is so densely packed with collectibles and side missions that you’re perpetually distracted from the actual plot, which might be the smartest design choice in the whole thing.
What really gets to me is how much the people of Hope County don’t matter. In Witcher 3, I cared about random NPCs. I still think about some of those side stories years later. Here, someone would tell me they’d lost everything and I’d feel nothing. Give me my reward points so I can move forward—that’s all I wanted. The characters feel less like people and more like attribute clusters: sad farmer, grieving widow, angry mechanic. None of it stuck.
Joseph himself doesn’t reappear until you’ve taken down his three lieutenants. And that grind is real. The first region is engaging. The second starts to wear thin. By the third, I just wanted it finished. How many cassette tapes and baseball cards and lighters until the final confrontation? Too many. The game buries the climax under mountains of completionist work.
There are bugs too. Entire settlements become unplayable when enemies spawn wrong or not at all. Missions break in ways that make you restart. It’s not catastrophic—you lose maybe an hour—but it’s enough to snap you out of whatever immersion exists.
Despite all this, I kept coming back to Hope County. There’s something about the sheer absurdity of it, the refusal to reconcile brutal narrative with playground atmosphere. The carnival never stops. The stories you accumulate are genuinely strange and memorable, even if the people in them feel hollow. Joseph Seed is at least a problem you can solve. Pump enough bullets into him and he’s gone. That’s more than real cults allow.