Hey so I got a free key for Far Cry 5 a while back and I've been playing it to examine how terrible it is (PRETTY EXTREMELY BTW)

I just finished it and can we talk about the ending for a sec

It's a very bad game and I could rant about that for a very long time but I'm gonna skip that part bc I don't really like making twitter an even more negative place

okay but the ending though

*SPOILER WARNING for a really badly-written game that you shouldn't bother playing*

So the premise is the villains are this doomsday cult that's trying to murderously herd everyone into fallout shelters to save them from the apocalypse

the BIG TWIST at the end is they're right

like, they murder, torture, and enslave thousands of people out of this poorly-defined religious zeal to save everyone from a prophesied doom. This makes them the bad guys, but it does the Bad Videogame Writing thing where the villian monologues about how many ppl YOU killed

and then the nukes drop, and the only people who live are the villain and the protagonist, because the villain did actually successfully prepare for this, and he's gonna save everyone he can

lots of Games Discourse has already talked over the ending; it's a silly unearned twist that's supposed to Blow Your Mind but isn't written well enough to actually work, etc

not gonna rehash all that

what I haven't seen anyone talk about is... if the crowning moment of the game's narrative is revealing that the cultists were *actually right all along*, what is the writing actually trying to SAY here?

because uhhhhhh

I dunno if anyone was listening but the cultist ideology is pretty much straight-up the neoreactionary "feudalism is good actually" thing

there are 3 main villians who each monologue for literally like 15 minutes at a time

two of them are largely incoherent (one's a really really bad Heath Ledger Joker "insane torturer" knockoff, the other's just "mind control drugs"), but the third's p clear about his ideology

he basically just tells you outright "America is doomed, look who's in charge, the bombs will revert the world to the Natural Order of Things, in which Men will be Men again and the strong will dominate the weak, and the REAL MEN be finally be the titans of the new world"

In fairness he's presented as an abhorrent monster. But like... he literally gets the last word, because it's a silent protagonist game. No counterargument is ever raised against the apparently-monstrous ideologies, you're just a floating gun

and then the twist is THEY'RE RIGHT

the counterargument is, I guess, that they're obviously The Bad Guys so you shoot them a whole lot and literal fireworks go off when you shoot them especially triumphantly

To be clear here, I don't actually *think* the intended thrust of the game was to secretly write weird neoreactionary fanfic

The writing is... utterly atrocious across the board; it's p reasonable to assume *any* level of critical analysis infers depth the authors never intended

I don't know that that entirely excuses it though?

Like if you're so bad at writing that you end up accidentally writing a full-throated endorsement of post-apocalyptic fascism, you're both a terrible writer AND still wrote something pretty gross

Given the tone of the rest of the game I really do think they just concocted the ending in a "WOULDN'T IT BE BADASS IF" brainstorming session and never actually put further thought into what such an ending would actually imply, ideologically speaking

so yeah that's... what I have to say about that

it's a trudging slog of game along most other axes too so I wouldn't really recommend playing it to investigate for yourself

If you did play it though I'm curious if you have Thoughts