Far Cry's villains are sick of Far Cry
Beware serious spoilers for every numbered Far Cry game except the first. You have been warned.
You don't need to actually play Far Cry 5 in order to finish it. All you need do is enter the church after the introductory cinematic, wait for the order to arrest your antagonist, cult leader Joseph Seed, then drop the pad. "God is watching, and he will judge you on what you decide here today," your quarry says, holding out his wrists. The silence lengthens, tension dribbling away into fidgety embarrassment. Finally, another character pushes down Joseph's arms and you walk back to the door. Beyond it, there is only the credits reel. A poor return on £50, I guess, but in a way this is the most uplifting of the game's three endings: it spares you a bloody struggle for control of Hope, Montana that will ultimately prove meaningless when a mushroom cloud sprouts from the horizon. The "Father", it transpires, was right about the end of the world all along. In asking you to leave him alone, he was only trying to save you a bit of time and legwork.
Far Cry 5's apocalyptic ending - the one you'll reach if you assume that plot progression always comes about through aggression - is basically a cop-out, a dog-eared doomsday spectre thrown across the rails of a story that aims to interrogate a violent society, but is largely content just to echo that violence as part of yet another exercise in colonising a map screen. It is, however, intriguing for how it retrospectively robs every player action of sense or significance - and for how Joseph Seed, like every Far Cry villain before him if rather more explicitly, knows this revelation is coming from the outset. Arrest the Father as ordered, and you'll find that the ensuing mayhem is peppered with scenarios that feel like self-commentary, a meditation on the callousness and futility of playing Far Cry 5 as it was designed to be played.
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