Anti-Trumpism has seemingly bled into all aspects of popular culture since President Trump announced his candidacy for president in June 2015.
However, Far Cry 5, a new action-adventure first-person shooter video game developed by Ubisoft and released this week on Xbox One, Playstation 4, and computer platforms, is one of the first video games to poke fun at Trump and his supporters.
The story is set in fictional Hope County located in the state of Montana, which has been overrun by an apocalyptic cult called “the Project at Eden’s Gate,” led by a psychotic preacher Joseph Seed. Also known as “The Father,” Seed claims he has been chosen by God to protect the residents of the county from an impending national apocalypse.
In practical terms, Seed is simply a totalitarian who uses coercive power to terrorize and indoctrinate all in his path.
The player takes on the role of a sheriff’s deputy sent in to arrest Seed on the suspicion of kidnapping. Safe to say, things soon go awry and you are left fighting to survive.
Yet although Far Cry 5 follows in its predecessors’ footsteps by offering a vast open-world full of high-octane battles and no shortage of dangerous animals, the game’s political undertones cut far closer to home than in previous editions. There is, for example, a side mission involving the infamously rumored “pee tape” connected to President Trump. But the game isn’t wholly derogatory toward Trump and his supporters.
On the contrary, many of the allies the player finds along his or her way turn out to be vintage Trump Republicans. Armed to the teeth, Hope County’s residents are sustained by rural small town values. They don’t want outside interference in their lives, nor do they want to live under the thumb of an authoritarian despot.
Moreover, the narrative importance of an armed citizenry is central to Far Cry 5. The player is left in no doubt that those who have survived the cult’s reaping have done so because they have a lot of guns and the occasional bunker. This is no San Francisco hippy retreat.
Indeed, when the player’s bickering civilian-clothed allies are pitted against uniformed cult members, a deep thread of individuality becomes clear. Far Cry 5’s developers certainly did not intend for their creation to serve as an endorsement of government, which has (admittedly not believably) abandoned the people of Hope County to their terror.
Interestingly enough, the director of Far Cry 5, Dan Hay, drew from his own experiences as a youngster in that the collapse of the “global village” was well on its way from such watershed events like the Cold War, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the 2008 financial crisis. These particular events created a sense of separatism and isolationism that, Hay says, bubbled up as a pervasive sentiment among the American public. Trust in the government eroded and people felt like they had to rely on their own devices to solve the problems in their lives. And distrust in government never seemed more apparent than when the Ubisoft team visited Montana.
“We actually went to Montana and we visited,” Hay said in 2017. “What was really interesting was what we learned there: this concept of freedom, faith and firearms.”
He added, “People from that region don’t necessarily trust the government. They don’t want to be fucked with. They want to be left alone. They have a pretty goddamn good bullshit detector. When we were there, they absolutely didn’t want to be lied to, and this resonating feeling of freedom, faith — and the firearms to protect those two things — came back again and again. So that’s what we’re doing. And we’re applying that to the Far Cry series.”
Hay said that everything started to make “sense” when the group of armed militia members associated with the Bundy family took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in early 2016 and held the FBI at bay for 41 days.
With respect to gameplay, Far Cry 5 delivers on all the elements you loved about its predecessors, plus you get to recruit oppressed residents of Hope County to your team of AI-controlled resistance fighters, and get to call on specialists to help in combat that even includes a grizzly bear and a dog. Additionally, you can fish, hunt, and raid doomsday bunkers for all kinds of stash.
The entire experience is immersive and thought-provoking. For those of us who haven’t trekked out to the American wilderness, Far Cry 5 has a sense of authenticity that can only be replicated upon actually visiting that region of the U.S. in person.
