Category: Video Games

I can now confirm that the rumors are true: Far Cry 6 is another Far Cry game. One of the games of all time. A game that was released in 2021 and continues to exist.

I said that Watch_Dogs was a 2014 game not just in the sense that it was literally released in 2014 and takes place roughly then, but in the sense that 2014 was the sub-genre. It was a game about how people thought the world worked in 2014. Like, obviously no one thought that Chicago literally had a city-wide surveillance network being manipulated by dueling hacker outlaws at the time, nor did anyone believe that exact course of events would occur or that the hacker battles envisioned by Watch_Dogs wouldn’t end up being far more spectacular and fun to play compared to real hacker battles. But people absolutely expected that a growing surveillance state would end up being a battleground for hacker groups and lone wolves. The fears and anxieties of 2014 were written deep into that game’s DNA.

And in the same way, Far Cry 6 is a 2020 game. While some lip service to the Far Cry series’ running thesis of “your player character skills of personal violence will only make things worse, you should just leave” is given, for the most part the revolutionaries are just the good guys. Anton Castillo does Far Cry’s charismatic villain thing, but his ideology is pretty vague. The rebels are left-coded, but it’s United States left-coding and this is pseudo-Cuba, which means Castillo’s entire regime is vaguely left-coded because of its anti-Americanism (something which aged especially poorly as the Republican Party doubled down on being the party of treason and surrender and the Democrats picked up the “vanguard of global democracy” position after the Republicans dropped it – a pivot that happened so fast I felt the need to throw in this parenthetical to remind current readers that in 2021, while a careful observer could see the tide had clearly shifted on this, the general consensus was still that the American right was more overtly patriotic than the American left).

Castillo gets called a fascist by the rebels, and his reserved, presidential demeanor prevents him from fighting against that accusation directly, but in interviews with the American media he criticizes the United States for its history of slavery, and while it’s a very valid criticism to say that the US media being unable to effectively grapple with assertions that having been a slave-owning terror state 160 years ago means America isn’t allowed to oppose slave-owning terror states in operation right now, the game frames this as Castillo being a villain with a point rather than getting away with remarkably stupid defenses because he’s taking advantage of a historically inept journalist industry. Castillo’s relationship to America frames him as Fidel Castro, but his backstory with the nation’s Communist rebels in 1967 frame him as Fulgencio Batista, and to the extent Anton Castillo defends himself from the association with Batista, it is to position himself as being more like Castro, rather than any attempt to suggest that Batista was better – they were both dictators, after all.

There’s even a Just Leave option near the end, but there’s no reason to believe that it’s a better option. Protagonist Dani seems to do better in it, but Castillo reasserts control over pseudo-Cuba and that sure seems to be bad. The rebels don’t seem to believe in anything besides Castillo being bad, but at minimum they’re probably going to do less slave labor and the only person who might’ve been seeking to become a new dictator gets killed in the final battle anyway, which results in Dani being offered the job of supreme leader and turning it down. This sure doesn’t seem like the foundation of a principled democracy, but as with most Far Cry games, the level of authoritarian torture horror that the current regime gets up to is high enough that installing a corrupt hybrid-regime will still be a noticeable improvement. You can ask questions about whether it was worth the war, but the war was ongoing when you got here, so the choice presented to the player character in the narrative and the player in mechanics is not whether you should have a war, but rather that, given there is a war ongoing, which side deserves to win. And the answer is just straightforwardly the rebels.

Anton’s princeling who he’s grooming for succession gets killed in the true ending where you actually finish the game and defeat Anton, but Anton is the one who killed him. Rebels sometimes do chaotic and unhinged things, but no one who didn’t have it coming ever seems to get hurt by it. So while you can Just Leave, it seems like your protagonist skills of incredible violence actually are totally helpful here, because the rebels are better than Anton (probably? It’s all vibes-based, so it’s hard to say for certain, but Anton has lots of very specific crimes and the worst thing the rebels ever do is kill a few specific prisoners of war – bearing in mind they are a revolutionary army with zero ability to hold them, so while the psychological precedent this sets in the minds of the revolutionaries is very bad, they don’t actually have better options, but also the game doesn’t even notice this) and the only thing keeping them out of power is insufficient violence.

Far Cry 5 had a problem where it acted liked it had a Just Leave theme but the problem is that you were playing as a character who was both native to and employed by the legitimate democratic government of the nation the game took place in. The way you get introduced to most (though not all) of the resistance members suggests you’re probably not local local, but you are not crashing into a foreign country to solve their problems with violence, you are defending your own country from an authoritarian theocracy attempting a coup.

In Far Cry 6, things seem to have gone full cargo cult, with a few elements of the Just Leave theme, like the charismatic villain and the shady allies, are retained because those are Far Cry-y, but the developers either forgot, never knew due to employee turnover, or have stopped caring that this is supposed to add up to a theme about the futility of violence to solve certain problems. In fairness, there’s not a whole lot of pro-regime change sentiment left in the audience these days, so the Far Cry series has kind of reached the point where its thesis gets a “yeah, no shit” reaction, but Far Cry 6 doesn’t have a new thesis to push, it just staggers forward, an undead game series that still has the trappings of a point about the regime change sandbox genre it’s a part of but no longer has a point to make about it – probably because the only other surviving series in that genre is Just Cause, who were taking the piss since at least Just Cause 2.

The other long-running theme of the Far Cry series is the Murder Vacation, and Far Cry 6 doesn’t fail this one as badly as it did Just Leave, but mostly because doing Far Cry-y things gets you surprisingly far. Even here, though, the focus seems less purposeful. You still have a wingsuit and little one-person helicopters like the ones you can rent for (relatively) cheap to fly around on vacation, but you also have proper military helicopters and tanks, so the wingsuit and puny vacation helicopters are no longer a consistently effective means of getting around. You still do lots of murder and the vacation-y mechanics are still around, but they’re so de-emphasized in favor of the new revolutionary tone that they can no longer meaningfully be called a theme of the game, so much as the theme of, like, two side quests.

Far Cry 6 kind of gropes its way towards a new theme, a theme of gritty, bloody revolution, of revolutionaries who have legitimate grievances but also show the scars of trauma inflicted by those grievances. And while it would be kind of disappointing to see them move onto a new theme when they never really nailed the Just Leave theme, and kind of garbles their new message that there’s still vestigial Just Leave and Murder Vacation mechanics, it is fundamentally okay and indeed, a good thing, for a series to evolve thematically over different installments. But the problem is that this theme feels totally insincere, feels like people are scared of criticizing the 2020-era zeitgeist and also think they could profit from uncritically parroting its most rote talking points.

It wants to continue Far Cry’s edgy, bloodsoaked tradition of stories where war and revolution come with a terrible human cost, which means they cannot appeal to the Marvel core demographic of people who weren’t very political but they saw a man murdered by the police on camera and they were at least political enough to know that murder should definitely not be allowed. And yet, they lack the unhinged, though, to its credit, very human madness of the most lunatic fringe leftists of the era raving about how they’ll replace prisons with “empathy ceremonies” where criminals are publicly drowned. It wants, or at the very least feels it must be, part of that zeitgeist, but that zeitgeist is an alliance between 40-year old suburbanites that the Far Cry series wishes it was too cool for and actual crazy people that the Far Cry series might want to namecheck but whose actual policy proposals would be embarrassing to actually portray sympathetically.

Kinda makes me think that maybe it’s time for UbiSoft to admit that they are a giant corporation with no beliefs and should maybe resign themselves to making bland, Marvel-style, vaguely pro-status quo media.

In Citizen Sleeper, you are a “sleeper,” an emulated human consciousness uploaded to a robot body that mimics the regular human body in various ways to prevent the copy/pasted brain from going insane. So, you have to breathe because if you don’t your emulated subconcious thinks you’re drowning, and you have to eat or else the hunger will drive you mad even though the amount of energy provided to your bio-mechanical body by the food is puny (and it’s not clear how diegetic the hunger mechanics are, but you certainly don’t seem to have to eat very often). Unfortunately, the only point of making emulated humans like this is to exploit some kind of legal loophole regarding AI – as long as the artificial intelligence is created by copy/pasting a human brain wholesale, then the resulting being doesn’t legally count as human and doesn’t have rights, but also doesn’t count as enough of an AI for nebulous other laws to apply. Some kind of AI safety laws, I think? It’s not clear, but the game’s not a legal drama, so that’s fine. Making emulated consciousnesses allows the corporations to circumvent some kind of legal problem, and that’s why you are a robot with a wifi connection in your brain and robot legal status and yet you think, feel, and act exactly like a human.

The inciting incident of the game is that you are pulled out of a freighter that you’d stowed away on after escaping your corporate masters on some pit of despair floating out in space, and you’ve arrived on a decaying ring station taken over by the workers in a string of riots after corporate control fell apart. Now your goal is to make good your escape, which you can do in one of three ways: Upload into the cloud, hop on a ship to a distant planet (you have two different ships to choose from, but the details don’t matter to the broad objective of escape), or break the corporation’s ability to track you down and decline either of the other two options so you can just hang out on the station forever.

It’s not clear why the corporation’s grip on the station was slipping to begin with, but the Collapse was triggered by large chunks of the station being physically destroyed, so the corporation bailed out and left their station-level executives to fend for themselves. A few decades later, the Havenage is a ruling body that evolved out of a union, vaguely social democratic although it’s not clear how many residents are in the union. Certainly you are not in the union, and the political details mostly don’t matter. The Havenage is in charge of the main sections of the station, but they don’t really tell you what to do or provide for your needs. They are doing an okay job of running things but you’re pretty much on your own for getting food and shelter, and they don’t have total control of the station.

The Yatagans are a street gang that controls some of the more dense residential areas, and the Hypha Commune are a bunch of botanist hippies living under communism out in the biosphere sections of the station, which have grown completely wild since the Collapse. The Havenage are the ones that outside polities contact to do business with the station and the Yatagans in particular seem to exist like a regular (if firmly established) gang, in the cracks between the limits of the Havenage’s resources rather than acting openly as a rival state. It’s hard to tell exactly what the relation is between the three because all three of them are pretty chill with each other during the plot – the Havenage will not help you with your Yatagan problems and the Yatagans will not help you with your Havenage problems, so whatever the exact situation between them is, there is a stable balance of power and you aren’t upsetting it.

So that’s where you are. What do you do? Every day you roll some number of six-sided dice based on the condition of your body. At full health, you roll five dice. At the minimum, you roll just one. You can assign the dice to various tasks, and each task results in another die roll for a negative, neutral, or positive result, with the odds based on the face of the die assigned to it. The “neutral” results are actually marginal successes while the “positive” results are more like critical hits, i.e. if you assign a die to work a shift at a dangerous job, a “neutral” result gives you money and avoids harm, a “positive” result gives you extra money, and only a “negative” result damages you. Once you’ve used all your dice, you can sleep to get them back.

I’m not thrilled with Far Cry 6 overall. I’m mainly only playing it because I want closure on various Ubisoft open-world sandbox series that I was too broke to play when they got big, forcing me to watch from the sidelines as people loved them, then got bored with them, then eventually started rolling their eyes at the very mention of them. Assassin’s Creed and Watch_Dogs I played through until fairly obvious stopping points. For Assassin’s Creed, it was after Syndicate, before Origins, an intentional break that Ubisoft took to try and retool the series. For Watch_Dogs, it was after the second one, before Legion, because Legion’s “play as anyone” gameplay gimmick was such a radical departure as to feel like a different series altogether.

Far Cry lacks any particular breaks like that (well, except the break between 1 and 2), so I’m trying to play up to the current installment in the series and then I can say that I have completed the series, I have experienced the games that I had initially missed. And I’m trying to do that soon-ish because Far Cry 7 is supposedly coming out in 2025 and this series has gotten really shaky. Obviously I can just decide “fuck it, the series is over for me because it is bad,” and if I end up playing Far Cry 6 so little that I can’t even finish a main story blitz before 2025, then that’s probably a good sign that the series has become unplayably bad and I should not try to play it anymore. But I’d like to at least try to get through Far Cry 6, especially since the only outright bad game the series has had so far is Far Cry 5, and even that was fun to play, it just had a miserable and stupid main plot.

Far Cry 6 is better about this so far, but this wouldn’t be the first time Ubisoft has put crowd-pleasing fanfare up front where the early reviewers working to deadline will see it and hidden all of the terminally stupid shit near the end, where only dedicated fans or people with a neurotic obsession with completing things will find it, so we’ll see if Far Cry 6 is actually better.

But one thing I can say for the game already is that it finally has tanks. The absence of tanks made sense in Far Cry 3 and 5, and it was mostly sensible and forgivable in Far Cry 2, since that game was breaking new ground in enough other ways that I didn’t mind if they ran out of time and money before getting to specific features like tanks and IFVs. It really stuck out in Far Cry 4, though. The tinpot dictatorships you fight in Far Cry games might not have state-of-the-art weaponry, but at this point the T-62 is over 60 years old and was specifically intended to be a cheap tank for mass export to anyone on the red side of the Cold War. Stir in half a century of regime change, equipment capture, and imitation models, and these things (or tanks like them) can show up absolutely anywhere. And indeed, they are in Yara! These tanks are some fictional model from 1944, but whatever, what’s important is that I can drive around in a tank and fire the cannon and run over things.

Figment 2 is about a figment of the mind of some guy. The figment is Dusty, the man’s courage, and his job is to defeat nightmares, which the mind fears. He is accompanied by Piper, a Navi-esque bird sidekick and what exactly she’s supposed to represent psychologically is not clear to me. I could take some guesses based on her personality, but I don’t think anything is ever nailed down in dialogue. She’s also pretty new around here. Both of these characters were also in the first game, according to Google, and that game was set in a teenage girl’s mind, with Dusty fighting against fear and depression. We’re clearly in a completely different person’s mind here, so I guess everyone has a Dusty and Piper floating around.

The game opens with Dusty fighting a giant evil pig representing fear of the dark, but the main plot is about fighting the Jester, the man’s lost sense of fun, who’s been crushed under adult responsibilities and is now going rogue and attempting to tear the Moral Compass apart in order to be heard again. Brief illustrated cut scenes of the outside world make it pretty clear the strain that all the extra work is putting on the relationships of the unnamed man Dusty and Piper are knocking around in, but it’s never clear what dangerously irresponsible things he’s considering doing under the Jester’s influence. The game’s ultimate message is that the Jester is good and the man should listen, but there’s also an implication that the Jester will wreck the man’s life if they keep taking desperate action, so the character arc for Dusty is about learning to trust and work with the Jester rather than fighting to the death, so it makes sense to focus on the damage done by the Jester’s absence over what they’ll do if they win by defeating Dusty. Still would’ve been nice to see, though.

The game is a hack-y slash-y roll-y around-y sort of game with frequent but only mildly challenging puzzles. We aren’t at full Lego Star Wars mindless puzzle levels, but it’s, like, one notch up from that. The game’s major selling point is its emphasis on music. Certain enemies attack in time with the combat music, although most do not, and bosses will sing songs at you while you fight them. This is a neat idea, but it suffers from the problem that all the songs are really forgettable. On the one hand, if you want a musical action-adventure game, you aren’t getting one anywhere else, and Figment 2 (and, I assume, the first Figment) are musical action-adventure games. I’ve given Assassin’s Creed games passing marks for historical tourism to eras I otherwise don’t get to interact with much in other video games, like the French Revolution, even when they’re mediocre in basically every other way, and objectively that’s the category Figment 2 falls into: Flawed, but it does deliver on its core premise.

But Figment 2 is flawed. Its story is that of the overworked husband and father who needs to spend more time with his family. Serviceable but rote, not a bad thing, but not a redeeming quality either. The gameplay is the same, a half-dozen different enemies and your standard roll-and-attack third person melee gameplay that’s been the norm for something like a decade now. It’s hard enough you can’t sleep through it but easy enough that I don’t get stuck on it, which is good, because it’s pretty forgettable so drawing attention to itself would be bad. The thing where the music is diegetic and enemies attack you in rhythm with it is new, but the music itself is the same serviceable-but-not-a-selling-point tier as everything else.

If you love the idea of this game’s core premise, then nothing about is bad enough to be disqualifying. Unfortunately, I’m not super into its core premise. I was willing to give it a chance because it was under 5 hours (about 3 hours and 20 minutes for my playthrough), but having tried it out, yeah, this series is not aimed nearly directly at me enough to overshadow its flaws.

Stray Gods is a visual novel where the gimmick is that it’s a musical and some of your dialogue choices are made mid-song, changing the course of the song. I don’t normally like visual novels, but not because I’m opposed to them in principle, just because I find it very annoying to advance the dialogue with a mouseclick every two fucking sentences. The game keeps asking me for inputs and it keeps not mattering. Stray Gods isn’t like this – the scenes just play out, voice-acted, until they reach a point where a decision is needed. Sometimes that decision is just to ask X or Y optional question or go ahead with the main plot immediately, and sometimes it’s an important choice with consequences for the plot, but either way, whenever I’m asked to interact, it’s because there’s a decision, minor or major, about how this story is going to unfold. It’s weird to me that this makes such a big difference, but it does – I’ve struggled to get through visual novels with really good writing in the past but have no difficulty getting through Stray Gods.

The premise of Stray Gods is that you are Grace, twenty-something in a band who doesn’t know what to do with her life who busts out an I-Want song, which a woman named Calliope steps in to complete. Later that night, Calliope shows up at Grace’s apparent bleeding from a mortal wound, dies in Grace’s arms, and passes on her god powers to Grace, because it turns out this Calliope is the Calliope, a muse. Calliope’s god power is that she can force people to bare their emotions in song, and Grace has inherited that power. So that song at the beginning was fully diegetic, but hey, Grace is a musician and also Calliope presumably used her god powers at some point, although implicitly only after she heard Grace start to sing. Anyway, since a god died in your apartment, the gods in charge (Apollo, Athena, Persephone, and Aphrodite – there’s been some vacancies) decide it was probably your fault, but give you a week to track down the real killer to prove your innocence. Musical shenanigans ensue!

That’s all the first, like, 45 minutes of this 5-hour game, so it’s not really spoilers, but beware that spoilers will ensue. The rest of my non-spoilery review for if you’re reading this to see if you want to play it is that the voice acting and illustration are great, the music is technically very impressive for how it interacts with your dialogue options to result in many, many different versions of each song all of which make sense and flow with each other, but in terms of actual soundtrack quality the good songs are heavily frontloaded. Pan’s song, Persephone’s (first) song, and Medusa’s song are killer, but then Orpheus’ and the final confrontation with the killer and your accuser near the end are a disappointment. Spoilers go below the break.

I couldn’t find a place to put this in the main Far Cry 5 Is Dumb post, so I’m splitting it out instead.

In the Jacob Seed sub-plot of Far Cry 5, you get kidnapped like three times. This happens in all of the game’s three sub-plots, and the only one where it even slightly works is in Faith’s, because there it’s unclear how physically captured you are by any of her drug sequences and it’s totally plausible that Faith is actually just talking to you over the radio (as video game enemies do) while you’re high on the large ambient Bliss in her region of the map. Here in Jacob’s region, you get physically kidnapped for multiple days on multiple occasions and at no point does Jacob just fucking kill you, but instead does some sci-fi Manchurian Candidate bullshit. He does succeed in getting you to kill the region’s resistance leader Eli, but he was winning against Eli and he is losing against you. His threat prioritization is totally backwards here.

Unlike Bliss, a made-up mind control drug, Jacob’s mind control is supposed to work on classical conditioning. But, like, classical conditioning doesn’t work like that. Training someone to salivate in response to a bell is not the same as playing music that induces a mindless murder fugue. At best, and this is a reach but it’s close enough to real that the game could still call itself gritty with a straight face, you might be able to condition someone to draw and fire a gun in response to a specific stimulus. Even that faces serious limitations, though. You’d need the stimulus to be rare enough that they don’t train themselves out of it once released from your program, like, if it’s a certain birdsong common to the area then they’ll get triggered at random and learn to suppress the reflex.

But then you also need to be able to play the stimulus at-will, so it does need to be something like a specific music track, except it also needs to be sufficiently loud and startling to trigger an immediate reaction, because classical conditioning does not erase decades of regular human social instincts with two weeks of training, so there’s going to be quite a bit of resistance to shooting anyone the target knows and cares about, even a little. Even a half-second of hesitation is enough for the conscious mind to catch up with what’s going on and override the reflex, because no matter how much classical conditioning you do it’s still a reflex. Like, have you ever reflexively started driving somewhere more familiar than your intended destination because you just switched to auto-pilot while on a familiar part of the route, reflexively punched someone in a haunted house, or looked for HUD elements for half a second in a real life situation that resembled a video game you’d been playing a lot? Classical conditioning is just building in instincts like that on purpose.

Militaries do use that for the much more macabre purpose of training soldiers to reflexively aim and shoot lethal weapons at a human silhouette (you know those shooting range challenges in shooter games where little human silhouettes pop out from behind cover? Yeah, that’s why those use human silhouettes and not circular targets – it’s about training reflexes in response to stimulus, not accuracy). But there’s no secret turbo-hardcore version of this that ingrains the instinct any deeper than what video games accomplish. The idea that a slideshow and some music repeated long enough will cause a victim to find and assassinate a specific target is as stupid as the idea that you would actually search for or hallucinate stealth indicators while crouching in tall grass because you’ve played a lot of Assassin’s Creed games lately. You totally might reflexively search for icons indicating if you’ve been spotted in that situation, but a half-second later your conscious mind catches up, knows immediately that this is ridiculous, and discards the idea. No amount of additional trauma in the conditioning process will change that (it can build in-group loyalty for other reasons, so there are tactically sound reasons for a psychopath cultist to do it, but it won’t make the conditioning any more potent).

And when the game tries to use video game conditioning on the player, it’s bad at it and it didn’t work on me. As I said earlier, games totally can condition reflexes into players and it’s a foundational part of many common kinds of gameplay. Far Cry 5 tries to take advantage of this, by having sequences where you’re being conditioned where you have to use provided weapons to clear a ghostly hallucination type area of enemies within a time limit, and since it’s not a real location, it involves things like a short labyrinth full of enemies who shoot at you when you turn the corner. This does indeed train the player to follow a specific path and shoot enemies immediately after turning the corner, without allowing their conscious mind to catch up and process what they’re seeing. In the final conditioning sequence, the last enemy you have to kill is the leader of this region’s resistance. They’re trying to do a thing where the player actively participates in being brainwashed into killing the resistance leader Manchurian Candidate style.

Except each conditioning sequence is slightly longer than the last one, adding an additional section to the end. So what I was actually trained to do was to be on high alert for new information as I was reaching the end of the familiar part of the sequence. I knew from previous training sequences that they got extended each time, that it was easy to get lost in a new environment (especially since these hallucination environments make no sense, which makes them harder to navigate), so far from reflexively snap-shotting enemies who were exactly where I expected them to be, I was paying a lot of attention to the new environment and noticed immediately that these guys were ragdolling and leaving behind corpses instead of vanishing into a puff of smoke like the hallucinated foes in earlier parts of the sequence, which made it easy to guess what was going on. When I reached the named character with a unique model I’d been sent to assassinate, I waited out the clock to see if anything would happen. This just resets the sequence like any other failure, so fine, I went through with the assassination to progress the plot (it’s not like it would’ve been hard to program in a slight branching path here, we’re at the end of the Jacob Seed sub-plot and the sub-plots are completely silo’d off from each other, geographically separated and with no characters in common, so the death or survival of the resistance leader would’ve had no impact on the rest of the game).

If they’d made the resistance leader one of those guys in the labyrinth, placed in the exact position as one of the hallucinated enemies from the earlier sequence, odds are fantastic they could’ve successfully conditioned me into turning a corner and blasting him without even thinking about it. But not only do they vastly overstate what classical conditioning can accomplish, they aren’t even capable of using classical conditioning competently for the things it can do.

And this kind of thing bugs me because it usually stems from the belief that being evil grants you magic superpowers, which is one of the most persistent obviously false beliefs which make the world a worse place. Compassion and empathy are not inventions of civilization. They are instincts which we evolved because they work. We also evolved instincts for selfishness and aggression because there are other situations where those work, and you can do a lot better strategically than blindly trusting your instincts all the time anyway, but blindly acting against your instincts all the time is not an effective way to accomplish anything. “Evil = superpowers” is the kind of stupid worldview held by someone too dumb to operate in the real world where you have to be observant and analytical and figure out when to use one approach or the other, so they hard commit to one strategy all the time and hope that it works out.