Spook’s Review FAR CRY 5: The Bad. Part 4.

This is the last of the bad. Honestly, it’s a good game, but I wanted to rant about these things, and it’s my blog, so.. Also, I’m not discussing the ending. Enough people are doing that.

Give me some of that old time, non-denominational fanatical religion.

                Our enemy is the cult, the Project at Eden’s Gate, the Peggies.

They’re fanatics, driven by their faith in Joseph Seed, and carrying out the reaping with utmost and driven religious zeal. They’re meant to represent the dangers of blind belief, or so we’re told but..

See, the problem with the cult’s religion is that the cult doesn’t have a religion. Its entire purpose is to be ‘cult’ and to say troubling stuff to you, but I think a core problem the game developers have is that their playerbase is diverse, so what to one person is crazy heresy is to another person what he heard in Sunday service.  

See. To be troubling, they have to actually be troubling. To have beliefs shook, you need to know what someone’s beliefs are and say, do or demonstrate something that shakes them.

You could argue that the PEG are focused on trying to shake up the simple idea that ‘things will be ok’ and you can even argue the endings tie in with that theme. It’s not a bad position to take, the problem is that to truly oppose the guys we need to know what they stand for, and what they stand for is self contradictory.

See, we have three lieutenants under Joseph Seed: Jacob, John and Faith.

Jacob opposes a ‘cull the herd’ ethos where the weak are ‘culled’ to make the strong stronger and strong enough to survive what they have to endure.  

John takes the approach that one must endure enormous pain to cleanse themselves of sin.

Faith’s approach is that one needs to essentially be drugged up immensely and just ‘give in to the bliss.’

These philosophies don’t work together, at least from the perspective of a consistent theology. The followers admittedly seem to admit this when they mention how you should be glad that you got captured by John instead of Faith or Jacob. But, if the cult is positing a theology under their leader of Joseph Seed, they need to be consistent don’t they?

They aren’t, which makes them feel like they’re trying to hit the high end of ‘the evils of belief’ without bothering to think of why anyone would sign up for this particularly whacked out bit of philosophy, but..

We might touch on that when I start discussing what I liked about Far Cry 5.