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Has there ever been a series as tonally diverse as Far Cry? Sure, the likes of Final Fantasy, Assassin's Creed, and BioShock have drastically changed their settings, genres, and flavours to various degrees, but the feelings they invoke remained largely the same. Far Cry, however, went from a light, goofy shooting adventure about aliens on a tropical island to a sombre dissection of the African blood diamond trade, to a satirical take on the modern open-world shooter, to an extraordinarily goofy parody of "edgy" 80s sci-fi culture. Now, with Far Cry 4, Ubisoft has settled on a tonally ambiguous Himalayan adventure that rests in the nebulous place between drama and comedy, light and dark, satire and sincerity. It's not a place often explored by the medium and that makes it as difficult to decipher as its wildly enigmatic cover.Its opening cinematic - revealed at Microsoft's E3 press conference - depicts a blond man in a magenta suit slaughtering a bus full of passengers awaiting entry into the fictitious country of Kyrat. Rather than kill the shocked player character, he offers him a hug then suggests that he's a party guest. "You and I are gonna tear s*** up!" he exclaims as The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" bleeds its way onto the scene, lending the proceedings something of an upbeat, exciting edge. It's a beguiling opening to a game that bewilderingly blends shockingly matter-of-fact violence in a war-torn region with the cartoonish theatrics and talking villain of a Quentin Tarantino movie. I'm reminded of a Paul Verhoeven film like Robocop where it's simultaneously extremely dark while also just too extraordinary to be taken solely on face value. Lots of games blend humour and drama, but it's usually obvious when you're supposed to laugh and when you're supposed to cry. In Far Cry 4, it's never clear how you're supposed to react to anything.
"That's the nicest thing I've heard all day," laughs Far ry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson when I tell him this. "What we're going for in a lot of ways is like the blackest form of humour where you think in your head 'oh, that's pretty funny', but we're not going for laughs. We're going for that awkward intersection of serious people doing outlandish things."
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