Far Cry 5 is the most frustrating game I’ve played this year, but it has one brilliant mission

The fifth numbered entry in the broad series of nature-and-tourism themed open-world shooters, Far Cry 5 is a mess. Its story doesn’t make sense, its themes don’t cohere, and it fails to do any justice to its real-world setting, Montana, or the politics and people that comprise it. It does not, in any sense, represent progress for the world of big, expensive video games.

Except for one moment. There’s a single mission that is everything Far Cry 5 isn’t — warm, humanistic, real. And it’s a mission that makes me think that, perhaps at the margins, this messy game has something to offer to gaming’s future.

It occurs at what will be, for most players, roughly a third of the way through the game, as they start to wrap up the siege on John...

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