Video Game / Far Cry 5

Trust. Pray. Obey.

"Oh, my loving sinner, when the world's on fire,
Don't you want God's bosom to be your pillow?
Tide me over, in the Rock of Ages,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me..."

— "When the World's on Fire" ("Rock of Ages")

Far Cry 5 is the sixth major installment in the Far Cry franchise, taking place in the fictional county of Hope County, Montana.

The game follows a sheriff’s deputy who is fighting against a religious cult called the Project at Eden’s Gate, led by the charismatic Joseph Seed, who believe the world is ending and are forcing the residents of Hope County to convert to their cause. It was released on March 27th, 2018 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

As part of the game's promotion, Ubisoft partnered with Asylum Entertainment to produce Far Cry 5: Inside Eden's Gate, a live-action short film that serves as a prequel to the game. The film sees Greg Bryk reprise his role as Joseph Seed from the game.

The game features three DLCs which, following the trend set by Blood Dragon and Primal, change the gameplay and setting significantly (albeit sold as DLC instead of a standalone game):

• Hours of Darkness: Taking place during the Vietnam War, the DLC has you play Wendell Redler recounting the time he was stranded behind enemy lines.
• Lost on Mars: Changing the setting from Montana to Mars, the DLC has you play Nick Rye as you fight off a Martian invasion.
• Dead Living Zombies The final DLC, taking the form of B-List director Guy Marvel's attempts at pitching various Zombie Apocalypse films.

A direct continuation of the events of the main game, Far Cry: New Dawn, was announced at the 2018 Game Awards. It was released in early 2019.

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Far Cry 5 provides examples of:

Tropes A-F

• Abnormal Ammo: The Shovel Launcher uses shovels as ammo.
• Action Girl:
  • The protagonist is customizable and may be male or female.
  • The player can recruit various women to join the resistance, such as Grace Armstrong, a veteran soldier and Gold Medal-winning Olympic Sharpshooter.
• Actor Allusion: Jacob Seed is a sadistic, intimidating villain with prominent facial blistering/scars voiced by Mark Pellegrino.
• A.K.A.-47: As with several earlier games in the series, not all of the guns have their real names: among other things, the "MS16" is an M14, the "A-99" is a Tec-9, both of the .50 caliber rifles have had their names changed, and the "AR-C" is a fictional full-auto hybrid of an AR-15 and an ACR.
• All for Nothing: The two possible story endings both end this way for the player and their allies, as Hope County is either nuked if Joseph is arrested, or you fall under the influence of Joseph's brainwashing and go on a murderous spree if you let him go. The ending where you arrest Joseph has this for him as well, as he was unable to "save" anyone except for you despite his massive campaign, the one person he hates more than anyone else. The "secret ending" has the player abandon the attempt to take Joseph Seed into custody entirely, correctly guessing that going through with arresting the leader of a fanatical and well-armed cult in the middle of their own stronghold will not end well.
• The Alliance: The Resistance can be broadly seen as this, as it is not a singular group, but a broad assemblage of small factions, one for each region of Hope County, who happen to share the common goal of opposing the Heralds. The Junior Deputy leads the Resistance by virtue of the fact that they are the one who managed to coordinate all these groups into a unified force to capably take down the cult.
• Alliterative Name: Jerome Jeffries and Mary May.
• Alternate Timeline: According to the developers of Far Cry: New Dawn, the deputy created one when they attempted to arrest Joseph Seed at the beginning of the game by triggering the prophesied nuclear apocalypse. It allows future numbered games to be set in the present day.
• Amazing Freaking Grace: Might as well be Joseph's Leit Motif; he starts singing it almost every time he actually shows up in person. It's also used on several independent occasions throughout the story and in at least one trailer.
• Ambiguous Ending: With Far Cry: New Dawn effectively confirming what happens after the Resist Ending, the Walk Away Ending is the one ending that leaves the most open-ended questions. What will happen when the Sheriff and the Deputies return back to Missoula to get support? But more pressingly, when Only You began playing, did the Deputy kill the rest of the team? Or were they restrained before that point? Fittingly enough, the game Smashes to Black before we get a proper answer.
• Amoral Attorney: Joseph Seed's brother, John, is a lawyer who has acquired much of the land in Hope County for Eden's Gate.
• Analogy Backfire: When Nick Rye joins the Hired Gun roster, he says, "You and me are going to be like Butch and Sundance!". His wife points out that Butch and Sundance both get killed at the end of the movie.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Some mission rewards include new clothes for the Deputy, usually with some visual connection to said mission or the characters involved in it. Weekly Live Events always have an outfit that gets unlocked by having online players as a group reach a number of successes on the challenge.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Crafting permanent upgrades as it existed in the past games has been abolished, with the related upgrades folded into a reworked experience perks system.
  • Hunting (and, new to the series, fishing) is now the main way of obtaining Shop Fodder, allowing the player to focus on getting money when they need it instead of having to loot every enemy religiously just to stay on top of equipment upgrades (looting enemies now only gives ammo and petty cash).
  • Some thrown explosives and buff serums are still crafted, but this is done from the weapon wheel, and the player will quickly be swimming in components and there are side missions that grand reduced crafting costs for various items as rewards.
  • When driving/flying a vehicle with limited-ammo weapons, the ammo can be instantly refilled for a small fee. It makes no physical sense whatsoever but it makes ammo management far less tedious.
  • Every location now works as a fast-travel destination, not just the handful of outposts you need to conquer first, which spares you an enormous amount of travel time and frustrating random battles.
  • Vehicle missions can turn into a chore if said vehicle is too fragile (which most of them are). The Auto-Repair perk gives all vehicles quickly Regenerating Health, making these missions a lot less annoying for a reasonable price in perk points. Some Guns For Hire will also have the Mechanic skill, which provides a similar benefit.
  • Being reduced to zero health merely incapacitates the Player Character instead of incurring a Game Over, and as long as at least one active Gun For Hire is close by, chances are good they'll revive the Deputy to continue the fight none the worse for the wear.
  • If you get annoyed by having to drive to places, or in the mountains having to get a helicopter, just take the Wingsuit and Airdrop perks. From the starting altitude of an Airdrop fast travel, you can go a very long way at a much faster rate than you can in a plane or helicopter.
  • If you aren't happy with your character, you can completely redo their appearance and even change their sex at any time once the tutorials are done, and the only downsides are a trip to the main menu and the fact that bought clothes are only unlocked for the gender you bought them as. Other than that, the game continues from the previous save file like nothing had happened.
  • When in stealth mode, most Guns for Hire are rendered basically invisible to enemies, even when they strut around in their faces, and will resort to stealth takedowns when ordered to go after a target. They can only be detected if they're caught killing an enemy on the player's orders.
• Apocalypse Cult: Joseph Seed believes that the collapse of society is imminent and that he has been chosen to save the people of Hope County (whether they want it or not).
• Apocalypse How: The Resist Ending ends with what could be anywhere from Class 1 to Class 4. New Dawn seems to indicate it being Class 1.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Bliss, a fantastical, fictionalized version of real-life deliriants like Datura and Scopolamine. It's difficult to describe what this drug is not capable of: among other things, it can brainwash people, allow long-range telepathy and physical control, induce very specific hallucinations, and in overdose can induce a permanent zombie-like state.
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction:
  • Pivotal story missions always deprive you of your GFH/FFH backup, forcing you to solo enemy forces in company strength. Sometimes them being unable to support you is justified to some extent. Often it isn't.
  • The three story missions in Jacob's stomping ground prevent you from using your own weapons and play out like a Rakyat Trial instead, specifically the one that switched your weapon every twenty seconds or so. There's no forced switch in this case, but every mission consists of several rooms with a specific gun with very limited ammo on offer near the entrance, and unless you're a real good shot you'll have little choice but to grab whatever the game gives you when you run dry.
• Artificial Stupidity: The AI for friendly characters is remarkably bad at getting out of the way of vehicles you're driving, standing still in areas that are on fire, and walking through your field of fire as you're shooting. You'll have a lot of cases where you'll need to revive you Gun For Hire because they chose to stand still while shouting that the fire was spreading as it engulfed them instead of actually moving away from it. Guns For Hire will also occasionally climb into a parked vehicle and drive off for no apparent reason, and this includes quest-critical vehicles, causing you to automatically fail the quest due to it being taken too far away from you.
• Artistic License – Biology: Bee nests look like wasp nests.
• Artistic License – Explosives: In the "Resist" ending, the Deputy and all of their companions are sent on a race against the clock to get to the bunker as Hope County is decimated in nuclear warfare. The player is treated to hellish sites like mushroom clouds in the distance, the countryside erupting into flames, and the world going from normal and blue to burnt orange in one flash. It's hard to tell just how far the group is from the bombs, but around three nukes go off in the same range. The group would likely have been incinerated in seconds, if not completely wiped out by the shockwaves that followed—they also look straight-on at the blasts without getting blinded.
  • It's even more blatant in Co-op mode, where the second player rides along in an ATV, completely unfazed as everything around them burns.
• Artistic License – Military: Grace is expressly identified as an army veteran. While this is perfectly possible, it is also strongly implied that she is a seasoned sniper. This is less so; sniper training (much less actual sniper duty) is available only to combat arms soldiers, and the army had no female combat arms soldiers until 2017. If Far Cry 5 takes place in 2018, this wouldn't be enough time for her to have trained for and completed a single deployment as a sniper.
• Artistic License – Law: Ever since the Waco Siege in 1993, American law enforcement have been very careful about how they address issues with cults and religious organizations with any significant following, and have more or less completely rewritten their books regarding them. Landing a helicopter in the middle of the cult's headquarters and hauling the leader out in handcuffs essentially violates every rule in the rewritten book, and it is amazing that marshal Burke got any sort of federal approval to arrest Seed the way he did.
  • The game sort of justifies the unusual arrest procedure by mentioning that the roads to Hope County have been cut off by the cult, meaning the feds can't just roll up to Joseph's compound and lay siege to it. They have go in via helicopter despite it being significantly riskier because that's the only option for transportation at the moment. It still doesn't make sense that they're only sending five agents into the middle of a de facto lawless warzone where they're expecting to face dozens (if not hundreds) of Joseph's armed followers,^*The aforementioned Waco Siege had a multi-agency task force consisting of personnel from local, state, and federal agencies, working on conjunction and with mechanized backup up to and including military demolition vehicles which were essentially tanks for all intents and purposes, and this was all to besiege a single building, let alone an entire freaking county. who the government is aware have already committed numerous acts of violence and murder (some of which is documented on video, no less). It's shocking that the feds didn't assemble a larger task force, as they presumably knew the situation in Hope County was so volatile that it could easily result in the most deadly confrontation between the state and a religious movement since the Mormon rebellion.
  • The plan being ill-conceived can also be partially attributed to Marshal Burke being a massive boob and not thinking it through... although there were presumably other federal agents beside him were involved in its creation, so unless they were also boobs it doesn't make sense why they wouldn't have said something.
• Artistic License – Ornithology:
  • Bald eagles in the game are able to carry large animals such as wild boar. While they are large by bird standards (their average wingspan being 7.5 feet), they're not nearly big enough to carry away a multi-hundred pound wild pig.
  • Real turkeys can attack humans but not lethally.
• As the Good Book Says...:
  • The trailer introducing Pastor Jeffries has him appearing to read from his bible, specifically his words seem to be a version of Jeremiah 23:1 at least to begin with.
  • A sign outside Paster Jeffries' church says "Today's reading: Jeremiah 23:16", indicating the beginning of a section of the Bible warning against false prophets who "speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord".
• Ascended Meme: The shovel is memetically regarded as one of the best weapons in the game, as it's extremely deadly when thrown (to wit, Heavies can be killed with one thrown shovel, compared to the usual massive firepower required to bring them down). The fifth Live Event introduces a Shovel Launcher as a prize.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The game offers two groups of heavy weapons - LMGs and rocket launchers - and although rocket launchers are always a blast to use, the only thing they're really good at is shooting down aircraft. Unfortunately for them, that's something machine guns can do almost as efficiently while also being extremely useful for just about anything else.
  • The slingshot. It's the first weapon of its kind to appear in the series, and the first weapon to enable using rocks as ammo. Yet for some reason it's not one of the weapons made available from the start of the game and by that time you should already have enough experience to forego its three gimmicks. Shooting rocks at a distance is nice but you can already throw them and unless you're playing multiplayer the range won't do much that just killing the target would, bows and silencers should be well within your reach so the arrows are kind of pointless, and if you try killing something with the rocks you're just giving yourself a handicap for fun.
  • Many specialists fall under this category.
    • Sharky and Hurk wield devastatingly powerful weapons with a considerable blast radius but are too stupid or crazy to give a damn about it. In a game full of enemies that attack in melee, trusting morons with a flamethrower or a rocket launcher to cover your ass is just asking for trouble.
    • Hurk's mum, Adelaide Drubman, is no threat to the player but so fragile in her Hellish Copter she will rarely be more than a distraction for the enemy before she's inevitably shot down.
    • Cheeseburger is a powerful melee fighter capable of one-shotting most human enemies, but let's face it, he's still just one squishy, unarmored bear with serious Leeroy Jenkins tendencies. Get into a firefight with more than three peggies with assault rifles and he won't notch more than one kill before being knocked out.
    • Grace is a peerless but fragile sharpshooter who can reliably take down a large number of peggies, but her rifle isn't silenced, so the moment she starts shooting, every enemy in the area knows where she is and charges her position (her fear ability rarely actually works). This can work out in your favor under some circumstances, but if you're the sneaky type, Jess Black is usually the better choice.
  • The Shovel Launcher. Yes, it's an RPG that shoots shovels that can send a cultist flying, but it requires dead on accuracy with iron sights, has a fairly poor range, and its unique ammunition has a very low reserve ammo count. On top of it all, that one shot isn't even silent and will alert enemies immediately.
• Ax-Crazy: Seed and his followers, being a cult of religious fanatics who believe in converting everyone in Hope County to their cult by force and killing everyone who resists.
  • The Cook, the villain of the sidequest "A Dish Served Cold" stands out as the most deranged character of the entire game even by the standards of Eden's Gate.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: Aside from literally killing dogs alongside their masters, the Project is running experiments on the local wildlife in an effort to turn them into controllable murder machines. The results are the Judges, Bliss-mutated predators (mostly wolves) that terrorize the countryside when they aren't hunting down the Resistance.
• Badass Boast:
  • All three character introductory trailers are capped off with one by the respective character being introduced.
    Mary May: And now what? They wanna take this place too? Fuck no. This place is ours.
    Nick Rye: Now, I may never have gone to war. But if them fuckin' peggies come after my family... I'm sure as Hell gon' give 'em one.
    Pastor Jeffries: Woe to the man who leads my flock astray. For if I am not their shepherd... then I must be the wolf.
  • Joseph Seed gets one at the very beginning. Either during the sermon or the confrontation, it all comes to a climax with this one phrase:
    The Father: God will not let you take me.
• Badass Crew: You can hire up to nine specialists plus three generic fighters to assist you on missions, although a maximum of two can accompany you at any given time.
• Badass Family:
  • Hurk returns in this game as one of the Guns for Hire, along with his mother Adelaide (who is a helicopter pilot) and his cousin Sharky (a pyromaniac with a flamethrower).
  • The Seed siblings serve as a villainous version of this.
• Badass in Distress:
  • Most specialists are in some sort of trouble when you go to recruit them, and some are actually trapped in dire circumstances and need you to bail them out. Also happens quite frequently to your Guns For Hire in regular gameplay because they're all Glass Cannons. A single melee fighter or predator is often enough to knock them out, forcing you to revive them lest they bleed out.
  • The Deputy gets captured by Joseph's Heralds with disturbing frequency. Sometimes they manage to escape on their own, but more often someone else shows up to break them out. And similar to the GFH mentioned above, the Deputy can get incapacitated in combat, which prompts the closest GFH to rush to their aid.
• Badass Preacher: Pastor Jerome Jeffries is a veteran of the Gulf War who had served as Hope County's Catholic parish priest for 15 years. He was one of the first people in Hope County to befriend Joseph Seed, but Joseph repaid that friendship by stealing Jerome's flock, then had him beaten and left for dead in the woods. Jerome survived and is now a member of the resistance.
• Bait-and-Switch: Each of the "Meet the Resistance" trailers start with the character doing something seemingly innocuous (filling a bottle, repairing an old crop duster, reading from the Bible) only to turn out that they're preparing for war (the bottle is for a Molotov Cocktail, the plane gets a minigun fixed to it, and the Bible has a gun hidden inside it).
• Batter Up!: Baseball bats are an available melee weapon, in wooden, aluminum and spiked varieties.
• Beard of Evil: Long beards are pretty common among the Project, and they're plenty evil.
• Bears Are Bad News:
  • In the trailer, a man is seen running through the wilderness with a bear in hot pursuit. In gameplay previews it's been shown that bears can and will randomly attack player characters, NPC allies, or foes, so watch out.
  • Subverted in one case when you are actually able to recruit one to your cause, complete with collar around its neck. Dutch remarks that Cheeseburger is a local celebrity, and might be more warmly welcomed than you.
• The Beastmaster: The player can recruit three creatures as "Fangs For Hire": Boomer the dog, Peaches the Cougar and Cheeseburger the Bear. Of course, the player doesn't tame any of them, they're already tame before you meet them. Jacob can also command wolves he calls "Judges" that he can sic on the Junior Deputy.
• Big Bad: Joseph Seed, the prophet of Eden's Gate, and the main antagonist of the game.
• Big Badass Rig: Large trucks are the biggest and most powerful ground vehicles available in the game, the best of which is probably the Widowmaker, a big rig with a blue and red flame paint job reminiscent of a certain famous truck and a pair of 50 caliber machine guns. Which are almost redundant because its size and power lets it ram most Peggie vehicles right off the road.
• Bittersweet Ending: Played with in regards to the Walk Away Ending. You manage to utterly cripple Joseph Seed's plans, but you wisely choose to walk away from Hope County to bring the government cracking down on the cult. However, an arguable Happy Ending Override takes place with the car's radio plays Jacob's trigger song, seemingly kicking in the Deputy's brainwashing as Whitehorse asks if you're okay. Everything Smashes to Black before we see what happens next, leaving the Sheriff and Deputies' fate up in the air. On top of that, it’s possible that nuclear war broke out anyway.
• Blatant Lies: The post game menus congratulate you for defeating Joseph and liberating all of Hope County- even though that's demonstrably false as it never happens successfully in any ending.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Several weapons like the Colt M1911, the sawed-off shotgun, the Skorpion SMG and the HTI anti-materiel rifle have gold-plated Prestige models, some with elaborate engravings to match. Their descriptions usually poke fun at how useless and pretentious this is.
• Blood-Stained Glass Windows: Several fights take place in and around churches and other religious buildings throughout the game. With the main enemies being insane religious nuts this trope was pretty much unavoidable. Naturally, two of the four main boss confrontations (John and Joseph himself) also happen at a church.
• Book Ends: In the Resist ending, there are several moments that mirror the opening of the game - there's a sequence where the player has to drive like hell (to escape the Peggies in the prologue, to escape the nuclear blasts in the ending), gets knocked out in a car crash, is dragged away after falling unconscious (by Dutch in the beginning, and by Joseph in the end), and wakes up handcuffed to a bed in Dutch's bunker (to be shortly freed by Dutch in the beginning... and to be trapped forever by Joseph Seed in the ending).
  • Not only this but several lines of dialogue are repeated:
  Sheriff: “Not every problem can be solved with a bullet, Marshall.”
  Joseph: “When are you going to realise that every problem cannot be solved with a bullet?”
  Joseph: “God is watching us. And He will judge you/us on what you/we choose in this moment.”
• Book Safe: Pastor Jeffries' Bible is actually hollow and has a revolver inside.
• Boom, Headshot!: It's always recommended to aim for the head, both for the massive damage bonus and because anyone who was killed with a headshot can't be revived by their allies.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: The Deputy gets automatically captured nine times over the course of the game, but all three villains want to "test" them or otherwise refuse to just kill them outright. This, of course, results in the Deputy killing all of them.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The AR-C assault rifle and the M1911 handgun are fairly average in damage compared to other weapons of their respective class. However, they are quite common from both friendlies and enemies and ammo for them are plentiful. Plus since you can customize your weapons with no attachment limitations and adjust the rate of fire in the weapon wheel/grid, the AR-C/M1911 combo not only remain a viable option for majority of situations but can also save a bit of cash in early parts of the game considering you start off with those.
  • For those who can use it well, The Compound Bow is an excellent close to mid-range stealth weapon which kills unarmored enemies in one-shot and can also be used with Fire and Explosive arrows. Unlike AR-C/M1911 a prepper stash side mission must be completed in Dutch's Island in order to obtain it from the start.
• Boss Battle: Similar to Far Cry Primal, the game has several boss battles, one against each of the major villains. Like the fight with Vaas in Far Cry 3, two and a half of them take place while you're in a hallucinatory state to explain why the bosses have "boss-like" abilities and can eat a large number of bullets. Faith and Joseph are the hallucinatory ones courtesy of Bliss, Jacob is the half until you’ve taken down the music beacons, and John is just that good at flying his plane.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • The best fishing pole in the game is unlocked by beating the state records in all the Hard fishing spots. Naturally, if you're able to do this there's not much the pole is actually useful for.
  • Jacob Seed's bolt-action .50 caliber sniper rifle has a unique paint scheme, but its stats are the same as a stock .50 cal and it can't be equipped with weapon mods, making it a much less useful gun.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: A recurring theme in the game, as the drug Bliss allows for near-instantaneous brainwashing of large groups of people. Also done in the more traditional manner to the player character courtesy of Jacob, which becomes a critical influence in one of the endings.
• Breakable Weapons: Melee weapons will break after a certain number of hits, with some being more durable than others. A perk can be unlocked to improve their durability across the board, but since they're so ubiquitous in the game world, it's usually not worth the cost.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • You can buy Silver Bars with real money, and use those bars to get weapons and vehicles immediately.
  • The Deluxe Pack and Season Pass come with weapons and vehicles that are available right from the beginning of the game, giving you a head start.
• Bullying a Dragon: The introductory scene looks less like an arrest and more like Marshal Burke want to flash his badge and weight around. He saw the tape and the sheriff warns him multiple time Seed is dangerous yet Burke try to have him arrested in his compound, in the middle of a night and with the smallest back up possible. Naturally things go really bad.
• But Thou Must!:
  • When John forces Jerome to officiate a forced confession from the Junior Deputy, saying "yes" will allow Jerome to pass the Deputy the gun in his Bible Book Safe, which they then use to send the cultists packing. If players wait too long, John will direct a nearby cultist to Pistol Whip Jerome to the floor before offering players the option to say "yes" again, with this repeating so long as players do not make that choice. If players refuse to say "yes" three times, Jerome will be knocked to the floor with enough force to dislodge the gun from the Bible, which the Deputy will then pick up and use, netting the same result as if players had chosen "yes" in the first place.
  • Many spots and moments in story missions are obvious traps the savvy gamer will instantly recognize as such, but you have no choice but to fall for them anyway to advance the narrative. Best exemplified in Jacob's final confrontation- even if the player recognizes Eli and doesn’t kill him, the mission will fail and there is no other way to continue but to kill him.
  • All three regions have a number of interactive cutscenes involving getting kidnapped by the cult. If the player knows how to avoid their intended triggers (a kidnapping team with tranquilizer rounds, fields of Bliss flowers, etc), the game will only go on for so long before just forcing the event to happen anyway. For instance, you might find yourself hit by a tranquilizer dart while several hundred feet in the air in a helicopter.
  • If you pick the "Walk Away" ending, the game won't advance the story and just restart the mission. You have to choose the "Resist" ending and doom the world to annihilation by factors beyond your control.
• Butt-Monkey: The game takes a disturbing amount of pleasure in subjecting the already pitiable angels to all sorts of darkly funny shenanigans. Whenever a not-so-serious mission needs expendable cannon fodder, you can bet a bunch of angels will show up to take the worst of it.
  • Special mention to Sharky's recruitment mission. Lighting people on fire and burning them alive? Horrifying. Lighting people on fire and burning them alive while Disco Inferno by the Trammps plays from giant speakers set up all over the arena? Hilarious.
• Call-Back:
  • The game seems to have quite a lot of influences from Far Cry 2, with the non-linear mission structure, ability to recruit mercenary buddies with unique personalities (also similar to Far Cry 2, the game's final battle involves you fighting all your former allies due to them being brainwashed by Seed), as well as ending with an Everybody Dies Downer Ending.
  • The opening setup is reminiscent of the very first game in the series. After narrowly escaping an attack by the enemy, the protagonist encounters a friendly character who spends the game as their Voice with an Internet Connection, and tells them to change their distinctive outfit because the enemy is looking for them (in the first game, it's Jack covering his red Hawaiian shirt with some body armor; here, it's the Deputy getting rid of their uniform entirely and putting on some average street clothes).
  • The Cannon has appeared in three Far Cry games now, being the only Signature weapon from Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 to make it into FC5's Prestige weapon roster.
  • Several references are made to ancient Wenja rituals.
  • Hurk's shrine in the backyard of Fort Drubman includes a stack of boxes apparently packed with souvenirs he took from his adventures, separately labeled "Rook Island shit", "Kyrat shit", and even "Oros shit".^*Either Hurk is secretly a consumer of ancient history or the devs were just having fun because Oros has not been called that for over 10,000 years, rather the land it consisted of is presently part of one of several countries, possibly Ukraine, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Serbia, etc., etc.
• The Cameo: Agent Willis Huntley puts in an appearance for a single side mission, and apparently he took another level in jerkass since the events of Far Cry 4. His monologues indicates that the director of the CIA, and perhaps even the POTUS himself, may have incriminating ties to the Seeds, although what those are is left unspecified. The cult have connections with people in big places might partially explain why the federal government hasn't stepped in to restore order in Hope county.
• Cassandra Truth: Nothing but an easily missable radio snippet hints at the ending, except for Joseph's apocalyptic rantings. But there's absolutely no way in hell that the crazy cult leader, who is spouting off the same thing every crazy cult leader says, can be right, could there? Wrong.
• Central Theme: Always think through your actions before running into something, and sometimes inactivity is the best option. Both endings have the Deputy's allies dying to either nukes or to the Deputy themselves, the only ending that avoids this fate is the secret ending, where the Deputy refuses to put Joseph in handcuffs and Sheriff Whitehorse agrees to leave so they can get reinforcements from the National Guard.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: You can swap the Deputy's clothes and even change the style and color of their haircut at any time, including while in open combat. The question of why you should do so is another matter, considering they're purely cosmetic and you can't even see most of them.
• Character Customization: The game lets you customize the look and gender of your character rather than sticking you with a set protagonist like in Far Cry 3 and 4. Surprisingly for a first-person game, some pre-order packs include jackets and hats.
• Church Militant: The Eden's Gate cult has its own militia equipped with automatic weapons, rocket launchers, and even technicals.
• Christianity is Catholic: The cult talks a lot about the seven deadly sins, Joseph Seed is carrying a rosary (albeit it doesn't look like a Catholic rosary, and more like a an Orthodox prayer rope) but most of the real life examples the cult takes from have been ofshoots of Seventh Day Adventism or Latter-Day-Saints.
• Closed Circle: The game takes place in a geographically isolated and economically overlooked area of middle America with an extremely low population; by closing the few roads leading out of the valley and cutting the few major phone lines, Eden's Gate is able to essentially take over the valley and be assured it'd be at least a few weeks before anyone on the outside notices. The Sheriff's dispatcher is also The Mole for the cult, so no one in authority knows that the Sheriff and his posse are actually trapped in Hope County. Also the Deputy can't just walk to the nearest unoccupied town due to the impassible wilderness terrain and the fact that even if the Deputy were somehow able to survive such a hike without survival training or supplies by the time they'd make it the cult would have already killed their hostages and caused all manner of chaos and destruction.
• Clueless Deputy: Averted. The deputy is a One-Man/One-Woman Army who leads the resistance against Eden's Gate.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: The game's story mode can be played by two players cooperatively.
• Cold Sniper: Grace Armstrong, overlapping with Friendly Sniper for being an ally to the player character. Jacob Seed is a much more straightforward example.
• Combat Medic: All NPCs can revive dying allies as long as the victim wasn't killed with a headshot. It's one of the reasons you should never leave home without at least one ground-bound GFH or FFH — they will revive you as well in case you go down.
• The Conspiracy: During his brief cameo, Willis vaguely alludes to the Seeds having some sort of past relationship with the CIA and possibly the current sitting president. The full implications of this are left unexplored, but this could possibly explain how the cult was able to accrue power for years without the federal government ever stepping in to restore order in Hope county.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • Since all non-explosive weapons can now be silenced (yes, even machine guns), the entire handgun and submachine gun categories have lost the sole selling point they had in previous Far Cry titles. There's nothing they can do that a decent assault rifle or shotgun couldn't do better, with the game-breaking-as-ever M79 grenade launcher being the only exception.
  • In a similar vein, bows and slingshots lose any relevance the moment you slap a silencer on your assault rifle and get the perk points for killing with bows.
• Cosmetic Award: Some of the weekly Live Event challenge rewards are just reskins of normal guns.
• Crapsack World: Careful listening lets you realize that the apocalyptic Resist ending isn't quite as out of nowhere as it seems. Specifically, it is stated that Moscow was nuked during Middle East peace talks. While the aggressor is unknown, Russia suspects America, and North Korea goes completely dark after the nuking.
• Crazy-Prepared: Considering the sheer number of survival bunkers, armories, and supply caches littered all throughout Hope County, it's safe to say pretty much all of the Hope County residents were preparing for something. If the Project had kept to themselves instead of trying to forcibly assimilate everyone else, most of the county probably could've weathered the apocalypse just fine without their meddling.
• Crazy Survivalist: Inverted. The Whitetail Mountains are home to survivalists who oppose the Eden's Gate cult and will serve as allies in the game.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The peggies employ some spectacularly brutal methods of torture and execution, evidenced by victims that were strung up on a rack and apparently beaten, flogged, cut, forcibly tattooed and impaled with half a dozen thick wooden or metal beams. People burned to death are also a fairly common sight. You can turn the tables on these sickos by running them over with a tractor mulcher or flash-cooking their bodies with an alien microwave cannon to make them explode in a huge cloud of blood, if you feel like shooting them or blowing them up with explosives is insufficient payback.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Not far from Fall's End lives some nutcase named Larry who subscribes to just about every conspiracy theory there is, but particularly the ones involving aliens. Help him out with his three easy side missions and witness him getting teleported away in a flash of green light, leaving nothing behind but a pair of Smoldering Shoes and the Magnopulser, arguably the best short-range weapon against organic targets in the game.
• Cult: The Project at Eden's Gate, a violent sect of Christianity led by a charismatic prophet who preaches societal collapse that have somehow managed to take over an entire county.
• Cutscene Incompetence: A Far Cry regular returns, though this time around it might more accurately be termed Cutscene Indolence. There are a huge number of cutscenes where your character passively observes what's happening despite having every reason to intervene or cut things short. While some of them are justified, for instance the protagonist is in a drug-induced haze, many are not: the Deputy is apparently so polite that they won't interrupt even their enemy's psychotic, self-justifying monologues. To compound the player's frustration, many of the cutscenes are unskippable.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Joseph Seed, despite being an ordinary man, is able to walk away completely unharmed from both a helicopter crash and a car crash: in both instances, everyone else in the vehicles with him was knocked out or killed. On top of that, following the car crash in the Resist ending, he's able to slip his handcuffs, overpower Dutch Roosevelt, and carry you inside the bunker before you wake back up even though you violently subdued him before taking him into custody.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Exploited by Jacob Seed and the game in order to make you assassinate Eli. His 'capture' missions involve waking up in a weird house, and fighting one's way through a bunch of Mooks by picking up new guns as you go. The object is to shoot the final target, which in the first two instances is just a blank mannequin. By the third time you run the gauntlet, you're so used to the concept, most players won't even have realised the final target had changed to Eli until it was too late.
• Dark Action Girl: Women Mooks fight in the cult’s ranks as well. The Resistance has their own in Jess Black, your compound-bow-wielding, hate-filled killer of a companion.
• Dark Messiah: Main antagonist Joseph Seed definitely fits the bill. He is convinced that the end of the world is imminent and has taken it upon himself to save as many souls in Hope County as possible. To that end, he has rallied a massive army of extremists to deal with those who don't share his vision, using violence and intimidation to get his way.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to how both Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 ultimately shows that the protagonists are redeemable and the villain got its deserved comeuppance, or possible ways of redemption in one of the endings of the fourth game, and how in pretty much any prior game of the series, the world seems to be an okay place outside where you're in, the world in Far Cry 5 is Crapsack World incarnate. You're here in a supposedly isolated county within the United States itself under the rule of a drug-making one influential mean crazy cult which not only well-armed with military grade weaponry, but also rule over both the land and skies of the place, in passing radios mention what is implied to be nuclear war, what with Moscow being nuked, and the instigating factor being as petty as terrorist attacks, and none of the endings allow you to succeed in your objectives, with one even showing that The Extremist Was Right.
• Deadpan Snarker: With Agent Willis reduced to a brief cameo, it's unknown who's responsible for this game's item descriptions, but they're both as snarky as ever and riddled with Shout-Outs.
• Death from Above: In addition to the helicopter gunships, mortars and eagles known from previous titles, FC 5 introduces a variety of planes armed with machine guns, rockets and bombs. Late-game Elite Mooks tend to make your life miserable by strafing and bombing you with their WW II warplanes, but you can get back at them by jumping in a plane yourself or calling in your two airborne companions as backup.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Attempting to shoot Joseph Seed in the head in the car during the "Resist Ending" will result in a nuke exploding right behind you and instantly killing you.
  • If you liberate the Hope County Jail prior to your second abduction by Faith, you will awaken in the Hope County Jail after said abduction where the team will attempt to snap you out of your bliss state. If you avoid heading to the jail before your second abduction by Faith, however, a different cutscene will play than the one if you had already liberated the jail before your second abduction.
  • In Arcade Mode, superlarge creatures such as Blood Dragons, Yetis, and Arachnids have special scripted fight animations for wrestling with each other, instead of fighting each other with their default combat A.I. which would probably look silly and drag on too long.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The triumphant moment the Deputy and his allies have over Joseph Seed is completely ruined by a nuke detonating in Hope County out of nowhere.
• Dirty Cop:
  • As Mary May mentions in the intro footage, Joseph bribing the local police to turn a blind eye to the cult's activities is the reason why law enforcement doesn't do anything to stop the cult. This slightly gets subverted into Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop territory though, as none of the officers flying in to arrest Joseph Seed turn out to be on the cult's payroll. Not even Sheriff Whitehorse who, despite trying to call off the arrest, does it only because he knows that having a mere five-man contingent waltzing into the compound of a heavily armed cult to take their leader could not possibly end well. If anything, them having been unable to stop the cult from becoming an armed-to-the-teeth militia and ignoring the local populace's plea for help to avoid open bloodshed in the valley rather puts him into a Police Are Useless category.
  • Nancy, the dispatcher, however fits this trope completely. She is revealed to be in cahoots with the cult leader, and her not radioing for backup is the reason no one comes to their aid after things go awry.
• Dirty Coward: Marshall Burke, who is self-conceited enough to ignore Sheriff Whitehorse's pleas on abandoning the arrest and returning with backup instead, only to see him running scared into the woods after the extraction fails.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Prestige weapons (previously known as Signature guns) may have been heavily nerfed in terms of performance, but most of them are now available in any gun store right away. As soon as you have the cash (easy to achieve through hunting and fishing), the best equipment in the game can be purchased before you even tackle the first real story mission.
  • Helicopter gunships are the most effective vehicle in the game in terms of mobility and damage output. It is incredibly easy to get the $7,200 required to buy one early in the game by looting stashes, and they give you an insane amount of firepower and put you far from harm. Few enemies will ever have the capacity to mess with you, with only RPG-wielding cultists and the cultists with fire arrows in the Whitetail Mountains being able to reliably damage you. The only other things capable of putting enough rounds into the chopper to destroy it would be other vehicles, but unless they catch you by surprise, you aren't likely to get shot down by them. Combined with a perk that automatically repairs vehicles when you drive them, and the attack helicopter ends up making the game trivial.
  • In fine franchise tradition, a headstart can be gained by purchasing the game's Gold or Collector's Edition, or by paying real-world money for silver bars that can be used instead of in-game dollars to unlock aforementioned Prestige gear.
  • If you have the Lost On Mars DLC, you get access to all the insanely powerful weapons offered in that campaign, such as the Obliteratorrr, a pistol that fires energy rockets that destroy absolutely everything it hits, has a hefty battery size for plenty of shots, and like all the energy weapons has infinite ammo, so you can destroy damn near anything that crosses your path. And they're all unlocked from the start!
• Disintegrator Ray: The Magnopulser, the exotic oddball among the dozens of firearms in your inventory, capable of sending humans flying at medium range or outright vaporizing them at point-blank range. Best of all, it has infinite ammunition and huge spread, making it the undisputed king of close quarters combat. All you need to do to unlock it is complete two easy missions for Larry, one of the county's numerous Conspiracy Theorists who lives one stone's throw to the northwest of Fall's End. Its only drawback is that it doesn't leave corpses behind for you to loot for ammo and ingredients.
• Downer Beginning: After the police arrest Joseph Seed, even though they get him on the helicopter, it gets brought down by a Peggie shoving their own body into the propeller. Everyone survives, but Joseph reveals that the Mission Control for the police was working for him the whole time, and the Peggies start hunting the cops down, with the clear message that no help is coming.
• Downer Ending: Both the endings. If you arrest Joseph, a mushroom cloud explodes in the distance; you and Joseph are the only survivors, since you destroyed all his contingency plans for a nuclear war. You end up chained to a bed in a bunker with him, left to listen to his rants for the rest of your days. If you let him go, it's unknown if the explosion happens, but the sheriff turns on the radio which happened to be playing the trigger phrases Jacob was using, and your (and the other deputy's) violent brainwashing kicks in...
• The Dragon: Jacob, a former military officer who is Joseph Seed's older brother. Jacob leads the military arm of the Eden's Gate Cult.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Scattered throughout the game are mentions of people who met unfortunate ends, with plausible hints that said individuals could be the protagonists of the prequel, Inside Eden's Gate.
  • A corpse hanging from a post near the Lamb of God Church in John's territory has a note nearby identifying it as a man named Alex, who came to Hope County with friends to infiltrate the cult, and later was killed by John for trying to rescue people from the cult's clutches. The note describes exactly what the Alex in the prequel came to do, investigate the cult to film an expose for his vlog.
  • This note, found in the Grand View Hotel in Jacob's territory, states that Jacob culled a woman named "H. McCalkin" for failing the Training from Hell he put her through. The note says that this individual planned to join the Marines, just like Hannah.
  • This letter, addressed by Joseph to a person named Sara, can be found by players if they choose to "walk the path" from Joseph's statue in Faith's territory, following a trail of blood leading to said statue. It implies that the addressee jumped from the top of the statue under Joseph's influence. The note states that the addressee felt a deep sense of abandonment from those around her, which is exactly what the Sara in the prequel felt as well.
  • Tammy states that her husband, a man named Mark, was tortured to death by Jacob in his chalet. While it is not definitely confirmed that this person is the same Mark from the prequel, it should be noted that Mark is the only prequel protagonist to be a local of Hope County, just like Tammy and her husband.
• Eagleland: The game was made in Canada (specifically, Ubisoft Montreal and Toronto) and depicts a highly exaggerated sterotype of America where the protagonists and the Crazy Survivalist resistance as the epitome of the "Beautiful". But so does the bad guys, which, despite their extremely twisted dogma and methods, they're actually Well-Intentioned Extremist and also a Crazy Survivalist.
• Easter Egg:
  • Just like Far Cry 4, 5 has a secret ending that "finishes" the game after less than 30 minutes of playing. Getting it requires nothing but not cuffing Joseph Seed in the intro cinematic. After about 90 seconds of idling around, the sheriff calls off the arrest, orders the retreat over the objections of some of his team members, and the credits roll.
  • See that bigass YES billboard on the western mountains in John Seed's Holland Valley area? Damaging it in any way starts a short mission that tasks you with destroying it completely. It's not required to advance the story, but everyone's happy to see it gone (well, everyone but John, naturally). A very, very subtle hint is given when you hop in a warplane kept in the field north of the crop circle and immediatly have the YES billboard lined up in the sights.
  • After you fall down the stairs in the wheelchair in John's bunker, if you go back into the room where John staples the flaps of skin to the toolbench you can read what the sins those two unfortunate individuals were guilty of: Gluttony and Greed.
• Elaborate Underground Base:
  • All three Heralds have their HQs buried deep within sprawling bunker complexes. John's is an old missile silo, Jacob resides in an abandoned Army or National Guard armory, and Faith seems to have set up her little drug kitchen in a similarly fortified underground installation.
  • The Wolf's Den, headquarters of the Whitetail Militia, is yet another extensive bunker system, albeit not nearly as huge as the ones mentioned above.
• Elite Mooks:
  • The Chosen, special enemies that appear once you've caused enough damage to Eden's hold on certain areas. While their ground troops are only marginally more powerful than basic infantry, their warplanes are a real threat for a number of reasons.
  • There're also the Project's VIPs, denoted by a red crown icon. They're essentially the lieutenant-type enemies from previous games in all but name, meaning they're rare but considerably tougher and better shots than the basic grunts. Killing one rewards 75 resistance points, and their bodies can be looted for higher-quality stuff afterwards.
  • Most animal species have a rare, differently colored alpha version that's somewhat more powerful and drops significantly more valuable pelts/furs.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Downplayed, the cult leadership are all white due to them all being Seed's blood relatives, though the Mooks consist of various different races and genders due to being random Brainwashed and Crazy people.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: Both of the endings and possibly implied in the secret ending:
  • In the "Good" ending where you attempt to arrest Joseph, a nuke goes off out of nowhere and Hope County goes up in flames. You escape with your sheriff friends, but they die in a car accident on the way there. Joseph Seed drags you from the wreck, kills the kind nuke shelter owner who saved you at the beginning of the game, ties you to a bed, and declares that you are his family now, he was right about God's prophesy, and you'll step out into the new world when its ready to be reborn. Presumably everyone in Hope County dies.
  • In the "Bad" ending where the player agrees to walk away, the Sheriffs get in the car and drive away. The Sheriff decides that they're going to the next county to get the national guard and return to save everyone. The Sheriff turns on the radio which triggers the player to fall under Joseph Seeds suggestion. The game cuts to black with the implication that the player killed everyone in the car.
  • In the Secret Ending where the player refuses to arrest Joseph Seed at the beginning, the Sheriff and everyone walks away from Eden's Gate. It ends there, but this just means that the cult's psychopathic actions continue without resistance and quite possibly are never stopped. There is also no indication that the nuke will detonate sooner or later. The bunker ending, as revealed in the trailer for Far Cry: New Dawn is revealed to be the canon ending.
• Every Bullet is a Tracer: Virtually every bullet that was fired from aircraft-mounted machine guns leaves bright yellow-white trails, which looks especially impressive during Nick's strafing runs due to his plane packing the game's one and only gatling gun. Mostly averted for infantry weapons, though.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The protagonist is addressed as "Deputy" by the locals and as "Rookie" (or "Rook") by the other deputies.
• Evolving Title Screen: After the Resist Ending, the title screen and pause menu will change to reflect the bombing of Hope County.
• The Extremist Was Right: If you choose to arrest Joseph Seed at the final encounter, it will turn out that all of his ramblings about the apocalypse were true all along. The world promptly erupts into flames as soon as you slap cuffs on him due to a nuclear war.
• Fair Cop: Deputy Pratt and Hudson fill the male and female quota of this trope respectively, but the player character also qualifies, especially if they wear the deputy, sheriff, Rainbow Six, or marshall outfits. Female player characters can also easily slide into the Dirty Harriet territory though, if they end up in a more revealing outfit (like the Primal clothes, or Citra's outfit from Far Cry 3).
• Fake Special Attack: Some helicopters are equipped with flare launchers. While firing off a volley of flares looks kinda cool, they have no apparent in-game effect at all. They inflict no damage if they hit something and don't start fires. It's possible that they were originally intended as a defense against enemy surface-to-air missiles that were cut before the game, as no enemies have any sort of homing or lock-on capable weaponry.
• Fallen States of America: Downplayed. It's implied that there's some kind of national crisis occurring that's preventing the government from intervening against the Eden's Gate cultists. Then again, it could just be Truth in Television, given how much real-life cults have gotten away with before being suppressed (though never to the point of using a weapon mix more associated with Mogadishu, openly, on the streets of a small town).
  • Turns out that it's Subverted at first, as the nation itself is alright; the real problem is that the Eden's Gate in some isolated county are small pickings compared to Russia's capital having been nuked and the United States placed on a nationwide alert. The Resist ending plays it straight thereafter.
• Fallout Shelter Fail: Well, doomsday preppers are a common theme in Hope County. Most of them are little more than small bunkers that are often found trashed, looted, or otherwise utterly useless. Eden's Gate turns out to have established extremely secure nuclear bunkers and filled with supplies to keep them through their believed apocalypse. The Deputy proceeds to wreck all of them in the course of their duties. Making their efforts all pointless. Joseph Seed has a smaller one for him and the Deputy, though.
• The Family That Slays Together: Eden's Gate is led by Joseph Seed, who is assisted by his three siblings - brothers Jacob and John, a military veteran and fixer respectively, and “adopted” sister Faith, who keeps the cultists 'rowing in the right direction'.
• Fantastic Drug: Bliss, which is used to indoctrinate non-believers (even those actively against the cult) into Eden’s Gate.
• Featureless Protagonist: Strangely averted and played straight simultaneously. For the first time in Far Cry history, the Player Character can be customized via a character editor that lets you choose the Deputy's sex, looks and clothes. However, unlike all previous Far Cry protagonists, they aren't given any background, defined character or even a name, leaving them an entirely blank slate for the players to project on.
• Fetch Quest: A long-time staple of Ubisoft open world games, they were bound to show up here as well. Far Cry 5 lets you collect comic books, Vietnam War lighters, vinyl crates, bobbleheads, whiskey barrels and more, usually 15 units each. Unlike previous entries where finding these collectibles rewarded so much experience and/or money that hunting them down was borderline mandatory, the ones in FC 5 offer negligible rewards that aren't worth the effort. To add insult to injury, purchasing a map to mark their locations costs more than what you get for completing the quest (for instance, finding all whiskey barrels nets $900; the map costs $1,200).
  • Completing a quest in a region that has been fully liberated, however, will add a bonus $400 reward. Given that some of the collectibles are scattered across the entire map the chances are high that these quests will be completed well after most other quests are done, making the total net reward (if you bought the maps) a measly $100 per quest.
• Fictional Province: The game takes place in the fictional Hope County, Montana.
• Fishing Minigame: Players can fish in the game's rivers and lakes, also a first for a Far Cry game. Doing so is a good source of cash that gets even better once you get the perk that speeds up the process considerably and unlocks more effective lures.
• Flamethrower Backfire: Shooting the fuel tank on the back of a flamethrower-packing Peggie will cause it to explode in a highly entertaining fashion.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Fangs for Hire has this in spades, with Cheeseburger the bear and Peaches the Cougar. The nickname the Resistance gives to the cultists, "peggies", derived from the cult's acronym can also be seen as this.
• Foe-Tossing Charge:
  • Large animals like moose, bulls, and bison will all send a human target flying with a charge. They're even capable of battering around cars and pickups, as well.
  • Large vehicles have no trouble smashing their way through anything lighter and softer than them. Big rigs reign supreme here, first and foremost Mary May's Widowmaker.
• Foreshadowing: For as much crazy talk as the Seeds put out, reading between the lines and paying attention to their sequences is a good idea. And while it may be hard to hear that radio while you're driving around, pay close attention and you might find out that Moscow has been nuked during Middle-Eastern peace talks by an unspecified aggressor, putting the United States into a severe state of alert.
• Friendly Fire Proof: Nope. Your allies are just as susceptible to your attacks as any peggy, so watch your fire. If you kill a friendly NPC in sight of others, their buddies will immediately turn hostile and retaliate in kind. Fortunately, everyone in your GFH roster is excempt from that last part. Unfortunately, NPCs have a horrible tendency of walking directly into your fire when you're using a fully automatic weapon.
• Full-Boar Action: Boars return as a fairly aggressive herbivore species that can make your life miserable if you fail to notice them in the underbrush. On the flipside, watching them rough up pursuing peggie forces is quite entertaining. In either case, their worst trait is probably how many of them attack at one time.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • The Project at Eden's Gate's acronym has earned them the nickname "peggies".
  • You help Larry complete his Dynamic Laser Capacitor, which he uses to head off into space on a new adventure, which he claims will be very similar to the current one, but just different enough to justify charging money for.
• The Fundamentalist: The Project at Eden's Gate tries to sell itself off as one of these, of the "fire and brimstone" type. On the first trailer alone, graffiti denouncing people as sinners is painted all over the place, religious text is carved into the flesh of what appears to be The Dragon, people impaled on crosses appear, people are taken and things are stolen as "offers" (And Seed, in narration, says that people will eventually come to thank them for it... and they will take what they want, whether they want to or not) and we see a woman quite forcibly drowned/"baptized" by one of the members.

Tropes G-Z

• Gainax Ending: The two standard endings in the story conclude in a inconclusive and bleak note with either Hope County being destroyed or your character being brainwashed, but you can still keep playing after you complete the story mode with the "Resist" ending, and Joseph Seed was possibly defeated in the Playable Epilogue, even though he is a Karma Houdini in all these endings. Its quite possible the Deputy may have hallucinated everything. Even the release of Far Cry: New Dawn has not helped in clearing thing up.
• Game Hunting Mechanic: The Deputy can hunt animals to get pelts to sell and bait to fish.
• Game Mod: Resistance Mod, available on Nexus mods, is an assortment of fixes, new content, and gameplay changes. One of them changes the scripted ambush event to advance the main story to quest marker.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality: Various allied characters who can be called to fight alongside you thankfully can't die. They can go down and get knocked out of commission for a while if they take too much damage, but you can help them up or they can get up on their own.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: When Faith first captures you by dosing you with Bliss, unlike most cutscenes, where the player can move their head by mouse/right stick, they cannot do so in this cutscene, to show how enraptured they are with Faith.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Even after Jacob Seed's brainwashing, simply hearing "Only You" on the radio during free-roam won't trigger the psychotic hallucinations. Hearing it while trying to get into his main base will, however, even after you’ve killed him.
  • After he rescues you, Dutch is insistent on the Deputy burning their uniform so they're not recognised. Of course, this makes no difference since every member of the cult will try and kill you on sight.
    • Even more jarring because, if you own Rainbow Six Siege, you can swap your police uniform for an even more distinctive police uniform, though it didn't have any markings.
  • Certain story missions seem to make assumptions about the order you'll do things in. For instance: at one point John Seed goes back to his ranch and successfully gets in a plane. This happens even if you've already taken over the ranch and he should logically be met with a hail of bullets from the resistance.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: The three boss-level Bliss creatures have blazing red ones. It makes them fairly easy to distinguish from their hallucinatory doubles when they start spawning them.
• Good Counterpart: The Whitetails are a survivalist militia similar to Eden's Gate, who are quite able to match the cult in terms of firepower and ruthlessness. The key difference being that the Whitetails genuinely just want to be left alone in peace, while Eden's Gate is very much based around forced assimilation.
• Good-Guy Bar:
  • The Spread Eagle Bar counts as this, being a hub for the Resistance and where the Junior Deputy receives a number of missions.
  • The 8-Bit Pizza Bar also counts, as Guns For Hire not currently accompanying the Junior Deputy can be found unwinding there.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Your fists are your default melee weapon, so you can just pummel the bad guys to death if you feel like it. Becomes quite effective once you unlock and purchase the brass knuckles, and downright hilarious while under the effects of the Furious homeopathic.
• Gory Discretion Shot: The scene of John cutting out the skin on Nick's chest onto which he tattooed "Greed" is obscured by a bunch of cultists kneeling over the unfortunate pilot.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Did you know you can throw melee weapons at enemies? If you answered yes, you probably discovered it by accident or read it somewhere on the internet because the game never tells you that's possible, least of all how to do it.
  • If you choose the Resist ending, the Final Battle makes you fight and then revive all your friends and companions, which means it gets easier the less companions you recruited beforehand. Even if you recruited everyone, the odds can be tipped in your favor at least a bit by dismissing the three generic fighters from the roster before starting the battle.
  • The tutorial for the Fishing Minigame only covers the absolute basics, leaving most of what you need to do for you to find out through experimentation or internet research. Particular mention must go to the specialized lures you unlock with the Fisher King perk. It's actually simple (each lure works best for the fish mentioned in its name), but the average gamer probably won't expect salmons to be attracted to salmon eggs of all things, for instance. There's also no mention whatsoever that the unique fish you must catch in certain side missions are nearly impossible to attract without these special flies.
    • Related to the above, the three fishing leaderbords that display the records you must beat to unlock the best fishing rod don't show the fish species' names, only pictures. Given how similar most fish look to the layman's eye, connecting the numbers and species on the boards is best done with a guide. That's assuming you know the boards even exist in the first place.
• Hand Cannon: A weekly Live Event adds a .50 caliber pistol to the game. It's statwise identical to the semi-automatic .50 caliber sniper rifle aside from trading some accuracy for close-range handling and being unable to equip a silencer.
• Hard Truth Aesop: The only good ending in the game is when The Deputy and Sheriff Whitehorse pick up on Joseph's mannerisms and dialogue and decide to leave for reinforcements. The intended moral seems to be: "Always read the room before running into a situation that you can't fix. Being independent and trying to fix everything yourself can make things worse and irreparable, working in a team and being diplomatic can make successes last longer."
• Hate Plague: This is basically what Bliss is. In normal doses, it acts as a hallucinogenic deliriant that warps the perception of your mind into accepting the violent ways of Eden’s Gate. In extreme doses, however, it'll destroy your mind and turn you into an Ax-Crazy, Technically-Living Zombie.
• Helicopter Blender: The main reason your chopper crashes in the intro cinematic is that at least one peggie voluntarily jumps into the rotor blades.
• Hellish Copter: The game kicks into gear when your police chopper is brought crashing down in the intro. Hostile helicopters show up later in considerable numbers, but they're so easy to dispatch they often don't get a single shot in before they're destroyed. The Deputy doesn't fare much better here; if you're flying a helo and cross paths with a technical or an RHIB armed with a .50 BMG machine gun, you'll most likely explode before you can think Oh, Crap!. It's also the main reason why Adelaide Drubman is not a particularly useful specialist most of the time.
• Herbivores Are Friendly: Seriously averted, as moose, bulls, bison and boars will attack you if you get too close.
• Heroic Dog: Boomer the hunting hound. He even fetches guns for you!
• Hide Your Children: Lampshaded with two notes, one about human children◊, the other about baby animals◊
• Hillbilly Horrors: The crazy natives this time are cultist rednecks.
• Hired Guns: The Guns for Hire system allows the player to find various characters to help you out in a fight, such as sniper fire or (in Nick's case) aerial support.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: The Throwback perk lets you throw incoming grenades or dynamite back to sender. Considering their short fuses, they usually go boom the moment they arrive without giving the target much of a chance to escape.
• I Can't Reach It:
  • Despite having a blowtorch and the ability to pick locks, mission-critical locks have to be opened via finding a key. The game tells you this for key-card locks. It does not for standard key locks.
  • One Prepper Stash requires you to shoot a lock out through a window. Another Prepper Stash located right next door requires you to find the key-card to unlock the door, despite having the same type of lock and a window that's nothing but metal bars, allowing you to easily shot it.
• Improvised Weapon: The brass knuckles are the only dedicated melee weapon in the game. The rest are either repurposed sports equipment (baseball bat, paddle), tools (sledgehammer or the infamous shovel), construction material (three types of steel pipes) or plain old tree branches. It's never touched upon why there's not a single bladed melee weapon available, even though Peggies occasionally attack you with knives or machetes.
• Incorrect Animal Noise: Bald eagles, as in many other media, have the call of a Red-tailed hawk.
• Infernal Retaliation: Any Peggie or hostile animal that's set on fire will instantly try to charge the nearest enemy to set them on fire. This includes animals that are set on fire by Peggies, at which point Hilarity Ensues.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Scrolling through any gun store's inventory quickly reveals that Jacob Seed will be using a heavy sniper rifle in his Boss Battle, and that there's a strange high-tech weapon to unlock whose working principle is based on electromagnetism, if the name is anything to go by^note It's called the Magnopulser and uses microwaves to turn organics into Pink Mist at short range.
  • The perk that increases your SMG ammo cap has a menu picture that shows a KRISS Vector submachine gun, hinting at the possibility of acquiring it at some point. Turns out the Vector is a Weekly Challenge reward for the April 10th-April 16th week, potentially lost after that time, though after the challenge ended a Vector SMG was added as a purchasable Prestige weapon with a different paint scheme.
• Ironic Echo: Joseph's speech in the Resist ending echos Dutch's welcoming speech in structure and has almost the exact meaning.
• Irony: Numerous companions and NPCs point out how the county prison used to be all about keeping bad guys inside. Now that it's the Resistance's HQ in the Henbane River region, they're fighting tooth and nail to keep the bad guys outside.
• It's Personal: Mary May's character trailer heavily implies that the Eden's Gate cult murdered her father (after also implying they did away with her mother and brother beforehand), and she wants revenge.
• Just Before the End: If you listen to the radio, you may get the feeling that Joseph and Eden's Gate might not be talking out of their asses. While Hope County is dealing with them, peace talks are breaking down in the Middle East, multiple terrorist attacks have taken place around the world in the last month, tensions in the Pacific have increased due to North Korea continuing its unrestricted nuclear testing, the U.S. is facing a financial crisis and recalling its citizens from overseas, and worst of all, Russia is reeling from a nuclear attack on Moscow, with casualties stretching into the millions. The U.S. is blamed and North Korea goes completely dark, escalating into a nuclear exchange.
• Karma Houdini: It's impossible to bring Joseph Seed to justice in any of the endings. Though he suffers the loss of his loved ones during the storyline, he walks away and is triumphant over the heroes. Even the best possible ending has you leave him alone at the very start of the game should you refuse to cuff him, with you and the cops walking away and the game abruptly ending there. This makes him the only Far Cry antagonist to survive regardless of the player's actions. The closest he gets is in the "Resist" ending, where he's locked in a bunker with his only company being the person who killed his friends and family and ruined his plans.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: On the other hand, if you've had enough of Agent Willis Huntley, especially after he betrayed Ajay back in Far Cry 4, there's nothing to stop you from shooting him and leaving him for dead at the end of his mission. Sadly, this isn’t canon, and he is mentioned to be alive in the next game.
• Kick the Dog: To make absolutely sure you don't mistake the peggies for the good guys, the devs sprinkled the county with gruesome scenes of sacked households where the residents' dogs have been impaled or otherwise killed alongside their masters.
• Lampshade Hanging: One of the first missions of the game involves you climbing a radio tower to turn it back on. During which, Dutch tells you over the radio that you don't have to go around climbing every tower you see, in reference to how common it was in the last two numbered games.
• Laser Sight: Enemy snipers have these, making it easier to spot their presence in an area.
• "Last Supper" Steal: The box art is based on The Last Supper.
• Lethal Chef: Chad Wolanski, the cook at the Grill Steak restaurant, has you collect roadkill so he can cook it. He also apparently uses tobacco juice as a marinade. In spite of this, most of the locals actually seem to like his cooking.
• Lethal Joke Weapon: The Shovel Launcher, an RPG-7 that's been modified to fire high-velocity shovels. A single shot not only kills a human, it blasts them backwards as if they've been hit by a big rig. And like arrows, the ammo can be collected from the corpses.
• Lighter and Softer: The DLC scenarios, coupled with Denser and Wackier:
  • Hours of Darkness is a Cliché Storm incarnate, but it ends with Everybody Lives.
  • Lost on Mars also revels on the Cliché Storm with added comedic and outlandish situation, seeing that it takes place on Mars.
  • Dead Living Zombies obliterates the fourth wall as the story jumps back and forth between different pitch the director try to present, ranging from Affectionate Parody to Reconstruction to the Zombie Apocalypse B-Movie plotline.
• Lightning Bruiser: The Widowmaker, a truck obtained early in the game. It's pretty fast, can take A LOT of damage and can deal even more.
• Loud of War: Faith's angels are attracted to loud sounds, music in particular. The peggies occasionally weaponize this to lure whole packs of angels into battle with the help of loudspeaker trucks.
• Ludicrous Gibs:
  • Scoring a direct hit on any human enemy with the Magnopulser or an air-dropped bomb completely vaporizes them. Might count as a very minor case of Awesome, but Impractical since it means there's no corpse to loot for ammo and ingredients.
  • Subverted by the tractor mulcher. Running over squishies with it produces fountains of blood, but the corpses are usually still there and intact afterwards.
• Lumber Mill Mayhem: The Baron Lumber Mill in Jacob's region is being used as a prison camp for the rebels and is one of the larger outposts in the game with lots of different ways to approach it. After clearing it of hostiles the player is then given a few additional missions to secure the area and prevent the mill from falling into Peggie hands again. The goodies the player gets access to for clearing it (including a new GFH) make it a very worthwhile target.
• Lyrical Dissonance: The various "Hope County Choir" songs frequently blasted at maximum volume by the peggies consist of cheerful gospel music singing about the end of the world and/or ignoring the screams of the burning sinners.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Any time Bliss comes into the picture, this line is blurred. Whether it be in the heart of Faith's region (where Bliss is primarily farmed) and her ability to show up in random places, communicate with you telepathically, or during her boss fight where she appears to float, spawn illusions, and hurl magical bolts at you in the depth of her Bliss-soaked bunker, or Jacob using both Bliss and classical conditioning to brainwash you into assassinating Eli and somehow being able to monologue at you at precisely the moment you hit that headshot, or in the Resist ending where a sudden storm seems to envelop the island out of nowhere you get visions of the world ending after Joseph dumps barrels of Bliss on you, there is not a lot to scientifically explain just how all this was able to be done.
  • There is also the question of Joseph's apparent ability to foresee the apocalypse. If Joseph had any access to media, it would have been easy for him to observe the media flow and make an educated guess. However, the Peggies forbid all use of electronic devices, and while Joseph would neither be the first nor last cult leader to have different rules for themselves and their followers, there is no indication this is the case. So... is Joseph just really good at hiding his phone, or is he genuinely receiving visions from God?
• Meaningful Background Event: In the final scene of the Resist ending, the flag on the wall and the chair Joseph sits in are both marked with the P.E.G. symbol, despite neither of these items being present in Dutch's bunker before or after this scene.
• Microtransactions: Silver Bars are Far Cry 5's premium currency, which you can use to quickly buy weapons and vehicles. However, everything can be bought using in-game currency too.
• Military Brat: Nick Rye comes from a long line of Air Force pilots. His father pressured him to enlist, but Nick refused and stayed home to take care of his wife.
• Mind Screw: It can be incredibly hard to know what's really going on at times, due to the massive amount of Bliss that the player is exposed to over the course of the game. Particularly true with Faith's Henbane River section and the Downer Ending of the game.
• Misplaced Wildlife: A downplayed example. While caribou used to range into Montana, they've been extinct in that state since the early to mid 20th Century.
• Morton's Fork: No matter which path you choose to finish the game, they have one thing in common: the Big Bad never gets his just comeuppance. The two main endings share another similarity you can't avoid regardless of the path taken: all your friends die one way or another (although the Walk Away ending merely heavily implies it instead of showing it).
• Mundane Utility: Adelaide's helicopter gunship has a grapple point on the bottom, allowing you to use it to reach difficult locations.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Just like Far Cry 2, you get help from a bespectacled black clergyman. Albeit one who's a bit more...proactive protecting his flock.
  • One of the songs on the Resistance's radio is "Should I Stay Or Should I Go?", which was used in the opening title sequence of Far Cry 4.
  • The scaling of the skeleton of Joseph Seed's statue in "False Prophet" is very similar to the scaling of many radio towers in both Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 before it, even down to the conveniently-placed ropes to tell you where to go, balancing on rickety beams, and the destruction of propaganda at the very top.
  • Before attacking a cult outpost with Hurk, he says that he's going to "go Wenja on their asses". We met Hurk's Wenja ancestor Urki in Far Cry Primal.
• Neck Snap: How the Deputy executes unarmed melee takedowns from behind. Since the game tends to default to your fists very frequently for no apparent reason, you'll be seeing this takedown more often than any other.
• Nerf:
  • Signature weapons in Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 were expensive, non-customizable guns with a unique paintjob and vastly improved stats over their basic counterpart. Prestige weapons and vehicles in FC 5 are still expensive and uniquely colored, but no longer perform any better in combat than their much more affordable base models. The sole reason to buy them is their Disc-One Nuke status.
  • .50 BMG sniper rifles are no longer capable of stealthily killing Heavies with a single headshot, not even from behind while loaded with armor-piercing ammo. The only viable method to One-Hit Kill a Heavy without alerting every peggy in the area is a melee takedown.
  • The M79 grenade launcher's damage per shot was nerfed significantly. It now takes at least two direct hits to destroy any car, but it's still a One-Hit Kill against most organic targets and also the sole handgun worth carrying around, so it could've been worse.
  • One example that works in the player's favor: aggressive animals deal significantly less damage and are much less resilient than the crazy wildlife on the Rook Islands or in Kyrat. That still doesn't mean they're harmless, but being jumped by a black bear is now more of an annoyance than a near death sentence, especially since most predators turn tail and flee after a couple of good hits.
• New Game Plus: While not present in the release version, a comprehensive NG+ mode was introduced alongside the Dead Living Zombies DLC late in 2018. It lets you start a new campaign with everything you had when you finished the previous one, with the exception of anything story-related (mission progress, Guns for Hire, map reveals, and so on). Many perks receive repeatable upgrades in NG+ campaigns to make them increasingly more powerful, and replaying on the highest difficulty unlocks a special reward if you manage to actually finish the game.
• New Old West: Takes place in a rural American setting and features The Sheriff (technically, the Deputy) as the protagonist, as well as other Western tropes such as the Badass Preacher, the Saloon Owner and The Gunslinger, albeit in the present day. The music has a pretty strong country and rockabilly feel too.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Both the Deputy and Joseph Seed turn out to be guilty of this; both of them kept everyone in Hope County so distracted by their insane violent antics that everyone is completely unprepared when the apocalypse actually comes. Seed berates the Deputy for getting involved instead of just walking away, but Seed himself is as just as guilty of this if not more so; had he minded his own business and took care of his own flock instead of trying to forcibly convert the entire county, it's likely that people like Dutch and the Whitetails who were prepped for the apocalypse anyway might have survived on their own. Instead everyone is so distracted fighting each other that everyone is caught with their pants down and only the Deputy and Seed survive the end of the world.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted as usual for actual archery-type weapons like the compound bow or the slingshot, but - in a first for the series - also for sniper rifles. Sniper bullets now have very noticeable travel time instead of being Hitscan, and they also suffer from minor bullet drop at long range. Unfortunately, their velocity is ridiculously low when compared to their Real Life counterparts, to the point that they need almost two seconds to reach the target when you're shooting at something 200m away (which is about the game's maximum rendering distance for enemies). For reference, actual sniper rifle bullets move at velocities between 700 and 1,200 m/s, depending on the caliber and the weapon that fired them, which at a distance of 200m would make them hit almost instantly (for gameplay purposes anyway).
• Non-Standard Game Over: Similar to Far Cry 4, you get an ending by doing absolutely nothing in the beginning. In this case, by not cuffing Joseph Seed, you and the other lawmen simply decide to walk away and leave the cult to their own devices, the sheriff implying he wants to gather more officer to be able to oppose the cult should they react aggressively to Seed being arrested. Similar to Far Cry 4, this actually turns out to be the best possible ending, as it allows you to avoid the Everyone Dies confrontation at the end of the game.
• Oh, Crap!: NPCs will always cry in panic when they spot a hostile animal, whether it's a moose, a wild boar, a wolf, or Peaches or Cheeseburger.
• Old-School Dogfight: The Deputy can get themselves in dogfights with Peggie planes. The final fight with John Seed has you trying to shoot down his plane.
• One-Hit Polykill: A bullet from a .50 caliber sniper rifle will keep going after hitting someone. Useful if you encounter appropriately clustered enemies, not so useful if there was a hostage you couldn't see on the other side of them.
• Optional Boss: The peggies' Bliss experiments on the county's wildlife have spawned three batshit insane specimen that got loose and need to be put down: a cougar, a moose and a bear. These critters are not only exceedingly powerful on their own, they also spawn waves of fragile but lethal hallucinatory backup. You don't have to fight them, but doing so contributes to your resistance score and nets a nice amount of cash.
• Our Founder: Faith had one such statue of Joseph erected in the Henbane River region. Unsurprisingly, the Resistance find it an eyesore, and one of the first missions the Junior Deputy is issued upon invading Faith's territory, is to destroy it.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Faith's "angels". They're captives whose higher brain functions were irrevocably destroyed by overexposure to Bliss, leaving them empty shells that the Project uses as lobotomized slave labor and expendable cannon fodder. They’re still smart enough to use melee weapons against you, and there’s also the fact that despite their minds being effectively gone by the time you find them, they’re still living.
• Outside-Context Problem: What the "Resist" ending boils down to. Even with the knowledge from Far Cry 6 that the nukes were launched by whomever controlled Kyrat, there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent them, nor any way anyone (with the possible exception of Joseph) could know that they would be launched at that precise moment.
• Panthera Awesome: The pumas frequenting Hope County's forests. Possibly the most awesome is Peaches, one of the three Fangs for Hire.
• Papa Wolf: Nick Rye joins the Resistance because he's not going to let his children be taken by the cult.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • Opportunities to perform Death From Below takedowns are extremely limited. If you haven't completed the related challenge by the time you've killed all Heralds and captured all outposts, chances are you'll have to make do without its perk points for the rest of the game. Chain takedowns become similarly difficult to set up once the map has been cleared of peggies in the late and post-game. However, you can play through capturing the outposts again if you do the Outpost Master.
  • Progressing through the story can render some missions unavailable. Thankfully, the game simply counts them as "completed" if you are unable to play them anymore.
• Playable Epilogue: After the Resist ending, you continue to play as if nothing happened except Seed's portrait is now marked with a giant red X and the main menu reflects your ending choice. How this is possible is a mystery, as you either went insane from brainwashing while the rest of Hope county was brainwashed by Seed OR were Seed's prisoner holed up in a bunker after the apocalypse happened, but considering how good Seed is/was at messing with peoples' heads, the player can't be sure that either ending actually happened. It's also par for the course for the franchise, seeing how FC 3 and FC 4 did the exact same thing.
• Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo: A variant of this trope occurs when John captures Jerome's church and tries to force Jerome to officiate a forced confession from Nick. Wanting Jerome to use Joseph's book to do this, John takes Jerome's Bible from him and tosses it aside, forcing the priest to hold Joseph's book in its place. When Jerome initially refuses to cooperate and officiate the confession, John has a nearby cultist Pistol Whip him to the floor, allowing the priest a chance to swap back Joseph's book with his Bible that was previously discarded by John. Unbeknownst to John, said Bible is actually a Book Safe containing a gun. When John next attempts to force Jerome to officiate a confession from the Junior Deputy, this allows the priest to pass the gun in the Bible to the Deputy, which they use to send John and the cultists packing from the church.
• Power Up Let Down:
  • Since all weapons have fully customizable Prestige models that can be purchased at any time, and those that don't can be looted from enemies, unlocking new gear through story progression has become almost completely meaningless.
  • You can purchase armor-piercing ammo for all projectile weapons once you've taken the Black Market perk, but both the perk and the ammo are far too expensive for the bit of bonus damage they do against vehicles. If you want to take down a vehicle without explosives, aiming for the driver is always the most economic approach with or without AP ammo. Worse, even armor-piercing .50 BMG bullets can't penetrate a Heavy's helmet for a One-Hit Kill.
  • The Lock-On Scope for the RAT-4. It takes far too long to get a lock, the retical you have to keep the target in during the lock-on process is tiny, and if you get it even slightly out of the retical or if anything at all breaks line of sight during the process you have to start over again. It's really hard to get a lock unless the target is heading straight at you. Which is exactly where you don't want to be most of the time.
  • Averted for most perks that buff something - these buffs are massive. Ammo perks for instance usually triple the amount of ammo you can carry, weapon sway is reduced to near zero with the right weapon proficiency perks in effect, and so on.
• Pre-Character Customization Gameplay: Downplayed. You're asked to pick a gender for the Deputy, but play the prologue where you and your team attempt to arrest Joseph Seed after that. The Deputy is wearing a uniform that reveals no skin from the neck down, and wears black gloves. Only once Dutch asks the Deputy to change clothes is the player given the option to customize the Deputy in greater detail.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner:
  Grace Armstrong: Boom boom motherfuckers.
• Pretty Boy: Joseph Seed himself has gotten this reputation among lots of gamer girls despite his creeper factor.
• Punched Across the Room: The Furious homeopathic buffs your melee attacks to such a ridiculous degree you can punch almost any mook to death in one hit and send the corpse flying back several meters.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Aside from slight dialogue changes, there is no difference between playing as a female or male Deputy.
• Pyrrhic Victory: In the "Resist" ending, Joseph Seed ultimately fulfills the prophecy, lives while the rest of Hope County dies, and has gone from a mad lunatic to a true prophet and guide - but you've decimated everything he ever had, especially his family. He can't save anyone EXCEPT you, the one person he hates more than anyone.
• Rare Candy: Perk magazines grant one perk point apiece. They're the primary motivation to find, open and loot the numerous prepper stashes all over the county since every bunker contains three of them. Several more can be found in other places, usually in unmarked bunkers at generic locations. The prepper stashes alone amass enough perk points to allow players to ignore most of the challenge system in favor of playing the game as they see fit.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Sheriff Whitehorse, who does his best to convince Marshall Burke at the beginning of the game to abandon the arrest, and return with reinforcements instead to avoid bloodshed. This is actually what happens in the Secret Ending if we don't handcuff Joseph Seed in the Prologue. He actually asks the player character as well to do the same at the finale: ignoring his pleas and fighting Joseph results in the Resist ending, while listening to him and not fighting the Final Boss unlocks the Walk Away ending, in which him, the player character and our fellow deputies get in a car and drive away to get help. It works well until Whitehorse decides to turn on the radio...
• Recursive Ammo: The Cluster Rocket and Cluster Incendiary Rocket both explode in an air-burst over what you're aiming at, showering the entire area with explosions and flaming death.
• Regenerating Health:
  • The Deputy's health bar is a single entity that quickly regenerates to full if no damage is taken for a couple seconds. Unlocking health upgrades increases the time it takes since the regeneration rate itself is fixed, but there's still just a single bar, so as long as you can find some decent cover you'll very rarely need medkits.
  • The Auto-Repair perk confers this ability to any vehicle you drive, making vehicle-based missions a cakewalk.
• Religion of Evil: The antagonists, the Project at Eden's Gate, are fanatic cultists.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Destroying Joseph's statue and John's Hollywood-style "YES" sign are mission objectives that net you Resistance points.
• Riddle for the Ages: With the knowledge that the nuclear attack on Hope County was caused by whomever controlled Kyrat, two major questions are left unanswered by the radio broadcast: Was it actually true, and if so, who nuked Moscow?
• Right-Handed Left-Handed Guns: Zig-zagged a la Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4; while most weapons are properly modelled as right handed, weapons such as the SPAS-12, MS16, BZ19, and SVD are left-handed.
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: Eden's Gate is a bunch of right-wing militia fanatics combined with a Cult. The Whitetail Militia are a heroic counterpart in that they're opposing the cult but are otherwise an anti-government armed militia.
  • That said, Eden's Gate are, for a modern day right wing militia, remarkably fond of multiracialism, manbuns and long beards, and recreational drug use. Yahtzee theorized that this was so that the player could identify them as part of whichever political fringe the player is convinced is causing the downfall of modern America, and critizised Ubisoft for not taking a clearer stance.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: Much of the plot can be boiled down to "find and rescue the other members of the Deputy's posse".
• Saloon Owner: Mary May, the current owner of her family's Spread Eagle Saloon. She's also putting her saloon's supply of hard alcohol to good use.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In the secret ending, if the Deputy hesitates to handcuff Seed, the Sheriff realizes they are going to die if they arrest Seed and gives orders to retreat.
• Sequel Hook: The Larry Parker mission ends with some obvious ones for the "Lost on Mars" DLC.
• Sequel Logo in Ruins: Inverted, Far Cry 5's logo is more pristine than the games before it, though its subject matter is no less dark as it deals with a war against a doomsday cult.
• The Sheriff:
  • The protagonist is a sheriff's deputy who ends up leading the resistance against Eden's Gate.
  • There is an actual Sheriff with Sheriff Earl Whitehorse, whom the Deputy works for before everything goes to hell in the prologue.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog Story: The entire game is one. There is absolutely no way to bring the story to a satisfying conclusion with the Big Bad brought to justice and the heroes living happily ever after. What's worse, you can't even get the satisfaction of choosing the least of three evils since they're all almost equally awful, and no matter how you finish the game, everything you've fought for will have been for nothing.
  • In particular the Marshall gets a tough time. First he’s totally unprepared for the level of resistance during the epilogue, survives two vehicle crashes only to be dragged away literally kicking and screaming by the Peggies to later turn up as a brainwashed drugged up puppet of Faith. Even when you rescue him he has a hard time going cold turkey from the Bliss and in the end it was all for naught as he is still under the influence of Faith, shooting and killing his ally then himself (whether because of her influence or from guilt is unclear) Poor guy.
• Short-Lived Aerial Escape: This is how the game starts; after Joseph Seed is in cuffs and is being escorted to a police chopper, his followers go into a frenzy to try and rescue their leader. Just as the chopper starts lifting off, one follower hops on and throws himself into the rotor, damaging it and bringing it crashing down.
• Shovel Strike: Shovels are among the many melee weapons in the game. There's even a special one in the shop with a smiley face on it, called Optimism.
• Shown Their Work: The substance referred to in-game as "Bliss" is in fact a real hallucinogenic substance known as Scopolamine; it's referred to as such in the editor, and the molecular structure of Scopolamine can be seen printed on the sides of Bliss containers. In real life, excessive doses of Scopolamine can cause vivid hallucinations for long periods of time, and is sometimes believed to leave the subject extremely vulnerable to suggestion; Scopolamine is known to have been used in truth serums for this reason.
  • What's more, Bliss flowers are seemingly based on some of the nightshade-family plants that Scopolamine is derived from in real life. The flowers shown in-game resemble a specific flower sometimes referred to as Angel's Trumpets, which is very fitting for the setting. They also bear more than a passing resemblance to the closely-related Datura flower (or the "Devil's Trumpets"), which likewise causes viscerally unpleasant hallucinations and psychosis.
  • Henbane has also historically been used as a main source of Scopolamine for medicinal purposes.
• Sigil Spam: New Eden's logo is some type of cross. This cross appears on their trucks, on top of staffs left behind in their massacres, and on flags in conquered territories (one even being a version of the U.S. flag with crosses replacing the stars, as seen on the cover art).
• Silent Protagonist: The first game to have one since Far Cry 2, the Junior Deputy is silent save for grunts when jumping or getting damaged. Word of God is that this is for players to better immerse themselves into their protagonist. Lampshaded by Nick: "Oh, you're the strong, silent type, huh?" On the down side, it means you're going to be listening to a lot of crazy yammered at you by the antagonists without ever getting a single word in.
• Sniping the Cockpit: The easiest and least ammo-intensive way to get rid of pesky helicopters. Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite as well against Chosen warplanes.
• Spice Rack Panacea: 5's equivalent to the syringes of 3 and 4 is "homeopathics". While homeopathy is the practice of drinking pure water with only a trace (if any) amount of herbs in the place of actual medicine, the concoctions in the game require the use of local flora that might be actual drugs (The sidequests related to the "Fast" and "Furious" homeopathics involve a small time drug dealer).
  • Then, there's "oregano",which is marijuana in all but name.
• Spiritual Successor: The DLC for the game, three unique scenarios, called Dead Living Zombies, Hours of Darkness, and Lost on Mars, each of which are based upon a different genre of retro movies, seems to be designed to be this for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
• Steal the Surroundings: One of the things you can find during free-roam is either a box-truck or semi trailer that can be looted for a powerful weapon or unique car, and a small amount of RP. While the latter, being a trailer, will require the corresponding vehicle, both versions can be taken wholesale if you don't want to risk getting shot at, at which point they can be looted at any time thereafter once the player gets where they're going. You don't even need to abandon them after looting them, you can just re-raise the ramp and keep going.
• Stealth Pun: Big Bad Seed.
• Take That Us:
  • Two side missions have the Deputy assist a hammy director with delusions of grandeur in shooting Blood Dragon 3, a microbudget movie ripped straight from Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. The second mission ends with him going on a hilarious rant that references virtually every (perceived) flaw critics tend to find in the Far Cry franchise as a whole.
  • The Larry Parker mission mocks the concept of DLC and Mission-Pack Sequel, particularly his dialogue about new adventures being very similar to the last one.
  • When climbing a radio tower on Dutch's island, Dutch tells you that you won't be going around climbing radio towers on a regular basis, something Far Cry 3 and 4 did for the sake of map exploration.
• Taking You with Me:
  • If a Chosen warplane gets critically damaged during its strafing run, it continues on its vector to smash straight into its target. This is arguably their most dangerous tactic since by the time you realize the plane won't pull up again, it's usually too late. It's one of two situations where rocket launchers really shine because they blow the plane up before it can hit the ground.
  • Burning enemies ignore their regular AI routines in favor of charging straight at the nearest targets in an effort to set them on fire as well.
• Talk to Everyone: Talking to NPCs (especially those that have been rescued from the cult) will tip you in on side quest givers or prepper stash locations. You also get an achievement for talking to 50 people.
• Tattooed Crook: The vast majority of peggies regardless of gender are heavily tattooed.
• Technically-Living Zombie: The Angels, being the unfortunate result of overexposure to Faith’s Bliss drug, qualify as this. The drug has destroyed their minds and turned them almost completely feral and Ax-Crazy to the point that they don’t feel pain, are mindlessly violent and will attack without provocation (although retain enough of themselves to use melee weapons), and blurt out religious phrases non-stop when left alone. But despite their horrific state, the poor bastards are still alive.
• Temporary Online Content: The game has weekly live events that task people to perform certain objectives. There are community and individual goals to complete, and reward things like silver bars, special outfits, or weapons with exclusive skins.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • A surprising number of Hope County residents seem to think that going backpacking in the wilderness with no weapons while there's a bloodthirsty cult killing and kidnapping people on the loose, on top of the county's psychotically aggressive wildlife, is a perfectly fine idea. This means that the Rook will often walk up on someone just as a wolf, moose, bear, or wolverine is in the process of mauling them to death.
  • The very beginning cinematic. We have a notoriously mercurial psychopatch with a messiah complex, who is ensconced in his compound with dozens of very heavily armed fanatics — who fervently believe they will go to heaven if they die for him — and we're going in with six officers with pistols and a shotgun? Yeah. What could go wrong?
• Tranquil Fury: Nick, Mary and Pastor Jeffries express this as they prepare for war against Eden's Gate, nonchalantly making firebombs or arming themselves and their vehicles as they talk about their experiences with the cult and how they're gonna go out for blood.
• Truth in Television: The "secret ending" where you walk away and don't arrest Joseph Seed is actually something that multiple law enforcement groups have done regarding militias engaged in blatantly illegal behavior. Basically, to prevent full blown shoot-outs or battles, they've been allowed to get away with mutliple crimes. Generally, they seek more advantageous times to arrest figures rather than full on sieges since Waco and Ruby Ridge.
• Uncertain Doom: There is no indication whether nuclear destruction happens in the "Walk Away" and the secret ending. Even the seemingly certain doom of the nuclear bombs in the "Resist Ending" is potentially not real, as the lead-up to it had the Deputy get loaded with two full barrels of Bliss during Joseph Seed's boss fight, meaning they could have hallucinated everything INCLUDING the nukes dropping in the end. Though if you look closely, the screen changes color suddenly right before the air raid sirens start, which could imply that you're either entering a hallucination or leaving one, depending on your viewpoint.
• The Unintelligible: Side mission giver Chad Wolanski is so difficult to understand the game automatically subtitles his lines even if subtitles are turned off for everyone else.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • The game's overarching narrative is basically a Roaring Rampage of Rescue combined with helping La Résistance fight off an army of Ax-Crazy lunatics, so there's plenty of caring to be done. Notable examples include saving captives, helping folks secure stable supplies of food, medicine and clear water for the county, and literally petting dog Boomer every time you feel like it simply because you can.
  • Fishing is mostly a safe and easy way to make some paper, but you can also elect to feed your caught salmon to Cheeseburger for no reason other than this trope.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • Aside from the usual plethora of nasty and creative ways to murderize enemies, the game offers the Testy Festy mission where the Deputy is tasked with collecting bull testicles for Fall's End's annual, well, Testicle Festival. This mission requires you to kill three bulls by running one over with a tractor mulcher, setting another one on fire, and killing the third one while it's "hiding the salami".
  • If players refuse to select "yes" when John is forcing Jerome to officiate a forced confession from the Junior Deputy, John will have a cultist Pistol Whip Jerome to the floor up to three times as long as the player does not select "yes". The third time this happens, the gun Jerome stashed in his Bible Book Safe will be dislodged, which the Junior Deputy will then grab and use to expel the cultists. If players picked "yes" to begin with, Jerome would have simply passed the gun to the Deputy with the same outcome, so refusing to make that choices offers no difference beyond players causing Jerome to be assaulted by the cultists more than is necessary.
• Videogame Flamethrowers Suck: Unfortunately, the flamethrower's range was nerfed from previous games. This means that its problems like taking a while to kill the target, setting the environment and thus yourself on fire, being useless against vehicles, expensive ammunition, and targets almost always responding by charging you and setting you on fire are more prevalent. You will most likely only use the flamethrower to get enough kills to complete the related perk point challenge. If you want to burn stuff, Arrows on Fire or Molotov Cocktails are much more handy and far less risky.
• Vigilante Injustice: Zig-Zagged, the residents of Hope County have only formed a public militia against Joseph Seed because he bribed the local police into turning a blind eye. The main theme of the game is about escalation and why you shouldn't try to fix problems by yourself. In the intro to the game, a small police squad marches to Joseph Seed's compound to arrest him and he surrenders to them without question. If the player hesitates to arrest him, Joseph will repeat a private conversion between Sheriff Whitehorse and Nancy, the dispatcher of the Hope County Sheriff Office. This interaction clues Whitehorse in as to what will happen if they arrest Joseph in his territory, so the sheriff commands the squad to leave so they get better reinforcements from the national guard. After Joseph is arrested, the helicopter crashes and both endings of the game are rather bleak; the sheriff and the deputies are either killed by the brainwashed player character, or America is nuked and it results in the deaths of everyone but Joseph and the player character. All the player needed to do to get the good ending is to follow procedure and leave the compound to get better reinforcements, not take justice into their own hands and fix the situation on their own.
• Villainous Breakdown: Joseph has one after you take down the last Herald.
• Villainous Rescue:
  • At the start of the game, should the Junior Deputy arrest Joseph, his followers stage one to free him by causing the helicopter taking him into custody to crash.
  • When confronting John in Jerome's church, the cultists attempt this by trying to whisk him away to safety once the Junior Deputy gets a hold of the gun Jerome stashed in his Bible Book Safe.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: If you follow Dutch's advice to go to Fall's End first, the fairly easy battle to reclaim it from the peggies culminates in a Chosen warplane showing up once all the ground forces have been neutralized. It does a good job at introducing new players to the threat hostile airplanes pose, but thankfully also gives them multiple machine gun emplacements around the city with which to defeat the damn thing.
• Weaponized Car:
  • The Eden's Gate militia patrol Hope County in white-painted technicals. A slew of custom technicals with varying levels of firepower is also available to the Deputy, though most come with a steep price tag.
  • The Widowmaker is a huge big rig armed with two forward-facing .50cal machine guns. The mission that unlocks it consists of little else but smashing and shooting your way through roadblock after roadblock, and boy is it awesome.
• Welcome to Corneria: All nine specialists have unique dialogue amongst each other^note except for pure Fangs For Hire combinations, natch, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, their repertoire comprises no more than four or five lines each, which is decidedly less cool because your companions are a chatty bunch, so you'll be hearing the same banter over and over again.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Joseph Seed, the main antagonist, could be viewed this way. While he is a radical who uses violence and fear to achieve his goals, he genuinely believes that the end of the world is close at hand and that he must "save" as many souls as possible.
• What Did I Do Last Night?: Completing the sequence of fetch quests that allows the annual produce festival to be held results in the Deputy being invited to stay and have a few drinks, followed by a brief montage/minigame that ends with the Deputy waking up the next morning in the middle of a field, lying next to a pig wearing a party hat.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: By holding the "aim down sights" button (the right mouse button on PC, etc.), melee weapons can be hurled at enemies. When you do this with a shovel, the Deputy heaves it by the shaft like a javelin; one so powerful it can kill just about adversary foolish enough to be on foot. Even the ones decked out in armour.
• Where It All Began: The final mission is outright called "Where It All Began", as Joseph is waiting to offer his final deal at the church where you first tried to arrest him. Unfortunately, neither option really goes your way...
• Whole-Plot Reference: The game's story beats are remarkably similar to that of Outlast II; starting with a night-time helicopter ride into hostile rural territory, which soon ends up crashing as you find yourself confronted with an insane religious endtimes cult while setting out on a mission to save your fellow passengers. Over the course of the game you experience vivid hallucinations and find most of the people around you insane because an external force is melting everyone's brains, and the ending is even very similar with what seems to be the apocalypse occurring off in the distance.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: The whole of Hope County, Montana is yours to explore. Unlike past games in the franchise, you can go anywhere you want right from the start instead of having certain regions locked off.
• The Wildcats: Hope County High School's mascot is "the Cougars."
• With This Herring: Justified, as the the Junior Deputy starts by scrounging whatever weapons they can find as they're trying to escape the cult's attack. And for the most part, the Resistance fighters aren't any better-armed than what you start out with, either.
• World of Ham: Almost every character except the Deputy is some sort of ham, be it large or cold.

Hours of Darkness

• Collection Sidequest: Wendell can find and retrieve the lighters of downed paratroopers along with destroying propaganda speakers to improve morale.
• Deadly Gas: One of the environmental hazards players must deal with are large clouds of what is heavily implied to be Agent Orange.
• Death from Above: Completing objectives awards the player with Airstrike Tokens that be be used to call down an attack from friendly fighter jets using the binoculars. Wendell can only hold five at a time, however, and the area must be cleared of AA guns first to prevent retaliation strikes.
• Dirty Communists: The NVA and Viet Cong certainly are, being Soviet and Red Chinese-backed Vietnamese communists whose modus operandi involves killing, imprisoning, and torturing anyone siding with South Vietnam and the US.
• Elite Mooks: The NVA, who are better-trained and better equipped than their VC counterparts. They're distinguished by wearing green and khaki uniforms as opposed to the VC's black civilian clothing.
• Healing Herb: Wendell's main form of healing is collecting medicinal herbs in the Vietnam jungles. Every three he picks are converted into a first aid kit.
• Hold the Line: The final mission has the player hold out against waves of NVA and Viet Cong troops as they prepare for extraction via helicopter.
• Jungle Warfare: Being set in Vietnam, this is a given.
• Kill Streak: Performing stealth kills will earn you some potent perks that make stealthing easier, but will be lost if you get detected.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: Wendell can come across a river filled with crocodiles. Luckily, in contrast to past games, where you needed a knife to defend yourself if a crocodile grabs you, here, Wendell can just subject the suckers to a Jawbreaker.
• No One Gets Left Behind: One of the main secondary objectives is to find and rescue your captured allies and friendly POWs from the NVA and Viet Cong. Each friend saved serves as a Gun for Hire for the rest of the DLC while the POWs provide intel on the surrounding area.

Lost on Mars

• 11th-Hour Superpower: Restoring any and all facilities on Mars unlocks two extremely expensive upgrades that massively reduce the power draw of your guns and the cooldown of your space belt, respectively. While the latter is certainly helpful, the former breaks the game's difficulty in half by allowing you to fire even the most powerful guns almost continuously.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Mars' resident AI ANNE has been overrun and torn apart by the invading Arachnids, and she needs Nick's help to put her back together and prevent the critters from attacking Earth. At least that's what she wants you to believe. She's actually the DLC's Greater-Scope Villain, and once you do restore her to full functionality, she immediately goes Skynet not only on your ass, but on all of humanity's.
• Action Bomb: The smallest Arachnid clade are suicidal youngsters that charge their target and blow themselves up.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: The game world's three regions are named the Desert of Despair, the Desolate Dunes and the Pits of Peril.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Your only interactions with the Arachnids boil down to "kill or be killed". They attack on sight and won't stop until you're dead, they're dead, or the resident queen is dead. Either way, someone's gonna take a dirt nap before this is over.
• Ambiguously Evil: It's not exactly clear how evil the Arachnids really are, especially once ANNE reveals her true intentions and you find out that Hemoleum (the game's currency) is a substance they produce in their bodies, one that ANNE has been harvesting in huge quantities to power her technology. They actually seem to be Mars' native species just trying to defend their territory, which wouldn't make them evil at all.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: The DLC stars crop duster pilot Nick Rye as the protagonist instead of the Deputy from the main game. However, they both can call on Hurk Drubman as their loyal sidekick, albeit in... slightly different form.
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction:
  • Four of the five Geothermal Anomaly missions provide Nick with a single gun that may or may not be particularly useful to the player, depending on their preferred play style. Usually they're quite reasonably chosen, though, like the Grape Popper sniper rifle for a long-range platforming level or the Bulldozer shotgun for a cramped underground level. The fifth mission is of the "score X kills with the weapon you're given before you automatically switch to another one" type.
  • ANNE prohibits the use of firearms inside the Observatory facility (something about "delicate instruments"), so you're given the Power Glove instead to punch some Arachnides in the face until the location is cleared out.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: All your guns have one, and they tend to be much shorter than your sight range. Go on, try and snipe those Arachnides crawling around at the edge of your vision. Chances are your shots will never reach them. Fortunately, the Arachnides aren't excempt from this, either - if you're beyond their acid bombardment's maximum range, they'll still shoot at you, but the projectiles will harmlessly disperse at an invisible wall somewhere in front of you. It seems that most clades can shoot about as far as Nick's assault rifles can, with only the queens being able to outrange everything in his arsenal.
• Aroused by Their Voice: Hurk is seriously turned on by ANNE's voice.
• Attack Its Weakpoint: Most Arachnides have a distinctive red spot on their back that can be shot for massive damage similar to a headshot in other FPS games. In-game documents imply that this organ of sorts has a direct connection to their central nervous system, which makes the headshot analogy even more pronounced. Soldier clades have thick armor plating covering this spot that must be shot off before it can be targeted. If you perform a Ground Pound takedown from above, Nick will punch the spot with his Power Fist for a One-Hit Kill.
• Beam Spam: Most weapons shoot lasers or similar energy beams, first and foremost the aptly-named beam guns.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The DLC's primary antagonists, the Arachnids, are a race of giant insectoids ranging in size from a dog to a two-story building. Most try to charge the Player Character in melee, but almost every clade also has a ranged attack of varying power.
• Boss Battle: The Arachnids' largest clade, the queens, serve as the DLC's most prevalent bosses. They're huge, they're fast, they hit like a truck, they eat firepower like candy, and they're the only enemies with an actual health bar. Oh, and there are 15 of them, although not all of them need to be fought to advance the story.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Arachnide Soldiers are to their lesser brethren what the base game's Heavies are to the regular enemy soldiers^note they even recycle the same HUD symbol, which means they're very hard to kill while boasting very powerful attacks. The first one actually serves as a Wake-Up Call Boss complete with Boss Subtitles. And then the elite versions show up.
• Boss Subtitles: Two Arachnide clades get them. The first soldier you encounter serves as a Wake-Up Call Boss of sorts, so it gets its species' In-Series Nickname "Crabby" plastered across a screenshot of it roaring into the camera before the battle commences. The same happens with the first queen you fight, only with "Queenie" instead of "Crabby".
• Brought Down to Normal: The game world's southern reaches disable Nick's space belt, which makes navigating the rough terrain much more difficult and also robs you of one of your most important combat assets: vertical mobility.
• Button Mashing: May ensue if you allow an enemy to get close enough to grab you. One of the most likely candidates to pull this off is the Yeti in the Bovine Research Center due to its speed, its resilience and the very limited room you have available to evade its attacks.
• Call-Back:
  • After Far Cry 5 made a point of departing from this long-time staple of the series, Lost on Mars reintroduces the scaling of radio towers (called antennas here) to reveal the surrounding areas. Thankfully, there're only half a dozen or so on the map.
  • One of Hurk's body parts is located inside a cavern with the remains of Blood Dragons, reinforcing Trial of the Blood Dragon that these creatures are extraterrestrial in origin.
• Continuity Nod: When Nick complains about having to climb towers to power the antennas, Hurk begrudgingly reminisces on how he similarly had to climb radio towers back in Kyrat.
• Cute Machines: ANNE's robots, and by extension the one Hurk is put into for much of the game, are basically flying metal eggs the size of a man's torso. With Energy Weapons for arms. That can sometimes be seen "doing the robot". Their design on the whole bears suspicious similarities to the Tet drones from Oblivion (2013).
• Death from Above: Nick's Space Belt allows him to hover over the battlefield and target the Arachnides' weakpoints from above while making it harder on them to retaliate. He can also deliver One-Hit Kill takedowns this way once he acquires the Power Glove. Conversely, Arachnide Kings (called "space bats" by Hurk) are vulture-sized flying Glass Cannons that can deal a shocking amount of damage very quickly.
• Denser and Wackier: Lost on Mars is to Far Cry 5 what Blood Dragon was to Far Cry 3. It's completely over-the-top, full of tongue-in-cheek references to contemporary pop culture, and doesn't take itself even remotely seriously.
• Degraded Boss: A lone Arachnide soldier introduces new players to the fact that there are way more dangerous creatures running around on Mars than the ones they've fought so far. The battle can be pretty tough because the clade is one of the most dangerous in the game, yet you must face it with only a few of the most basic weapons. Soldiers then show up as uncommon yet still regular enemies almost immediately afterwards, and they rarely come alone when they do. Worse, they have an even more powerful elite version.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: One available upgrade for Nick's space suit is the Pro Shooter Upgrade Of Doom. It seems to reduce the time it takes to switch weapons.
• Downloadable Content: DLC for Far Cry 5
• Early Game Hell: As usual for the franchise, the game becomes a lot less brutal once you've restored a few facilities and unlocked some additional guns, and then again when you get your hands on all that neat advanced gear.
• Elite Mooks: Once you hit the mid-game, the Arachnides evolve and start fielding stronger, tougher, red-and-black versions of their various clades.
• Energy Weapons: Nothing but. The DLC provides twelve new weapons, all of which run on a cooldown system instead of ammunition. Some work similarly to ballistic guns in overall function, but most have fairly non-standard firing modes that may need some getting used to.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Until you've reactivated at least 25% of ANNE's facilities^note which powers up a few robots that support you in fighting the Arachnides, the only thing on Mars that isn't out for your blood is Hurk. Becomes slightly less pronounced the more facilities you restore, but the Arachnides will always be much more numerous and powerful than your allies, and even these allies turn on you for the final missions.
• Evil All Along: ANNE.
• Foreshadowing: There's a metric ton of hints that ANNE is not actually attempting to save Earth, but rather the opposite. The only one who doesn't get it is, of course, Hurk.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Instead of trying to stop an insane cult in the middle of the US, Lost on Mars sends you to, well, Mars, where you have to stop an aggressive alien species from invading Earth, supported by an ancient AI that eventually turns out to be the actual villain of the story.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: Arachnide Queens have a threepart health bar. Every time you deplete a segment, the queen burrows into the ground and summons more mooks to kill. Do so until she reappears, then rinse and repeat until she's dead. Aside from that, queens also have an uncanny talent for hiding behind large obstacles (like buildings) when you're far away, still capable of shooting you while being just out of your sight in return. If you reposition to get a better shot, so will they.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Bovine Research Center contains, among dozens of cows in test tubes, a bona-fide Yeti in cryogenic suspension. Naturally, when you're on your way out, the thing attacks and must be killed before you can proceed. No explanation is ever offered as to how this thing got to Mars or why it's even there in the first place.
• Gravity Screw: Being set on Mars, gravity is a lot weaker than we're used to, which allows Nick to jump a lot farther than he could on Earth. He also acquires an antigrav belt early on that enables giant leaps plus the ability to hover in place for a short time. Later he can upgrade the belt to what's basically the base game's wingsuit IN SPACE (aptly called "Space Wings").
• Hand Cannon: The six available handguns look mostly identical, are pretty massive, and most deal ludicrous damage for something their size. The Obliteratorrrr (no, that's not a typo) and the Nut Hugger actually shoot explosive projectiles, with the latter's being homing.
• Happy Ending Override: Inverted. This DLC is seemingly set after the events of the main game, but ignores the Downer Endings of the game, notably the nuclear attack in the "Resist" ending, or the other two where Joseph continues his plans unchallenged. Here Hope County clearly isn't destroyed and it appears Joseph is no longer in power.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Soldier clades take ridiculous amounts of firepower to kill even if you manage to shoot off the armor plate over their weakpoint. That they're fast, pack a mean punch in melee and have a powerful ranged attack as well (with the elite version's being poisonous, to boot) doesn't help. At all.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Most locations on Mars that aren't actual facilities have names that wouldn't be out of place in any Diablo game, like the Desert of Despair, the Desolate Dunes or the Pits of Peril.
• In-Series Nickname: The Arachnids are only rarely called by this name. Nick and Hurk usually call them "crabs" or "crabbies" instead.
• Laser Hallway: A few facilities are protected by laser grids that deal heavy damage on contact. They usually serve as additional obstacles in platforming segments, and once to up the difficulty halfway through an already annoying Gimmick Level.
• Lethal Joke Weapon: The Morphinator is a Hand Cannon that turns the target into a distracting chicken or an explosive cow, both of which are as helpful as they are hilarious.
• Lightning Bruiser: You do not want to face queens or soldiers in an area they can reach in melee. The things will be all over you before you can shoot down even one of them, and they will kill you in seconds if they get that close. The best you can do is hunker down on some high vantage point they can't access, dodge their ranged attacks and keep shooting until you're the last one standing.
• Lightning Gun: The Grape Popper sniper rifle appears to shoot a massive lightning strike instead of the usual Beam Spam.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Hitting an Arachnid with enough force will make it explode. Some weapons like the Tazer Spazer Annihilazer always do this by virtue of their ludicrously high damage rating.
• MacGuffin Delivery Service: The DLC's story essentially boils down to "find energy cores, bring them to ANNE's facilities and do whatever's necessary to power them back up". The whole thing is actually so close to the trope's description that one can't help but wonder whether the devs are avid readers of this very Wiki.
• Mama Bear: The player needs to kill Arachnids and destroy their eggs to draw out the queens, who will attack furiously and viciously even as their hit points fall into the single digits.
• Money Spider: Literally. The giant spider-crab-things you're fighting for most of the story are also your main source of hemoleum, the DLC's money equivalent. Top-tier clades can drop up to 150 units apiece, and every queen is worth up to 500 units. For reference: the most powerful weapons cost 2,300 units each, and the two most expensive items weigh in at 5,000 units each, so amassing enough cash to buy everything is fairly easy as long as you don't make a habit of running away from the Arachnides.
• Monster Organ Trafficking: Remember Hemoleoum? That green stuff you collect to turn into weapons and other equipment? It's produced by the Arachnides in a way that's compared to honey as it's made by bees. ANNE has been harvesting Hemoleum from them for who knows how long, which might explain why the crabs are so pissed at her.
• Mushroom Samba: There are five geysers on Mars that contain energy cores but also emit a toxic purple vapor. To get to the core, Nick must jump into these geysers, which sends him into the sort of trippy hallucination missions Far Cry has become infamous for. These ones all revolve around Nick's desire to protect his family from the peggies and take some revenge on the cult (and John Seed in particular) while he's at it.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Despite the game's inherent silliness, some of the available weapons have pretty scary names, like the Nerve Reaper for instance.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: By the end of the DLC, you have helped restore an omnicidal AI with a god complex, given her the means to attack Earth with an army of Killer Robots, killed countless living beings that were just defending their home, and possibly doomed at least their local population by killing off all their queens. Feeling good yet? For what it's worth, at least you helped undo the first two mistakes.
• Non-Indicative Name: The top-tier shotgun bears the name "Hellfire" but has absolutely nothing to do with fire; it shoots what amounts to laser slugs (the shell type, not the squishy critters). Chalk it up to the Rule of Cool.
• Non-Malicious Monster: The farther you progress in the story, the clearer it becomes that the Arachnides aren't actually on an invasion path to Earth. They're just trying to defend themselves and their territory from an evil AI and her hapless minions (one of which is you).
• Oh, Crap!: Both the protagonists (and most likely the players as well) have this reaction when they attack the Arachnide Research Center and suddenly have to fight not one but three queens. Simultaneously. Plus an army of lesser crabs, naturally. Have fun.
• Palette Swap: The DLC's twelve weapons are evenly divided into four categories (pistols, beam guns, rifles, shotguns), and all three variants in each category are visually identical except for their coloration. It's also an example of Color-Coded for Your Convenience: the basic models are white, the upgraded ones with the same functionality are red, and special variants (like the sole sniper rifle in the rifle category) are metallic-golden. Only the Bulldozer shotgun breaks the pattern by being orange despite serving the same function as the basic Iron Fister.
• Pinball Projectile: Two of the three shotguns fire shots that ricochet wildly around the area if they didn't hit the intended target right out of the barrel. The Iron Fister does it with six pellets, the Bulldozer with ten. Both look pretty impressive but, unfortunately, still manage to rarely hit anything regardless, and even if they do, the damage of individual pellets striking home isn't worth mentioning.
• Plot Device: Half your time on Mars will be spent acquiring energy cores, glowy red Power Crystals you need to power up ANNE's disabled facilities. Most are carried by Arachnide Queens, providing the pretext for numerous Boss Battles. Others can be acquired through the five Geothermal Anomaly missions or by 3D-printing them directly once you've unlocked the blueprint. The latter is prohibitively expensive, there are much more cores available in the game world than you need, and battling the queens makes up half the game's fun, so there's hardly a justification for wasting hemoleum on energy cores. Conversely, once all facilities are back online, any surplus cores can be converted into 1,000 units of hemoleum apiece, which is one hell of a lot more useful for any number of reasons.
• Point of No Return: When you're about to start the final mission, a text message warns you that there's no going back once you're committed. Unlike the base game, Lost on Mars doesn't have a Playable Epilogue (the DLC actually deletes your save file after the credits have rolled), so if there're things you want to try out, stuff you need to buy or achievements left to unlock, take care of it before you wrap up the story.
• Portmanteau: Some throwables have such names, like the Chickenade^note grenade that spawns distracting chickens, crabmones^note crab (AKA Arachnide) pheromones that make the victim the target of any nearby Arachnides, and probably also the Gren-Adios^note standard Stuff Blowing Up hand grenades.
• Power Fist: The Power Glove packs enough of a wallop to punch smaller Arachnides across the room, perform One-Hit Kill takedowns from above, and serves as an emergency weapon in the unlikely case all your guns are on cooldown for some reason. While it's certainly entertaining to use every now and then, the fact that most Arachnides will utterly brutalize you in melee makes it Awesome, but Impractical.
• Recycled In Space: Just like Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon took its base game and transplanted it into Cyberpunk, Lost on Mars takes its and shoots it into an over-the-top science fiction setting. Fortunately, it is fully aware of the premise's ridiculousness and enjoys itself as much as possible.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The Arachnides' Elite Mooks in a nutshell. Except the "evil" part is somewhat up for debate after The Reveal.
• Reforged into a Minion: Done by the heroes for a change. After Hurk's human body ended up split into a dozen pieces and spread across the entire mission area, he's put into one of ANNE's robots so he can accompany Nick into the field. Still doesn't make him particularly useful, but hey, better than nothing, right?
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Unlike in the base game, Lost on Mars weapons and equipment aren't purchased but 3D-printed more or less instantly from the stuff you paid it with.
• Rule of Cool: What half the DLC runs on.
• Rule of Funny: What the other half of the DLC runs on.
• Sand Worm: Well, more like Sand Spider-Crab-Thingy than an actual worm, but the trope applies in spirit. Treading on the slightly darker-coloured dirt fields everywhere on Mars will make Worker Arachnides pop from the ground almost instantly. Can be used for farming Hemoleum, but since they drop so little of it, it's usually not worth the time unless you really need just a bit more of the stuff.
• Scenery Porn: Mars looks pretty damn gorgeous.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Killing a queen will make any remaining Arachnides in the area flee for their lives and the surrounding dirt fields safe to walk on for a while. Heavily wounded Arachnides may also try and retreat to safety; whether they succeed or not is up to you.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Not one but two throwables exist to facilitate this: crabmones and Queens's Hearts. Both make whatever's hit by it the target of any Arachnides in the area, even if said target is itself an Arachnide. The difference between the two lies mainly in the size of their blast radius and their rarity. Crabmones are abundant in the game world, but Queen's Hearts can only be looted from, you guessed it, queens (at least until you unlock the blueprint to craft them yourself).
• Shock and Awe: Some weapons deal electrical damage, like the Nerve Reaper assault rifle (which stunlocks the target under sustained fire), the Grape Popper sniper rifle and the System Shocker EMP grenade.
• Short-Range Shotgun: All three shotgun models are virtually useless against targets beyond point-blank range despite some of them boasting impressive range stats^note which only means they deal full damage up to this distance, but since they simply won't hit anything that far away, it doesn't help their case all that much.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Averted. Shotguns are powerful, but their insane spread patterns mean they won't reliably deal damage unless the target is practically hugging you, which you'll want to avoid at all cost. There are other weapons much more worth carrying around.
• Spectacular Spinning: Just about every weapon in your arsenal has some spinning parts for no obvious reason other than it looks cool.
• Spiritual Successor: To Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, both being goofy, light-hearted affectionate parodies of specific science fiction genres with glorious B-Movie plots that revel in equal parts Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny.
• Status Effects: Late-game Arachnides gain poisonous attacks that quickly deplete your health for a few seconds. Queens always deal poison damage in melee and have special effects at range that either temporarily disable Nick's space belt or the weapon he's using at that moment. All these effects are Color-Coded for Your Convenience.
• Super-Persistent Missile: Once you lock on with the Nut Hugger and launch the shot, the laser missile will make any effort to hit the target, even if it means flying along some truly insane trajectories. That's not only helpful but borderline mandatory due to the Nut Hugger's shots also being Painfully Slow Projectiles.
• Take That Us:
  Nick: "Fuck me. I gotta climb towers now?"
• Taking You with Me: Soldier Arachnids explode violently when they're killed, and since they always try to attack in melee, great care should be taken to never let them get that close.
• Teleporters and Transporters: Fast-travelling is explicitly facilitated by teleporters you power up alongside any facility you reboot. Some facilities are Gimmick Levels that can only be accessed through special on-site teleporters, probably because it provides a convenient excuse for the devs for dropping you into some completely crazy shit while taking away your weapons in one fell swoop.
• Too Dumb to Live: Hurk, as always. Lost on Mars really makes you wonder how this guy ever made it to adulthood, least of all survived bumbling through at least three warzones across the globe, and that's not even counting the situation on Mars.
• Trick Bomb: You have a few grenade items that have fairly standard effects... and then you get the exotic and just plain wired stuff. Chicken bombs, alien baby bombs, queen alien heart bombs...
• Unfriendly Fire:
  • Just like in the base game, your companion can be damaged by your attacks, whether intentionally or not. At least Brobot can't hurt you this time around.
  • You're also not immune to your own guns' splash damage, so watch where you aim your Nut Hugger or Obliteratorrrr.
• Weaponized Offspring: Inverted. Nick can grab the larval form of the Arachnids straight out of their egg clutches and use them like grenades. He is initially disturbed by this until Hurk assures him its okay since they're monster abominations.
• Wormsign: Anything burrowing through dirt fields will create these, but be warned: their occasional absence doesn't automatically mean there isn't something lurking for you. Quite the opposite, really.
• Zerg Rush:
  • Unsurprisingly for a species of giant bugs, Arachnides are often encountered in numbers, and the smaller they are, the more numerous they tend to show up. Kings in particular are rarely seen in swarms smaller than 6-10 individuals.
  • In the Final Battle, ANNE eventually resorts to swamping you in a veritable army of Hurk clones. If the counter is anything to go by, she sends at least 100 Hurks at you.

Dead Living Zombies

• Evil, Inc.: Lampshaded by the sixth filmmaker that Guy pitches to, who states that evil corporations make good villains since they avoid directly offending any specific groups or ethnicities.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Everyone that Guy approaches rejects his pitches and call his attempts half-assed. Given that it's basically action-filled scenes with no character building, weak plots and stuff he makes up on the spot as he's giving the pitch, they're not in the wrong here. Until two producers help him get it done right and with something that actually works for a zombie film.
• Framing Device: The various scenarios take the form of film pitches that Guy Marvel is attempting to sell to producers.
• Lemony Narrator: Guy will change the setting depending on his narration.
• Mook Maker: Mutation Stations, which pump zombie goo into the ground to make more zombies until the player destroys the chambers holding the goo.
• Reconstruction: Essentially, the seventh and last pitch becomes a Recon for zombie action in general, with the main character being an established badass, has a backstory, a family, and gets in and kills the zombies to protect the world, no questions asked. It helps that the guys who are building this story are two guys who love zombie films in general and have lots of fun developing this story.
• Stealth Prequel: The story ends with a producer accepting Guy's pitch and sending him to Montana to replace the original director of the next Blood Dragon film.
• Timed Mission: The sixth film puts the player in the role of a Zombie Infectee who must make his way to the hospital in seven minutes in order to create a cure.
• Viewers Are Morons: The sixth filmmaker gives some encouragement to Guy by telling him that the only thing that truly matters for a film is getting butts on seats so he should just put in whatever he thinks will sell.
• Zombie Apocalypse: All of Guy's film pitches are just variations of zombie films.

---

Amazing Grace,
How sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost,
But now I'm found,
Was blind, but now I see.