Nightmare Fuel / Far Cry 5

Welcome to Hope County...

Hope County, Montana. A beautiful place, perfect for a pleasant vacation if you're feeling tired with the city life. Just be prepared to deal with the local cult — they tend to be a bit unfriendly, what with the murders and doomsday philosophy, not to mention being armed with a lot of guns...

Okay, Hope County is not a pleasant place to visit. Unmarked spoilers below.

Trailers and demo

• The live-action Welcome to Hope County teasers embody both Nothing Is Scarier and Mood Whiplash. They show us the raw picturesque beauty of Hope County and follow it up with something utterly horrific.
  • The first teaser hits it off with a beautiful view of a river, that happens to have a rotting corpse floating down it.
  • Teaser 2 gives us a man running from... something. Moments later, he is gunned down by an unseen sniper. Stark silence follows, just another innocent killed by a brutal militia.
  • Teaser 3 has a normal looking church, with us being able to hear Amazing Grace being sung by the congregation inside. Then we see the symbol of Eden's Gate on the outside, and it turns out the bell is being rang by someone banging another person's head against the bell.
  • Teaser 4 - again, a magnificent view of the Rocky Mountains and forest. Then a bloodcurdling scream, and birds fly away.
  • The first gameplay trailer has Father Seed giving a speech, which includes the fact that he will take people into his cult "willingly... or not". Cut to people being dragged into churches struggling, a terrified woman being forcibly baptized, and a couple inside of their kitchen, on their knees praying, with a man packing an assault rifle holding them at gunpoint.
• Overall the idea of violent doomsday cults settling in and attempting to take over a remote area of a first world nation aren't exactly far-fetched with the historical examples of Branch Dividians in Waco and Order of the Solar Temple in western Europe and Canada.
• From the Announcement trailer, we see some of the actions that the cult partakes in, such as forcing others to convert against their will or killing those who oppose them, but what really sets the tone for the cult is the sign outside their church: SOULS DO NOT HARVEST THEMSELVES as we hear the main villain Joseph Seed give a sermon while seeing images of violence.
  Joseph: The end is upon us! I shall lead you to the Gates! For you are my Children and I am your Father!

The Game

• The sheer levels of Mind Rape by the cult is downright scary. Particularly Jacob who breaks people and makes them fight, whereas Faith's can make them do anything she wants, including suicide.
• The video the Junior Deputy watches on their phone starts off creepy enough, with a mole walking into one of Joseph's sermons in a dead silent church, surrounded by armed cultists. Joseph then points out the mole, who gets subdued and brought forward to the Father. What follows is Joseph grabbing the man's face and gouging out his eyes with his bare hands. The man screams in pain, then falling limp, gurgling on his own blood, while Joseph raises his bloody hands in praise, to which his followers rejoice.
• The atmosphere during the opening sequence is rather grim and oppressive, and it does a great job of making you feel entrapped. During the helicopter ride to the Seed compound, the Deputy is watching footage of the cult's atrocities on his/her phone, the same atrocities that Joseph Seed is to be arrested for. After they land, they walk through a crowd of jeering, hostile cultists who are all grimy, disheveled, and long-haired on top of being armed to the teeth. Upon finding Seed in his chapel, his calm, knowing reaction to the police officers makes it seem like he somehow knew they were coming to arrest him. He appears to surrender willingly and confidently says that "God will not let you take me," whereupon the helicopter gets brought down by a Peggie jumping into the main rotor. Joseph Seed escapes and proclaims to his gathered followers that "the Reaping" has begun before ordering them to find and kill all the police officers. The whole sequence is unbelievably tense, as it feels like bullets are going to start flying almost as soon as the helicopter lands.
  • The Peggie sacrificing himself to bring the chopper down also demonstrates how far the cult is devoted to Joseph Seed and what they are willing to do to save their "messiah".
  • All the more terrifying is how the crash proceeds. Everyone around you is in a panic, except Joseph, who is softly signing "Amazing Grace". His eerie calm throughout the whole ordeal is disturbing to the point that it's not surprising when he shows very little emotion as we progress through the game. The guy seems to be devoid of any feelings.
  • When you regain consciousness, you try to reach for the swinging headset, only for Joseph to steal it. All the while, the dispatcher on the other end is begging for somebody to answer her, and then...
  Joseph: Dispatch, everything is just fine here. No need to call anyone.
  Dispatch: Yes, Father. Praise be to you.
  Joseph: (to player) No one is coming to save you.
• The ending of the game is not better. Basically, you are given the choice between resisting Joseph Seed's offer and arresting him or just leaving his compound. Choosing to arrest him will have you end up in a hallucinogenic gun fight against him. After defeating Joseph Seed, a bright flash blinds the character temporarily. From the distance behind the Whitetail Mountains, a FUCKING MUSHROOM CLOUD erupts. You're forced into making your way to Dutch's Bunker, as the world around you is burning in a literal nuclear hell!
  • Worse yet, the entire final confrontation with Joseph seemed to encourage an understated Power of Friendship with almost all the allies you've made over the course of the game, taking the bastard down once and for all. Your reward for victory? Every single last one of them dying in terror and yourself left locked up with the madman in the aftermath at his whim. Assuming, of course, that the entire sequence wasn't just some dream caused by a really fucked-up Mushroom Samba happening in the Deputy's head. And even then, the idea that Bliss can mess with the Deputy's head so badly to make them see that is pretty horrifying.
    • Speaking of messing with the head... When the team is driving to the bunker, MORE nuclear bombs are exploding along the way. In reality, being in the blast radius of several explosions is a guaranteed way to be burned into a crisp. Instantaneously. How THAT doesn't happen to everyone in the car is anyone's guess.
  • Listen to Deputy Pratt's gut-wrenching yells as the world literally burns around him during the escape. It's extremely realistic, it's not hard to picture a human freaking out that hard in such a situation. It really makes you thinking of what the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaski felt before they were evaporated...
  • Joseph’s final monologue is also rather frightening, especially the part where he gets right in front of the Deputy’s face and gloats that he was right.
  • The other option isn't better. You let Joseph Seed go and he lets the other deputies go with you as you're driven out of the compound. The Sheriff turns on the radio, which begins to play Only You - the song Jacob used as a trigger to activate the Deputy's brainwashing into a cult soldier. As the screen begins to go red, the Sheriff looks to them and asks what's wrong.
• Joseph's Villainous Breakdown right before the final confrontation. It starts out as him undergoing Inelegant Blubbering with snot coming out of his nose, but then he goes into Tranquil Fury and you know Joseph means business.

  Joseph: Another seal... has been opened. My family... my brothers, my sister... THEY'VE BEEN TAKEN FROM ME! BY A SNAKE!! IN THE GARDEN!! (sobs bitterly for a few seconds) I thought I knew God's plan... but I was wrong. I was blind... (he raises his eyes to face the Deputy with a Death Glare) but now I see. You took my family from me so that I could have yours. We will welcome them with open arms... just as we will welcome you. We will be waiting for you... Where It All Began.

• Blissed out bears. And as bad as Blissed out bears are, Blissed-out moose are somehow even worse. Not to mention the Blissed-out cougar. Screw it, every single one of the "Judge" animals is terrifying.
  • Speaking of Bliss, the further you get through Faith's region, there are times where you think you are encountering one animal, when it suddenly becomes another. For instance, a wolf becomes a cougar, a bear becomes a wolverine - and vice versa. . .
  • Can we take a second and talk about the Blissed-out cultists you encounter throughout the game? Some of them just seem to be regular dudes with higher HP, but the ones you meet by the Henbane River have this monstrous, abhuman quality where something's clearly off about them. Going by the way they shamble around and how their speech has been reduced to wordless moaning and screaming, it's clear that Bliss has destroyed their minds. Bliss is supposed to be based off Datura, a deliriant that's extraordinarily unpleasant and scary even in small doses, so these guys must have been given a lot to make them this way. The sheer, abject terror resulting from that kind of dosage is unimaginable.
    • Another troubling question is raised by these enemies: how many of them were cultists who willingly took the ultimate terror trip to serve their God? And how many were just random people abducted by the cult (or cultists that questioned Seed) and force-fed Bliss? Whether it was done willingly or unwillingly, it's not a pleasant thought to dwell on.
• In Holland Valley, you can find a sewer pipe with a single red balloon floating outside. You'll float, too. Thankfully, it's just a harmless Easter Egg, but just try going into that sewer pipe without expecting a Jump Scare.
  • There's another red balloon inside the attic of the haunted house in the Henbane River region, with this note that you find alongside it...
    You have the fear of god you need the of THE DEVIL you need to FEAR IT you take a young person and take their body and mind you use their empty corpses to find more young people whose bodies you can steal no no NO no no you will wish your mind was scooped out of your body because when IT is through with your bodies YOU WON’T WANT THEM ANYMORE.
    • In the room with this note is a bed with shackles and what looks like fresh blood, and you can catch a glimpse of someone watching you from that same room before you first enter the building...
    • The haunted house itself is filled with Jump Scares. Notably, the dummies used in the various scares appear to be simply human models rigged up like dummies, not actual dummy models. At first, one would think this would just be Ubisoft being lazy and recycling resources, but then you get to the upper room and find what you see above, along with a bathtub full of gore. It would be around this point that you realize that Ubisoft wasn't being lazy...they knew exactly what they were doing.
• Keep an ear out for the car radio, and you might just hear news reports of the nation in a massive alert. In particular, Moscow was bombed, with casualties in the presumed millions, and in the midst of peace talks too. While everything in Hope County is so busy being isolated due to Eden's Gate, everyone is too oblivious and the player might just shrug off the background noise in the midst of their driving around.
  • This also means that Joseph isn't magically "right" in the Resist ending; all he needed was a reserve radio, satellite TV or mere access to the internet to listen to the news and prepare. You were fucked from the start, the world is doomed, and Everybody Dies, even if you try to run away or leave things be. Even though Joseph needed to be stopped, you're still an Unwitting Instigator of Doom and Hope County burns with no one saved. (Though that radio broadcast ignores the fact that all signals coming in and out of Hope County are blocked)
  • In the Book of Joseph, Joseph remarks that John is so persuasive that he could convince the president to hand over the nuclear codes. He then surmises that it is through that possibility that the end of the world might come. Sit on that for a minute.
  • Going further, if you take your time to try to listen to every single report, you’ll learn an underlying story beyond your control. Through them, we learn that constant terror attacks are occurring in the Middle East and civilians of many nationalities are being killed left and right, and that North Korea is continuing to test its nuclear arms. The final three broadcasts are the aforementioned nuking of Moscow, Washington D.C. being evacuated, and North Korea ceasing all communications, which is perceived by analysts as the first sign to nuclear war.
• The death of Eli, when you first meet Jacob you are put through time trials that force you to kill anyone you see. The screen is tinted red and there are images of feral wolves who are eating their prey. Each trial gets longer the more times you meet Jacob, and you get so caught up in the bloodlust and adrenaline that you don't even think about you're killing until it's too late.
  • Or, if you're a bit more cognizant from the get-go and you avoid pulling the trigger on Eli as you round the corner, you're now faced with a colossal Sadistic Choice. You must kill Eli to get out of the nightmare Jacob has trapped you in, but to do that, you must end the life of a good and heroic man. This time, you don't even have the excuse of instinct or blind reactions, you must deliberately murder him to progress. Not that the game acknowledges this, mind. Even if you come barreling into the room with thirty seconds on the clock to just sit and stare at Eli, Jacob still acts as if he turned you into an unthinking killing machine.
  • The training Jacob puts you through is particularly scary...for the player. Because it's not just conditioning the Deputy to kill on command, the high-paced, fast reaction time required to complete these sections is training YOU, the player, to be better at killing. You're so used to this drill by now, that you don't even pause before killing Eli. Also, the song Only You is now permanently ruined for both the Deputy and player.
  • The trials make you kill nameless soldiers as well, which explode into smoke, dust or flames when killed. In the final trial after reaching the bunker, the player doesn't realize the dead aren't disappearing, you're killing real soldiers on your path to Eli. These soldiers are fighting in self-defense against their only hope to stop Joseph, while you're thoughtlessly mowing them down.
• The King's Hot Springs Hotel in Faith's region is haunted. Hang out in the main building when you've cleared the area, and you'll hear whispers and other noises coming from nowhere, even without being under the effects of Bliss. Room 203's door appears to be slightly left ajar, although there is no way inside.
• It should be noted that Joseph Seed and his followers are similar to Zachary Comstock and his followers, who were frightening on their own with their fanaticism.
  • Just to reiterate, the members of the Project at Eden's Gate are terrifyingly devoted to Joseph Seed, willing to go at any lengths to see their goals accomplished. Not once do they hesitate. One piece of Nightmare Fuel comes on the first capture by John. While being transported to his compound, the cultist in the truck speaks of how one reaches Atonement.
  ...confession without pain isn't confession. You'll scream out your sin, then you'll wear it on your flesh before John peels it off of you. It's a beautiful thing.
  • Even after you kill the three Heralds and Joseph, the remaining cultists are still as dedicated to the cause. You can see it as them being so brainwashed they can't live for anything else, or they really think Joseph had ushered in The Collapse.
• The very creepy way that The Platter's "Only You" creeps in whenever Jacob is about to capture you for his sadistic tests. It starts off with you barely hearing it in the background, enough for you to think the song's not playing in-game, but then your vision begins to get fuzzy as you start to see lights floating in front of you, all while the song gradually gets louder. Then, you finally collapse on the ground and pass out. And it can happen at anytime after you get enough reputation points in Jacob's region.
• If you have a fear of bees and wasps, play the "Vespiary" Prepper Stash at your own risk. You must traverse a dark grain elevator that is full of hornet nests, and the building is so tight and cramped that you're frequently in very close quarters with them. Especially horrifying is one moment where the floor gives out from under you, and drops you right in front of a nest. Even though the hornets are surprisingly docile as long as you don't mess with the nests (which you'll have to, to get past some of them), and you can actually destroy them without being attacked if you use the Repair Torch, it's still unnerving as hell.
• You can join Larry in his alien adventure. Jump into the portal with him while it's opening up and you'll be taken to... somewhere. You don't get to see much, but through your orange tunnel vision, you can see what looks like some sort of alien spaceship, along with very disturbing inhuman sounds, before you're dropped back off into Hope County. Wherever Larry went, it couldn't have been good.
• Getting Sherri's whiskey caskets require you to swim into tight spots and risk drowning multiple times. If you have a fear of tight places and drowning, you're not gonna have a good time.
• Every Far Cry game since 3 has featured snakes, and this one is no exception, with Hope County being home to rattlesnakes. Luckily, they're a little easier to avoid because of that telltale rattle, but at the same time, that makes them a little creepier, not helped by the fact that they blend in excellently with their surroundings. There are many moments where you hear the rattle, but don't see the snake, and are constantly on edge until you do find it, or simply leave.
• The Bright Warden Radon Spa, a location with a prepper stash in an old Radon mine full of hyper-concentrated Bliss fumes. It's dark, you can hear constant laughter, and you're expecting a fight around every corner, but all you find are a lot of unexplained bodies and some ghostly apparitions. Then you flip a power switch, and all the lights go out. You turn around and realize that the "bodies" you walked past on the way in are all waking up...
  • Even scarier if you visit this location after killing Faith, as her shadowy silhouettes seem even more ghostly.
• In the Henbane River, if you go south of Sacred Skies Youth Camp, you can find the Administrator's Cabin. Walk around the area, you can hear a phone ringing in a boarded up cabin. If you break through said cabin, you will find an old rotary phone on the ground, ringing, despite it not being wired to any phone line. Pick it up and you will hear someone sobbing, just crying before it cuts off. And there is zero explanation for this.
  • In fact Henbane is littered with these. At one outpost you can find a recording of Faith giving a creepy monologue about how Rachel (her original name) had been replaced by Faith herself.
    Faith: Rachel's so sad and alone. Once was lost; never found. She led a faithless life and it brought her low. Faith rose up in her, but Rachel stayed low down. Faith flies divine—and Rachel...Rachel gropes around in the darkness. I left her there a long time ago.
  • Another one, found at an old abandoned cemetery, Faith has this to say:
    Faith: A baby is a sack of screaming, shitting, crying impulses with no personality, no thoughts, no understanding of the world beyond feelings. It has no soul. You have to give it one. The only soul we ever have, we receive from others. And it is only others who can take it away.
• Ever been to Prosperity? It's a ghost town in the middle of nowhere; but when you get there, all you see are mannequins all over the place masquerading as humans that once lived there; as far as the eye can see. It's rather unsettling to be there for a long time.
  • It is actually explained why mannequins are propped up there, but only if you meet Tweak, a drug addict/amateur chemist. The town was abandoned by its residents who fled to Fall's End away from the Peggies. It was Tweak who set up the mannequins for someone like the Deputy to use as target practice under the influence of his boosted homeopathics. If you never encounter him, though, Prosperity will indeed seem like a literal ghost town.
• The fact that the Heralds can send out hunting parties with Bliss bullets and arrows to catch you at any given moment to capture you. The fact that Bliss can be made into a projectile injectible is particularly frightening. It's a wonder that they haven't used such means for ultimate conflict resolution.
  • But the scariest part, is that Bliss really exists in Real Life. Its called Scopolamine and is normally very safe and even essential medicine used to treat motion sickness, going so far to even be on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. However, the fact that the cult turned a once very beneficial medicine into a mind-corrupting drug is still terrifying.
• All four of the Seeds sincerely and honestly believe they're doing the right thing. In an odd way, they even seem to respect the Deputy.
• A rather subtle, almost unnoticeable one, but on the start menu of the game, as soon as you press start, you'll hear a weird, faint noise. If you listen to it closely, it sounds like a heavily distorted, yet still relatively quiet scream.
• Wanna know who is back in the Lost on Mars and Dead Living Zombies DLC? Our hairy friends from Far Cry 4, the Yeti and a freaking Blood Dragon.
• One of the prepper stashes in Hope County involves sifting through dog poops to find a key that one of the campers fed to one the many dogs to hinder the Peggies from opening their locked stash. It sounds silly until you walk in the camp to find that the campers have been killed by Peggies, and the dog that ate the key is trapped in a locked house filled with other dogs, some still alive and panicking while others have died due to starvation and probably illness from all the littered feces.
  • Fridge Horror sets in when you wonder what would have happened if the Deputy just never stumbled through the place and let the dogs rot all the way from neglect.

---

Only yooooou...can make this world seem right... only yooooou...can make the darkness bright...

---