Far Cry 5 is thematically a successor to Far Cry 4, but it leans far harder into fourth wall breaking. Where Far Cry 4 broke the fourth wall once or twice, Far Cry 5 breaks it at every opportunity.
Far Cry 4 was a game that critiqued the vapidness of player motivation. The player's official motivation is that they want to scatter their mother's ashes. Their real motivation is that they want to tear shit up. By the time they ascended Pagan's mountain, how many players even remembered why they were there? Pagan's monologue as he walks you out to the shrine (assuming the player didn't make the humongous mistake of shooting him) both mocks the player for their ignorance and gullibility (What's that? You didn't know that your father murdered your baby sister?), and then, twinkle-eyed, smugly reminds them how much fun their gyro-copter mass murder escapades were. (Pagan admitting that he simply used the murder of his daughter as an excuse to do whatever he wanted to do, just as you used your flimsy character motivations to do whatever you wanted to do.)
Far Cry 5 is a game that recycles the narrative fabric of Bioshock: Infinite and largely strips it of its American-ism. Far Cry 5 is not really an American story. It takes place in America, but the actual story being told is essentially mythical. The game could have taken place anywhere in the world, and the underlying themes would have been identical. Far Cry doesn't have much to say about America because it's not about America. It's about free will and the player as, essentially, a supernatural force that isn't a ROLE. They're a free agent. They can choose. The other characters don't have that freedom. Faith is a literal ROLE. She's not even a real person. She's a random woman living a life assigned to her. And ultimately the same is true of every other character. But "Rook" is not a real police officer. They're a player wearing the skin of one.
And Joseph recognises you, on a certain level, for what you actually are. Joseph foresaw that you would come. Not some vague "they" will come. He explictly foresaw that YOU would come. The manifestation of DEATH. He foresaw that you would kill his family. (He knew you wouldn't be able to kill him, though. After all, if God won't let you take him, why would God let you kill him?) However, Joseph hoped, most likely in vain, that the player would... just walk away.
Far Cry 5 is about free will, futility of human endeavor, and also how people will jump though hoops to avoid believing something that conflicts with their worldview. The player is not actually "Rook". Rook is a cypher. At key moments in the story, characters look "Rook" in the eye, and tell them things -- those things are not directed at Rook. They are directed at the player.
Far Cry 5 reinvents the opening sequence of Bioshock: Infinite, where "He doesn't row", into an excellent boat-based monologue about the illusion of free will. There are multiple aspects of Far Cry 5 that are reused from Infinite, but in a far more more effective way, I think.
I suspect, though, that Far Cry 5 is an example of how open world games struggle to convey their message and themes if the audience isn't paying attention. You're looking at 3-4 hours of plot over 40 hours of gameplay. The audience can lose track. But Far Cry 5 tries to hammer its point home over and over again. Even Jacob, the cynic who doesn't really believe in the divine, tries to warn the player.
Jacob: "My brother saw all this coming. I don’t know if he talks to God. That doesn’t matter. He was right. Humanity is once again in crisis. It doesn’t matter what we build or achieve…we will always find a way to break it down. Babylon, Rome, empires rise, empires fall. America. We’re no different. We think we’re indestructible. World War II. War on ‘Terror’, we survived it, but it only brought us closer to the edge. And this is where we are. Right here on schedule, just waiting for someone to push us, and oh boy, have you pushed us.
You did everything you said you would do. And you didn’t even know it. You had no fucking clue."
John: What if Joseph is right? Did you ever stop to think about that? Everyone thinks he's crazy. But he's not. You want this key because you think you're saving people, but they are already safe. We had a plan.
You don't understand. You don't believe. You don't care! May God have mercy on your soul.
Faith: You still don't understand. You don't know what it is you're doing do you? Joseph believes he's our savior.
But you'll be the one who decides what happens. You were the start. You'll be the end. It was always going to happen this way.
You'll walk the path. You'll rescue your Sheriff. You'll be the hero. And then... you'll choose. And if you don't listen to him, he'll be right."
Faith literally turns to the player, and asks slyly, "Do you know what hubris is?" When your average player plays Far Cry 5, they are defying Joseph's God from the moment they put the cuffs on him. They break seal after seal. They are arrogant. They are warned again and again to stop before it's too late. If players refuse to stop, the blood of millions is on their hands. This is Far Cry 5's message. You're meddling in affairs you don't understand. You think you're the hero, but you're not. As evil as the cult are, they would have saved a fair number of people. Thanks to you, every person they might have saved is now dead. This is regardless of whether the player is actually causing the end of the world in a butterfly effect-slash-wrath of the gods cascade. It could be a Terminator 3-style end of the world where you can only stall it for so long. It happens eventually. You can only prepare for it.
Another thing to remember about Far Cry 5 is that using drugs to see into into the future is canon. It happened in Far Cry 3, and it happened in Far Cry 4. Faith explicitly tells you what will happen if you continue down the path you have chosen. You will be given a choice, and if you take the wrong choice, Joseph will be right.
An interpretation of Far Cry 5 that intentionally ignores the multiple times you took drugs and gained access to supernatural knowledge/insight is a flawed one. A lot of people have tried to dissect Far Cry 5 purely on the grounds of America and American politics, and I think this is a mistake Errant Signal falls into. Far Cry 5's core story taken in a literal way about the player being arrogant towards "the gods" and incurring Nemesis. They break the seven seals and that's that. Even if they stop before the 7th seal, and walk away, a huge amount of damage has already been done.
The interesting is that Far Cry 5's ending is actually not dissimilar to the original planned ending of Red State. Where it turns out the cult were in fact right. It just doesn't directly show anything supernatural.
Smith has stated that the original ending continued with the Rapture happening and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse descending on the scene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_State_(2011_film)#Original_ending
