Moving targets: the scattergun politics of Far Cry 4

[Administrator]

Somebody has left the radio on. As I swerve the truck through the outpost gate, into the precarious wiggles of Kyrat's infrastructure, Royal Army trumpets blare from the radio, obscuring cries about this great nation, these meddling anarchists. It's tempting to toggle auto-drive, settle back and gloat over the cracks in the rhetoric, as the regime labours to play down my recent conquests - fully half of the realm's radio masts mounted and flipped to the rebel cause. But there is, as ever with Far Cry 4, no time. I'm already out of the car, slicing through the underbrush.
In a clearing nearby, three boys in red vests are rigging a statue of the Buddha with explosives. They're dead before I can catch my breath. One soldier gapes for a second at the Kukri protruding from his rib cage; another falls silently to a throwing knife. My magnum springs up and blows the third off his feet, launching him violently into the air. Purple "karma" dutifully suffuses the top of the HUD. I have enough of it now to summon a mercenary to sully his conscience on my behalf. The real Buddha probably wouldn't approve, but his in-game manifestation only beams complacently, spared the fate of its real-world fellows in Tibet, where thousands of monasteries and convents have been destroyed since China overran the country in 1950.
Vaguely entranced by the dappled stone, I take a step towards it. My phone rings. It's Pagan Min, Kyrat's shameless old gossip of a despot. He's eager for my thoughts on the tug-of-war between my lieutenants in the Golden Path resistance group, between Sabal's suffocating adherence to the old ways and Amita's hunger for emancipation by fair means or foul - but there is still, for some reason, no time. A courier zips by on a quadbike, his pockets stuffed with intel I'll pass on to Amita without reading; gunfire bubbles up from behind a ridge, like beckoning applause; an untouched radio tower blinks in the distance, casting its glamour of propaganda. There is never enough time, somehow, for everything there is to do at any given moment in this game.
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