User:MatsCW

 After being utterly disappointed by Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed III”, my sight was set on another game of the same company, which hadn’t really had my attention - ‘till now. Though I’ve never really been a fan of first person shooters (in fact, I couldn’t even finish BF3’s campaign when I borrowed it from a friend because of how terribly bad it was), Far Cry 3 looked like a game which mixed many of my favorite things: organic exploration, hunting, a great villain, who I could sympathize and fear at the same time, and a ridiculously fun gameplay (I’m looking at you flamethrower). Anyway, by Christmas my grandma got mea copy of the PS3 game (surprisingly she actually got the one I wanted).

 As soon as the beach with the bloody machete appeared on the XMB, I was already pumped to play it - and god I had a great time with it -  carefully murdering guys with the bow, taking entire outposts undetected with my silenced sniper and sneaking behind the enemy lines to then slice some throats. I finished the game on the hardest difficulty and then proceeded to take over the two islands.After I was done with it, I stopped playing because I had to go to the countryside for holidays.

 Later that summer, after I came back, I actually had forgotten about the game, for a while, since I was more into other stuff at the time. But one evening, when I was just browsing stuff on my pc, my eyes shifted towards the box that was resting on my shelf and I said to myself “Meh, might as well try to finish all the side quests and everything” so I turned on my PS3 and started playing. I did a couple of side quests, killed some tigers– but in general - it was pretty boring. Because once you take out all the enemy outposts, random encounters just stop happening. So the biggest threats on the game are animals mixed up with your own stupidity.

 However, on my way to a path of the hunter quest, while I was on the top of a mountain, I spotted an enemy pirate, standing all alone. I zoomed up on him with my camera and noticed that there were five pirate corpses around him, one of them a heavy. Still, I got closer and proceeded to stab him in the chest with a takedown. Taking a look at his body, I noticed some weird stuff I hadn’t seen on an enemy before. His chest and stomach had 3 bullet holes, his arms had several cuts, and one of them was slightly burnt.

 Anyways, I proceeded to loot him, and got the usual stuff: some money, half crumpled cigarettes and a red poker chip. In addition to these, I got a thing that said “photo of a loving family”. It was the first time I got such an item, so I wanted to check the description, for many of these were actually pretty funny (like the porn magazine that said “An adult magazine with some sticky pages… better sell it quick”), but all I got was an option to view it. It was a slightly burnt off picture of a mid-aged woman with two kids, one of them a teenager - strange I thought to myself - but I just kept walking to get the quest.

 As usual, I used my wing suit to make the moving through the island faster - I don’t like using fast travel. While diving into the air however, my game lagged out, thing that happened to me a couple of times - damn consoles - so I simply shut down my PS3 – perfect timing for my mom - who was calling me from downstairs. Happens that my parents were going to a wedding and they’d probably be coming back past 4 in the morning - slightly drunk. That would give me the chance to play with max volume till late, just like I wanted.

 After some League of Legends matches and a couple of hours of eating while watching YouTube videos, I turned my PS3 back on to play some more. On the XMB however, the bloody machete on the sand was gone, thing I didn’t really think was important at the time. Then I proceeded to go through all of the introduction screens, and to the main menu, where I selected my saved file. As any far cry player will know, the loading screen for this game is pretty weird, for instead of just showing “loading” as usual games, it throws out random words (that have a meaning in the story anyways) like hunt, jungle, brother, etc. however, this time the only words that popped up on the loading screen were “find” and “kill”. “Meh, probably another glitch” I thought.

 The game started up as usual, only I was in front of a cave instead of a safe house, and a story mission marker was pointing me to go inside the cave. Curious for this new main quest, I stepped - without thinking about it too much - inside the cave. I kept walking, waiting for the flashlight to turn on, as it usually does when you step inside a cave, but it didn’t. I turned around but all I could see was darkness behind me. “Oh, I get it. This must be one of those drug sections, like the boss fight with Vaas, or the mushroom mission” so I just kept walking in the direction my mission marker was. Then it all disappeared and the screen went black.

 Moments later, I was inside a house, sitting down looking towards the floor. Then, after realizing I was in control of the camera, I looked up and saw a woman, a kid and a teenager in front of me. They were the same as the ones in the picture I took from the pirate I had killed earlier. After that a cut scene triggered, my character stood up and hugged his family. A gunfire was heard outside, “Don’t let him get you” he said in a Hispanic accent. Then he walked through the main door and peeked outside. I was in the middle of a village, facing the main road, and on the far end of the road, I could see a maniac with a flamethrower, burning down houses and people. My character then took a breath, emitted a battle cry, took a knife from his belt and started running towards the man. I realized I could only control his direction sideways, but couldn’t make him stop moving forward, also I could control when to swing my knife - but it wasn’t very useful - for when I got slightly close to him, the man, which was facing another way, turned towards me. I recognized him. He was Jason Brody, the main character from the game.

 Although you never see Jason’s face during the game itself, you do see him on the intro and on the trailers, so he wasn’t hard to recognize. However, while on the trailers he has that annoying rich boy smile, here he looked different. He was smiling, but he had another type of smile. The type that you would see seconds before you die on the hands of a psychopathic murderer. He looked at me that way, and after that a dark grin appeared on his face, he pointed the flamethrower at me and fired away. The flames engulfed me, and although I wasn’t given the prompt to put the fire down, my character tried it anyway. The skin was slowly burning away, as I heard the agonizing screams of my character. In a last attempt to complete his mission, my character pushed forward and leaned towards Jason, trying to stab him with the knife. All he achieved was making a slight cut on Jason’s arm. In the end I fell to the floor, where I saw as Jason kept walking his path of destruction, laughing. Just before I died, I saw him burning the house I came out from, woman and child cries could be heard coming out of it. Finally, the screen faded to black, with tints of orange and red on the borders.

 At this point, I was really confused. I mean, sure, the game had some pretty fucked up moments, but as far as I know, nothing like this. Even stranger was that the game never leaves the first person view of Jason Brody, and why would they put me on the shoes of an enemy charger? As all of these questions boggled my mind, the screen slowly faded to another point of view. I was standing, slightly closer to the ground than what was usual on the game, in the middle of the village mentioned before; except it was completely destroyed, with charred corpses lying around, houses burnt to the ground and a strange fog covering the place. My character looked around and saw, beneath a couple of burning logs, the body of a woman, and beside her, there was half the body of a little kid, no more than 3 or 4 years old. The other half was stuck under a giant log that fell over his little body. Although their skin was burnt I was able to recognize them: they were the pirate’s wife and little kid, but… Where was the teenager? Did he run away?

 Anyway, my mission marker said that I should move forward through the main road, and so I did. There I found the body of the man I was controlling, or at least I assumed it was, because of the place where he was and how his body was damaged. It gave me the option to loot him, but instead of the usual animation where you sweep your hands over the body and the loot appears on screen, he lifted the man’s jacket and took something that was on his chest. He then lifted it to his eyes - it was the picture of the family. He took it and put it on his pocket.

 I was then given the prompt “Square to carry body” so I did. My character picked up the body and the mission marker changed to target the beach, more or less 100 meters away from me. There, a cut scene triggered. I dropped the body, and with it, a bloody knife, similar to a machete fell and buried itself in the sand. My character then proceeded to pick it up and looked at it, slowly. When he was about to wipe the blood from the blade, a very familiar voice made him stop, a voice I had grown to both love and hate. The voice of madness itself that said: “Kid, did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?”

 After this, the screen abruptly turned black. The loading screen appeared, and the only thing that said was “Monster”. Moments later I spawned as Jason, with all of my weapons, looking towards the exit of the cave. “Well, that was one hell of a trip” I thought to myself, as I stepped out of the cave. The dead pirates were no longer there, so I confidently walked away from that place, thinking “If the game surprised me with that, I wonder what other cool stuff it holds hidden”.

 As I was thinking this, I heard a voice in the game. It was weird, almost gargled, but it held something familiar. “So, did I?” My character was abruptly thrown to the ground. Then a foot turned him around and stepped on his chest. “You are insanity. I am. Every fucking one is” he said. As I looked at him, I was stunned. He was a shifting form, changing between Vaas and the pirate I just killed. Jason tried to pick up the knife that fell beside him, but his hand was stopped by another foot. “Not just yet motherfucker”. The foot then made a bigger pressure, breaking Jason’s arm with a terrible cracking sound. A horrific cry of pain was emitted by him, but that… thing just leaned towards his face and put his hand on Jason’s mouth. “Shhh Snow White … It’ll be ok. Remember” he said ironically “You are a warrior! But even warriors die. You die, I die, and” he then shifted to the form of the pirate “I die” he said reaching with his fingers to the cut in his neck I had caused earlier, fully opening it, until the inside of his throat was completely visible. He shifted back to Vaas. “Oh but death is one thing. You Jason, you don’t die just yet. You need to keep playing. Yes. You will keep on playing” he took the knife from earlier, the one with the bloody blade out of his belt “But why play alone? You’ve been alone for a long time Jason” he shifted to the shape of the pirate “So have I” he then got his head closer to Jason’s and whispered in his ear “We are brothers Jason. We are the same. We live. We kill. We die. That’s how it works. But you broke it all, and now it’s time to put things back to its natural equilibrium” saying this he leaned back and stabbed Jason in the chest, twisting the knife and taking out chunks of meat and bones until there was a space right next to Jason’s beating heart. He then proceeded to take his own heart out and put it inside the hole on Jason’s chest. “We are equals!” he exclaimed before the screen faded to black.

 After that, the loot rucksack was opened automatically. There was no option of going back; none of my items were there, nothing except a single one: “photo of a loving family”. Curiosity got over me and I opened it. It was a photo of my family. My little brother, who was at a friend’s house, with half his body splattered over the floor, my parents, both burned to death under chunks of wood on fire and in the middle, me, with my throat slit open. Seconds later I felt the firm grasp of a hand on my hair, and the cold steel of a knife slipping through the meat of my neck. “We Are Equals”.