Despite spending dozens of hours in Yara, the Cuba-inspired setting of Ubisoft’s Far Cry 6, despite getting earfuls from quest-giving NPCs, swerving down dirt roads in rusted jalopies, blasting salsa anthems, skimming palm tree canopies in my ridiculous wingsuit, it feels less like a real place than a ghost town, haunted by the mechanics and geographical features of Far Cry games past.

I come across a Yaran fishing port and my mind overlays the shapes and structures of a Himalayan village, or a Pacific island beach dotted with bamboo bungalows, or a ranch in the Montana wilderness. I am supposed to be playing 2021’s Far Cry 6, living out the life of a guerilla named Dani Rojas, who’s seeking to overthrow the brutal dictator of Cuba-but-not-Cuba, Antón Castillo (played by Guancarlo Esposito), but I don’t really buy it. Built, as it is, from the same materials, pieced together in the same order, packed with the same weapon upgrades, the same vehicles, the same bases stuffed with flimsily caged animals, exploding barrels, and alarm systems, I could just as easily be playing any modern Far Cry game, set in any of the exotic locales which define its touristic approach.

Within half an hour of starting the game I’m handed a flamethrower. With it, I get to do the thing that you do in nearly every Far Cry game: burn down a field of the enemy’s crops to a soundtrack. Here, it’s tobacco instead of weed and it’s the anti-fascist anthem “Bella Ciao” instead of Damian Marley’s “Make it Bun Dem.” Here, it’s a cobbled together, upcycled flamethrower, half-rusted and painted in bright hues, instead of some expensive piece of military hardware, but it does the same deed just as efficiently. It, and everything else in the game, is die-cast and molded to fit into the exact same configurations.

Far Cry 6 nods at and readily lampshades this fact. After the flamethrower mission, your protagonist mutters something about it all feeling familiar. To be fair, it’d be foolish to play a game which is the sixth installment of a long running franchise without expecting a certain degree of familiarity. Any Far Cry game coming from Ubisoft at this point is undoubtedly going to wear its lineage proudly on its sleeve, serving more as an iterative installment than a departure, a new splash of paint on a rapidly aging chassis.

This is part of a recognizable—and certainly understandable—pattern among big budget games and their sequels. Game development is a challenging process. Making sure the numerous moving parts of a game interlock in ways which are seamless, fun, and rewarding, even after many dozens of hours, is a daunting and often impossible task. It’s hardly surprising to see developers reuse elements that work, to stick to formulas which have always reliably provided success and critical approval.

Where this approach falters, however, is in applying the same formulaic design approach to representing and depicting a culture and its people. Unfortunately, this is precisely what the Far Cry series–ever since its third installment–has proudly made its bones doing. The modern Far Cry formula involves stuffing whole societies into navigable maps broken up into military bases, convoys, and checkpoints. Whole art histories and historical totems get reduced into collectible power ups and story macguffins: collect this [prayer flag], [bottle of moonshine], [machete], and bring it to the [temple], [log cabin], [swampside village].

It’s a programmatic and Eurocentric way of understanding culture. It’s how North Americans and Europeans, fed a diet of propaganda, minimization, and disregard, have always tended to view the Global South. Instead of honest historical accounting we mostly get the branded version of it: t-shirts, bumper stickers, and dorm room posters. Fidel Castro is reduced to his green military cap, his beard, and his half-eaten cigar. Che Guevara is a romanticized troubadour, abstracted into two colors and screen printed on t-shirts and weed grinders. Regardless of whether we view these men through sympathetic or antagonistic lenses, that view is blinkered all the same: we see only what we want, or care, to see. All their nuances, changes of heart, contradictions and fraught, contested ideologies are filed down to ones and zeroes for easy memetic recall. Far Cry 6’s Castillo is the natural result of this process. Tinpot dictator shorthands made manifest behind the expensive veneer of a famous actor’s face. No real depth, no vision, just a boogeyman to fear and despise.

All the history which Far Cry 6’s developers have supposedly pored over, all the research and sensitivity consultation doesn’t do anything to add depth to Castillo or any other part of the game. Cuba, the Caribbean, and Latin America become inch-deep simulacra, representational trinkets and signifiers. Heal yourself by smoking a cigar. Tackle gators in a swamp. Blast a colorful catalogue of Cuban-inspired music as you drive from generic base A to generic base B.

On top of this, the repackaging of elements which are inherent to the formulaic Far Cry legacy further exposes Yara’s artificiality. You can’t, for example, have a Far Cry game that doesn’t include whacky drug trip sequences. Well, what if, instead of acid, it's genetically modified … uhh, tobacco? Any piece of culture can be retconned and contorted into a shape which satisfies the formula. The ease with which these supposedly intrinsic objects and customs are changed out for one another suggests a simplified understanding of how they actually operate within the real world.

Far Cry 6’s plot involves a miraculous cancer-curing drug, which is a clear nod to Cuba’s real life advances in medical science, as well as its role in providing international medical aid, in spite of American obstruction. But players won’t really get to see anything close to this facet of Cuban society. The view we get is, instead, filtered, digested, and spat out as some villainous machination of Castillo’s; a medical establishment as ammunition for world domination, one made possible only through upsetting and cavalierly depicted slave labor.

These and other inspirations for Far Cry 6’s setting rarely seem to survive their clumsy translations. As a result, their in-game manifestations do little to help players better understand the political complexities of the Caribbean or Latin America, which wind up serving merely as historical patina for the same old violent sandboxes the series has always offered, and likely always will.

In addressing some of the valid concerns about political seriousness raised after previews of the game came out in May of this year, Far Cry 6’s narrative director, Navid Khavari, explains the brand’s “DNA,” which “ … seeks to have mature, complex themes balanced with levity and humor.” Far too often, the joke appears to be at the expense of the society which also inspires the game’s more mature themes. Far Cry 6 often references the U.S. trade embargo, a ruthless and immoral form of collective punishment forced on the people of Cuba simply for the crime of living under and generally supporting Castro. At best, the game casually brushes the embargo aside. At worst, it turns it into the inspiration behind the humorous and lighthearted “Resolver” concept: a facet of the game’s undercooked guerilla ideology explained as an adaptation to the scarcity conditions resulting from living under an embargo. It amounts to weapons and upgrades built out of spare parts and junk. Your character and other NPCs effectively upcycle the used detritus of their environment, treating their armor and assault rifles like the endlessly repaired 1950s roadsters which still put down Havana’s streets to this day.

It’s telling that instead of designing a mechanic which points out the injustice of living under a sixty year embargo, Ubisoft designed something meant to be fun and goofy. We are meant to be impressed by the zany, unrealistic extremes of a backpack which shoots depleted uranium tipped missiles, or which can turn you into a raging machete-wielding berserker. We’re meant to celebrate the ingenuity of a deprived people without caring about what caused the deprivation to begin with, without wondering about what they might accomplish, given the same opportunities as everyone else.

It’s a perspective which sees Cuba through the same lens as those vendors hawking Che Guevara t-shirts and Castro caps. It looks only at the surface, the representational iconography, and, like a 3D artist reusing the same animations across a variety of different character models, grafts that surface onto a dependable, generic, and, by this point, utterly unremarkable base structure.

These soulless husks, these floating spirits, unmoored from their setting, dragged from third world-locale to third-word locale, yammer on in what is meant to approach authenticity, but which actually feels false, regurgitated, and unrecognizable. Everyone you meet in Far Cry 6 (over)uses the word “guerilla.” Grinds their teeth across the letters and repeats it to the extent that any meaning it may possibly have once held is lost.

Here, guerilla, take these tools, versions of the ones used to fight against other tyrants, other cookie-cutter ideologies and placeholders for real world political figures. Liberate this land, spread your violent freedom across its surface, just as you’ve done many times before (sometimes ironically, sometimes reluctantly, but always effectively). Don’t sweat the details. It was never really about you or your imaginary struggle. It was always meant for us. Safe backdrops for our toothless fantasies. We sample the colors, the sounds, the images of your culture to add a little spice and flavor to our bland dishes, never imagining or desiring to truly understand what it is we are consuming.

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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Twitter @youmeyou.