Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

The Far Cry series of video games have quietly been doing interesting things to the first-person shooter format for years, reports Alasdair Stuart. The basic premise is always the same: the player is a character dropped into an intensely hostile environment that must conquer that environment as well as their foes, but the games have jumped all over both the map and history. Far Cry Primal is a prehistoric action game, Far Cry New Dawn is set in the near future after a limited nuclear exchange. Blood Dragon plays like an escaped ’90s straight to video masterpiece complete with Michael Biehn as the lead voice actor and pivotal pieces of equipment called the Killstar and the Battle Armored Dragon Assault Strike System. And yes, the acronym for that is BADASS.

Most interestingly, the series has rowed back from the traditional ‘Jack Chestmeat is an ex-special forces operative ON THE EDGE’ style of protagonist to far more grounded, mundane and more interesting leads. Far Cry 5 and New Dawn in particular play with this in some fun and interesting ways. Which brings us to announcement briefly put up on developer Ubisoft’s website which includes a pair of very interesting names.

The first is Noah Hawley, showrunner on brief but enormously fun cop show The Unusuals as well as Fargo, Legion and the just-released Alien: Earth, is set to be the showrunner for what’s described as an anthology series. The quote reads:

‘Each season will be set in a new world with a different cast of characters following the video game franchise’s signature standalone storytelling format’.

What’s interesting is that while this is how the games run, the show appears to have a leading man who will carry over into each new season; Rob Mac. The artist formerly known as Rob McElhenney has just wrapped the 17th season of sit-com It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which he created and stars in as Ronald ‘Mac’ McDonald. If you’ve not seen the show, Mac is both an absolute monster of a human (as the entire cast are) and the exact sort of person who would be a protagonist in Far Cry. He’s a magnificently delusional man, hiding from his true self and a weird combination of physically capable, emotionally tortured and vastly self-centred.

Crucially though, Mac (the character, I can see how this can be confusing) has vast internal emotional depth which the show has explored to heartbreaking success on more than one occasion. Mac (the actor, almost done, promise) is phenomenally talented at this side of things especially, and is also fully prepared to get into and out of the shape of his life as recent seasons of the show have proved. In other words, he’s both the perfect star for the series and, as apparent co-writer and developer, very much a voice you want behind the camera too.

No word yet on when the show will hit, let alone be officially announced. But if you want to get a taste of what it’s going to be like, Hawley’s Alien: Earth arrives on Disney Plus this week and the complete run of Fargo to date is streaming. Mac’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is all, aside from several episodes that chose to take down, on Netflix with a 17th season on the way shortly. Mythic Quest, his excellent sit-com about video game development is all on AppleTV.