For fans, the Far Cry series is known for beautiful sprawling locales, heavy weapons, and strong voice acting performances. But it’s also notorious for continually sending players to “exotic” nations, and encouraging them to murder the local people of color. Previous settings include the islands of the South Pacific, an unnamed African country, an Asian-Pacific archipelago, and a fictional country tucked into the Himalayas. Far Cry 5 will be presented next month at the annual E3 game conference, but a piece of key art, released today, shows that Ubisoft intends to invert that controversy, moving the series to the USA.

Far Cry 5 is set in a Montana county, and its lead enemies, judging from the key art, are a band of white Americans. The image is a loaded collision of violence, religion, and politics. The band of rural Americans, sporting unkempt beards and wool button-downs, while wielding magnums and bowie knives, re-create the tableau of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. On the table rests iconography of rural Americana: a freshly baked pie, a glass jug, an empty beer bottle, a raw steak, and an American flag — the stars replaced with a variation on the Iron Cross, known best as a German military medal used during the World Wars. In the foreground is a bound prisoner, “SINNER” painted onto his back; in the background stands a chapel, draped with the same variation on the Iron Cross.

(Yan Kuzovlev notes on Twitter the symbol resembles a squat version of the cross of Scientology. The blue tone of the chapel resembles the color of the church’s headquarters in Los Angeles. That could be read as further commentary. As Polygon explains, Far Cry 5 tells the story of a Christian cult.)

Far Cry 5 will be a rare shooter set on American soil

The image calls to mind the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Range, in which armed militants in cowboy hats and rugged button-downs seized the headquarters of the park located in Harney County, Oregon. Though it’s likely work began on Far Cry 5 before the incident, as video games takes years to conceptualize, greenlight, and develop.

The significance of the game using white, non-military Americans as villains extends beyond the Far Cry franchise. Other than the Grand Theft Auto and Postal series, very few medium-to-large budget video games have used American citizens as lethal targets. Like the action movies of the 1980s, most video games have defaulted to “non-controversial” fodder, like Nazis, indistinctly “foreign” terrorists, robots, aliens, zombies, and, of course, Nazi zombies. Even fewer games have specified a certain type of American as an enemy, preferring to paint with a broad and less controversial brush.

But a shift has taken place over the past year. Resident Evil 7 sets its hero against a pseudo-zombified white family in the American bayou, while Outlast 2 draws horror from an American religious cult. Mafia 3 follows Lincoln Clay, a mixed-raced Vietnam vet, who takes revenge on the Italian mob in 1970s Louisiana after the assassination of his father figure, the leader of the black mob. And an episode of Hitman, called “Freedom Fighters,” has the titular killer assassinating targets on a Colorado compound that seemed to take at least some inspiration from the real-world incident in Harney County.

But Far Cry 5, should it commit to the direction the key art suggests, will be the biggest and most aggressive game to adjust the sights of the first-person shooter genre against people in the United States. Its enemies aren’t zombies, nor are they singular targets that require skill to kill. The series is built around its lead killing hundreds of enemies in a single playthrough.

With one image, Far Cry has inverted its controversy

Far Cry 5 has with a single image show its intentions to course-correct. And in doing so, it may find itself in a controversy — this time from the opposing side of the political spectrum.

An important piece of information is still unknown: who will the player play as? The moral complexity of previous Far Cry games was impacted, partly, by the identity of the protagonist. The player selected the lead from a pool of characters with different ethnicities in Far Cry 2, while Far Cry 3 featured an extreme sports-loving, young, white man as the hero who slaughters islanders, while getting marked with mystical tribal tattoos. Far Cry 4’s hero was returning to his homeland to spread the ashes of his deceased mother before being looped into the nation’s civil war. The character at the center of Far Cry 5 will be the lens through which we see its villains.

But the art alone has already upset some fans. On the forum Politically Incorrect forum at 4chan, one commenter writes, “Sweet. If that is the plot I can find out who make FarCry game and NEVER FUCKING BUY ONE OF THEIR GAMES AGAIN.” Another writes, “Making the white people look evil. Getting fucking sick of this shit. You want us to become evil. We sure as fuck will.” Another goes further: “I hope they at least give us an ******evil ******* so that I can have the option to join them. If that were the case I would gladly pay $70 dollars to have a degenerate-hunter simulator.”

It’s still unclear how Far Cry 5 will deliver upon its formula of beautiful settings and deadly guns. The game promises a conversation about violence in video games, and why it became acceptable to murder virtual versions of one group of people, but not another.