Videogames love the Victorian era, but they tend to love it mostly as an aesthetic: steam, industrialism, mutton chops, dead prostitutes, fainting couches. Tiger and elephant leap at each other in primal combat: offense and defense, orange and blue, with all the vibrancy of mascots and all the gravity of constellations. The lion’s head fell forward on the crocodile’s back, and with an awful groan he died, and the crocodile, after standing for a minute motionless, slowly rolled over on to his side, his jaws still fixed across the carcase of the lion, which, we afterwards found, he had bitten almost in halves.īoot up Ubisoft’s Far Cry 4 and the first thing you’ll see-after a litany of logos for the developer, the engine, and Nvidia-is something that feels like a digital reincarnation of Haggard’s vision. As the adventurers Horace Holly and Leo Vincey make their way into the center of Africa, they see the fight from their riverboat-the animals “struggling hideously,” tearing at each other with tooth and claw: Rider Haggard’s 1887 adventure novel She, the entrance into true wilderness is marked by a spectacle both natural and preposterous: a crocodile and a lion fighting each other to the death.

Far cry 4 hunting map