Games I Played In 2024 - Umurangi Generation (+ Macro)

Console: PC, Switch, XB1, PS4, PS5, PSVR2, Quest 2, Quest 3

Developer: Origame Digital

Release Date: May 19th 2020 (Macro DLC released November 7th 2020)

Umurangi Generation is a first-person photography game all about artistic expression, exploration, and masterful environmental storytelling. Developed by solo Māori developer Tali Faulkner in 10 months, Umurangi Generation is visually reminiscent of the PSX-era of games: low-poly, low-res, and blocky with mostly flat textures, but with tons of visual charm anyway. However, it very much plays like a modern FPS game, and the tutorial even says so. Just replace the guns with camera lenses.

TAKE IN THE VIBES

Umurangi Generation hosts numerous modes, but the main Normal Mode is essentially about scavenger hunts called photo bounties. In each stage, seven photo bounties are given to the player, and that's all that needs to be done. Bounties aren't always just requiring a picture of specific things, however: often there will be a restriction on what type of lens you need to use, or whether you need to be close or right next to the object. The bounties are always the same, rather than randomized, so they are carefully designed per stage. Once all bounties are complete, a delivery point appears somewhere in the stage and must be accessed to complete the level.

There are also five bonus bounties on each stage that are always the same no matter what: take a group shot of all your friends (three recurring characters and a penguin), earn a certain amount of money, recreate the stage's postcard, find all the films, and complete all bounties and deliver the parcel in under 10 minutes. The game even does a good job of incentivising doing these: they unlock new lenses and features on the camera.

The base game has 8 stages, with the DLC having 4 extras. Of the 8 stages, there are 6 unique maps, with the other two having variations later on. Nevertheless, the variations are obvious enough that they do feel like different stages and not like artificial ways to extend the game, especially considering the role they play in the narrative.

Each stage in Umurangi Generation is quite small, but filled with enough trinkets, posters, graffiti to make exploration and, most importantly, taking pictures consistently interesting. Due to the small size, it never takes too long to do all of the bounties, and most of the time spent, at least for me, was spent looking for the films. The films are very small black cylinders that easily blend into the environment, making finding them a bit of an ordeal. But they're never in places that are that out of the way either. Looking for them is a good way to fully explore a stage and, as a result, experience all of the environmental storytelling the game has to offer. Picking up a film replenishes your available film, up to 24. It's like replenishing your ammo. To be honest, I'm not sure if this mechanic adds much to the game outside of being realistic to an extent.

If there's one thing to criticise about the core gameplay, it's the way bounties work. While the idea is solid and indeed fun, in its implementation it can end up being counter-intuitively restrictive to the more artistic side of the game. Some bounties are specific enough that they're only really possible to do in one or two spots on the stage, reducing the creativity in tackling them tremendously. And other bounties are so easy that it can be as easy as using a wide angle lense in the middle of the stage and taking a picture in the needed object's general direction. In fact, a few times I got some bounties done by accident when trying to get another one. While it's possible to avoid it, there's something about adding a soft time limit that makes it harder to consciously do on a typical playthrough. Other bounties, especially in later stages, can be finicky to complete. One in particular is to be taken when near, but is an object that only comes around every 30 or so seconds, which can be a bit annoying.

A smaller nitpick is the way you change lenses. While it's like any FPS where scrolling the mouse wheel cycles through them, they're ordered in a borderline random manner that I never managed to perfectly recall, especially as more lenses were added haphazardly in the line-up. With multiple late game bounties requiring specific types of lenses, I found myself agonisingly cycling through all of my lenses one by one until I found one of the correct type. The more the game went on, the more I found myself wishing there was a sort of weapon wheel-like system, or perhaps a category-based system like Half-Life or Timesplitters.

As far as the lenses go, it feels like a lot of them zoom you in too much compared to your usual viewpoint while some zoom you out too much. While it can be remedied with the camera's zoom most times, I often found myself needing to back up more and more to get the shot that looked just fine before looking through the camera. The focus feature, though functional, also feels a tiny bit too inconsistent from a casual, non-photograph perspective like mine; it just never felt like I had a true grasp on how it really worked. It also doesn't feel like an actual focus, as sometimes I'd see a seam in the blur effect.

There is a scoring system in the game, where your pictures are graded and given a monetary value. While this makes sense due to your character being a courier, in practice it doesn't really add anything to the game. The money isn't used for anything as there is no currency system in the game, and though your pay is tallied at the end of the stage, it's not saved so there's no real score attack. This is likely due to the fact that you can take as many pictures as you want (nearly 170 at the very least) and you can absolutely just take the same optimal photo over and over again to pad the stats, but there could've been a way to handicap the score for repeated pictures and having a ratio for the number of pictures taken. As is, this score is merely used for a bonus bounty that is always really easy to achieve, so it feels like a waste of a mechanic the way it is.

ONE SNAPSHOT AT A TIME

If there's one thing that stood out in Umurangi Generation, it's the plot and the way it's told. With no dialogue, cutscenes or text boxes, Umurangi Generation tells its story purely through environmental storytelling. Posters, graffiti, and the general state of the world around you as you, a passive player, run around taking pictures tell the story better than any cutscene could. In the tutorial, the player is told not to photograph blue bottles, a colloquial name for the jellyfish-like Portuguese man-o'-war. Doing so deducts points from your picture and it says that this will make sense further in the game.

Umurangi Generation takes place in a cyberpunk version New Zealand. However, instead of relying on the 60's and 70's view of cyberpunk, Umurangi Generation is an attempt to modernise the idea of cyberpunk, injecting modern day sensibilities into the concept. The result is shockingly effective by the end of the game, not just due to how well information is communicated through the environment, but because of the game's very nature as an exploration-based photography scavenger hunt, which forces you to look through every little nook and cranny, read graffiti, look at posters, and more.

The game's narrative also has some nice retro anime influences that tie it all together really nicely. It's not necessarily the kind of story or narrative where you end up caring for particular characters, instead it's more of a snapshot of the state of the world in 8 parts. The unnamed player character is completely passive and NPCs do not react to their presence in any way, either. You do get to change the poses your friends are doing, though.

Being a cyberpunk game, Umurangi Generation's story touches on many themes common within the genre, most importantly anti-establishmentarianism. There is enough in the game's environments to be able to really study it and make something akin to a video essay about it. Strikingly, Umurangi Generation's tone adopts a no-holds-barred approach to its subject matter: there is little subtlety and words aren't minced. It's ugly in a refreshing way, a boon of being a solo endeavor. There's a crass, crude edge to it all that, especially when paired with the game's overall vibes, creates a pretty special atmosphere for a game with such "basic" low-poly graphics. There are even some scenes that genuinely instilled a sort of dread within me; the game is not necessarily immersive, but it still pulled me in.

THE ORIGIN OF IT ALL

The Macro DLC for Umurangi Generation adds four additional prequel stages after the final mission, as well as new camera features. The stages added in Macro all take place 2 weeks before the events of the main game, and they all have an extra level of detail that is really appreciated, down to one stage having an outright secret room with a hidden key that's purely there for story reasons.

The features added are very welcome, such as turbo skates, a way to go prone, manual controls for the camera, and even a selfie lens. The manual controls give the player a whole other level of freedom when it comes to taking picture, allowing you to modify the camera's ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. This can even, I assume, serve as an introduction to the more technical aspects of photography. As someone with no experience in photography, it all goes a bit over my head, but I love that the options are there. My biggest gripe, amusingly, is that there are no poses for the selfie lens, severely limiting its value for me.

In Macro, the mystery aspect of Umurangi Generation's storytelling is completely discarded, replaced by blunt, borderline shocking imagery. If there were any doubts about where Umurangi Generation stands narratively, Macro bursts in with a pack of dynamite and abandons any possible subtlety to spell out the message with the elegance of a sledgehammer. Three of the four new stages also have a story area that helps with the narrative, and the only downside is that it makes me wish that there were more of these in the base game due to how effective they are. The one in the final stage is especially effective due to the sense of scale being portrayed.

That's kind of the story of Macro: it has some of the best stages in the game and introduces features that were sorely missing from the base game. In a way, it proves that there is potential in this concept to iterate further and create something even more memorable.

ART IS NEVER PERFECT

Perhaps the greatest issue with Umurangi Generation is, unfortunately, the overall jankiness of the game. It's to be expected for a game developed in 10 months by a single dev as their first game, but it's still prevalent enough to warrant a full section. There's some small bugs here and there, as is typical of any game, but some larger ones (specifically on Steam, which is the version I played) really sour the experience to varying degrees.

First, when you go out of bounds, the game teleports you back to the spawn point, which makes sense. Out of bounds areas are usually very obvious too: falling in water, off a building, etc. However, some out of bounds areas are less obvious, and some are even an obstacle. I don't have much of an issue with the obstacles, even if some are obnoxious, but there are parts of stages that look like they should be accessible but just aren't with no wall blocking them.

Then, there are collision issues aplenty: jumping against a wall often allows you to surf on the side until you randomly fall, and you can get stuck on an edge, unable to jump. I found plenty of small cracks between objects that allowed me to walk through, whether standing or crouching, and end up out of bounds. Crouching, walking under a sloped ceiling, and then standing up causes you to fall under the floor and usually out of bounds. Using the turbo skates on a harsh enough slope makes you walk right through it. Running into an invisible wall with turbo skates can make you zip through, making it hard to tell if you're meant to be there or not.

There are two severe issues with the PC version at time of writing, though one only matters to a certain subsection of players. Namely, there is an achievement that is impossible to unlock on the current version, and this has seemingly been an issue for months now. More pressingly, however, transparency appears to be broken on the PC version, or at least on certain graphics cards. By comparing with other players' gameplay from earlier version, it quickly became clear that I wasn't seeing Umurangi Generation in its full glory. No stage made this more obvious than the first Macro stage, which sports glass walls that entirely failed to render for me, leaving me confused about invisible walls. There is also a bounty item that simply doesn't render on the same stage, leading to more confusion. Heartbreakingly, this issue even breaks the fun Game Boy Camera lens.

Some jank in Umurangi Generation is part of its charm, for sure. But there's just a bit too much jank to the point that it makes the game feel less polished than it deserves. I find it really disheartening, especially since I enjoy the game a lot. I was planning on completing the game and then taking my time being very artsy in Creative Mode, maybe even casually speedrun the game, but the transparency issue in particular has made me hesitant.

CHILL BEATS TO TAKE PICTURES TO

Umurangi Generation's soundtrack (as well as Macro's) was composed by Thor High Heels, also known as Adolf Nomura. Full of chill beats, nu-jazz, ambient EDM, trap beats, trip-hop and whatever else fits in that musical pocket, Umurangi Generation's soundtrack suits the game perfectly, as a lot of the tracks are on the 60-120 second range and don't overstay their welcome; it makes the game's soundtrack feel like a personal mixtape of the nameless protagonist's making. Even more fittingly, practically all the tracks on the main game's soundtrack were not made for the game, but are instead an eclectic mix of Thor High Heels' past work (especially the albums released as Adolf Nomura). And yet, the songs feel carefully chosen to fit with each stage they play on, and there are no repeats. Fittingly, they grow in intensity as you progress from stage to stage. Some tracks are filled with catchy samples, others have distorted wub-wub bass, and a select few even have a heavily overdriven and crushed electric guitar to create a soundscape that feels right at home in the world of Umurangi Generation.

As for Macro, as far as I can tell, Thor High Heels made around 50 new tracks specifically for the DLC. This makes Macro's soundtrack feel very different from the main game's, as this time the tracks are actually made to fit the settings, rather than being retrofitted to fit. I don't find Macro's tracks as memorable overall; they seem a bit more uniform and simpler as well, though the final stage's tracks are incredibly fitting. It's all good nonetheless, I just find that there's a tangible difference between both sides of the soundtrack, and I find myself wondering if a mix of original tracks and past tracks would've worked better for the entire game.

PROS AND CONS

PROS

    • Masterful environmental storytelling; makes you care through game design.

    • Refreshingly blunt narrative that captures the essence of cyberpunk very well.

    • Stellar level design that allows plenty of creativity and artistic liberty.

    • Truly has three valid playstyles of equal worth: the Normal mode, the artistic Creative mode, and the Speedrun mode.

    • Excellent soundtrack that captures the setting brilliantly.

    • Surprising amount of detail and personality for a game of this visual style.

    • Great introduction to photography as an art.

CONS

    • Multiple bugs that add up, especially bad on the PC version.

    • Lack of restrictions on some bounties makes the game to easy at times.

    • Money/score system feels tacked on.

    • Switching lenses is tedious due to a lack of a weapon wheel-like system.

    • Some lenses feel too zoomed in, others too zoomed out.

    • Visual style can make the potential artistry feel limited for some.

WORTH PLAYING?

Absolutely! If the PSX style appeals to you, I see no reason not to give Umurangi Generation and the Macro DLC a shot even if photography isn't particularly your thing, though it might be a bit too expensive for some. I'd wait on the PC version, though, and get one of the console versions, or perhaps even the VR version. It's a game with a clear message to communicate as it carves out its own unique way of showing a cyberpunk world. Some may fight the political tone too shocking or brutal, but I think that's what makes cyberpunk as a genre work, even when it lacks subtlety.

Most importantly, though, I think Umurangi Generation can give a whole subset of players a new appreciation for the art of photography, and I've already seen people say it inspired them to take it up in real life. To be honest, I can't say I'm not considering it a little, at least at a very casual level. Just the idea that an indie game made by one person could inspire others to take up a new art form is moving to me, in a way. The way the game refuses to judge the artistic quality of your pictures just further encourages you to get wacky and artsy as much as you want. Unfortunately, even though I personally love the visual style, there is a case to be made that it's limiting what can or can't look "good" and it will turn away many players at first sight.

Overall, I think Umurangi Generation is a brilliant indie game, a shining example of the power a game can have, but it's also weighed down by some of its unavoidable jankiness, bugs, and some odd design choices. It's even a rare example of a game I feel could benefit from being on a VR platform. It showcases a wonderful art form and also the power of environmental storytelling to great effect, and unless the game looks completely unappealing to you visually, it's worth playing.