Well, I wasn't expecting to be writing another one of these the very next day, but Steam tells me that my total playtime on this, title screen to credits, was 63 minutes. (I obviously did not 100% this, or even close; this was just a casual front-to-back playthrough, and I'm definitely going to do more.) So, here's another one, I suppose. :)
Umurangi Generation is a 2020 first-person photography game (Wikipedia swears that that's a real genre which also includes perennial Ammy favorite Beyond Good and Evil, so I'm going with it) from Origame Digital.
So, it is impossible to discuss Umurangi Generation without first discussing the politics of Umurangi Generation. One of my partners (@proxy, hi) streamed this last year, describing it as "the kind of game that can radicalize you if you are not already radicalized." Its developer is Māori, the game is set in Tauranga, and the developer has said both that it is explicitly intended as an anti-neoliberal art piece created in response to the government's mishandling of COVID and and that he does not wish for it to be called "cyberpunk" because he feels that cyberpunk as a genre has not evolved since its inception, and instead just refers to it as his "shitty future game." (So uh, sorry for describing this to a metamour as cyberpunk.) In short, this game is politics-on-its-sleeve leftist, in a way that, perhaps obviously, resonated heavily with me.
Umurangi Generation is divided into stages, each with a ten minute timer which can be ignored if you aren't looking for 100% completion, because meeting the timer just unlocks some stuff, you don't actually fail a stage for taking too long. (This game is chill like that.) You're given eight things to photograph, and they can sometimes be vague: "four birds" might be four actual birds or four birds on a poster or four birds graffiti'd onto a wall. I spent an embarrassingly long amount of time looking for "a kiwi": the game wanted the bird, not the fruit (and, considering that the game is set in New Zealand, not a photo of a random local, either). It's up to you to figure out how to find and photograph things like "the numbers 2 and 3" or "the word 'cops'" or "a sarcastic use of 'Property of the UN'" or "fifteen candles". Each stage has small bonus objectives like "take pictures of your friends" (one of which is, inexplicably, An Actual Penguin) or "recreate this postcard" which gate unlocks like new camera filters. That's the entire game, and it, as I have found myself often saying in these writeups, is V I B E S.
The plot behind the scenes is worth uncovering for yourself, but the storytelling is entirely environmental, so I suspect that many players will have different takeaways of what specifically is going on, though the broad strokes are, well, unavoidably obvious.
It's difficult for me to write too much more about a game that I spent just north of an hour with at time of writing, but I really loved this. It's surprisingly chill given its subject matter, the aesthetic is great, it's mechanically very chill; in short, it's the kind of game that knows exactly what it wants to be and wastes zero time being that and being done. I am always down for the experience of "document a fictional world", and, in the process, really having to live in it for a (very) short while. A+, recommend highly, short and artistic and memorable.
