I wonder if I'll ever be in the "right mindset" for these type of games, ie, the mindset that allows critics to give a game like this a 10/10 simply because it is indie and does just enough social commentary that it gets a pass, but gameplay wise it is way too simple and can be a bit of a drag to incentive anyone to continue playing just for the sake of VIBING IN A VIRTUAL SPACE... This is, and seems to be to this day a popular genre of video games still, let's not call them walking simulators because this one has a CAMERA!

But guess what! The gameplay? Well, it is more of a proof of concept, or just there for the sake of having something I feel. Because get this, I have played games that have managed to be games with just a camera, and even though Umurangi Generation goes out to give you some mechanics and imitate what it feels like to use an actual DSLR camera, there is no proper win stake to it, you know, what makes a game a game: Game theory, anyways, the mechanics feel unfinished.

It probably isn't easy for an indie developer to program an actual photography mechanic that feels intuitive and not just "You got (number of items) in a shot! How good!" but literally just trying to make the laziest photos ever, zoomed in to hell and get the same amount of points makes the only mechanic unintuitive already. But that’s not what is important you knowwwwww, what is important is how you are personally connected with the photos you have made… Yeah oh boy, I picked the time to play a game like this at the worst time possible. It is the whole Minecraft dilemma again, except I do like building a lot more than a photography simulator.

The gimmick to win the game is to essentially reach a high point and try to capture as much as you can within the frame, yes there is a 10 minute timer that if you take the photos of everything on the to-take-a-photo-of list, you'll get bonus money (which doesn't really do anything except points) and that might motivate you to speedrun the game and make a game of it (it just feels like a tackled on challenge), literally in an attempt to gamify the game, it somehow removes the only aspect people talk about and the reason people even recommend it: which is taking your time to explore the maps so you can enjoy: ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING!

Yes people, you heard me! Environmental Storytelling, the thing that is like in almost every single post-apocalyptic game as a given but whenever indie games do it, it is the second coming of Christ (to be frank it does it extremely well in this game but that’s despite the point). Surely a game that obviously is about exploration has a good means to explore right? Which is ironic because aren’t we in a dystopian future, I guess I should just ignore that aspect and see the protagonist as a mediator who just has access to everything, but honestly by that point I am so detached from the game world that I feel like I am just exploring a GMOD map I downloaded for fun. Anyways…

Short answer: No, the controls actually kinda suck, sorry, the game has a double jump for shits and giggles for some odd reason but your movement overall is stiff and there isn’t even a run button, so piloting the character is like driving a rusty car, again, things like movement in a well established genre become a must (especially when it is one of the few aspects to comment on), you are so fine tuned to first person movement from other games that having to drive something worse ruins even the fun of having to walk around.

I still think it is absolutely hilarious to, if any option to add to a game’s movement, add a double jump, the game prides itself in not presenting it’s world through no dialog but… That double jump really got me thinking, if I got some cyberpunk augmentations going on can they make me move faster? Like it just seems funny to add a double jump but then limit the player to any other form of control, you can crouch though. The world isn’t the most interactable and is more of a model set or like I’ve joked about before: A gmod map (although gmod maps usually had interaction but), which also has a photography mode a lot of people had fun with.

Going back to environmental storytelling: If I was rating this game on style points alone, it would probably be phenomenal you know? But I’m looking at it as a video game, in an over saturated capitalist market of video games, where we just consume these bitches and get over with it and go onto the next. There are very rare cases where I give style over substance a hefty pass, and the phrase itself “style over substance” can be picked apart with questions such as “What confines substance, and what confines style?” Well, let’s say that style mostly confines things like little animations, aesthetics, all that fun stuff.

Because technically speaking, I cannot fault this game for “substance” in the plot subtext department, if there is any. I guess I just call it subtext because it doesn’t go out right and say it to you, so in a way it isn’t plain text (that’s a weird way to say it considering the game does have text through Graffiti). One of the aspects of the game is that it both satirizes (by using anime cliches) and explores real issues of the world by comparing end of the world stuff (in real life) to end of the world stuff (in anime tropes), and in general sci-fi has always been used as an allegory for… Well about everything really.

In this case it is really the grievances from an indigenous person of the Māori seeing the world dying around them, which is basically ABOUT EVERYTHING REALLY, you can gain interpretation from everything, you can even notice how Americans have started living in one of the last bastions of humanity (Neo-New Zealand with all of it’s shelters).

Kaiju’s aren’t exactly new to the idea of being compared to Climate Change or pandemics, or you know the idea of people stealing your land, Pacific Rim did it too. All world ending events can be viewed effectively the same as the four horsemen of the apocalypse are still horsemen, but there’s one thing unique about these horsemen: their approach.

But to keep it short and simple: Capitalism, and how people react to it, the world is dying and all one can do is take photos and make art woo! There’s no solution but we can just make the general population numb to it and normalize it to a point we profit on it. You want an actual goal to save the world? What goal? We’re fucked, you are just exploring the remnants and making the most of it, sure you get a camera with a HINT OF LIME of gameplay but that’s not really the main focus. Feel something about this virtual exploration of a sad depicted world or don’t, that’s all there’s to it mostly.

There is a message in how lo-fi this game is in all of it’s aspects, namely how there isn’t much of a game to be had in this game to begin with because you cannot gamify the simulations this game alludes to, the whole point of taking photos of things that are evidence to the plot of the game docks your pay, it goes out to say “GET IT?” but not in the worst say, the only way to have fun is to play it in your own way and not treat it like a game with goals. Treating it goal-oriented goes out to comment: This is why the Photography industry sucks!! You just do things and don’t think about anything, alright yea I get it, the game aspect itself isn’t really fun, is that it?

I’m kinda getting tired of the whole “game ideas or game theory is deliberately broken for the effect of art” period, I have at least seen that done a few times this year alone, for fuck sake's guys can I at least enjoy video games before the world dies, and I get it, shit’s nihilistic, the planet’s dying Cloud, and all we can do at best is make art and not a regular video game and you probably shouldn’t treat it as such, even if, most game reviewers do for some odd reason?

Like it seems every review of it says “Tony Hawk style scoring” When there isn’t in fact that, and the game goes out of it’s way to say that scores do not matter. I see a bunch of guys trying to sound more deep than the other when writing their review, and some deliberately trying to ignore what the game is about. Which again, also part of the culture surrounding “It’s a game but liberties with game theory” just gotta sound smart about it and that's all that matters, ugh. It’s punk and we gotta always be soft to it!

I’m gonna be honest, I am being harsh on this game. Especially one with such a strong and emotionally driving message of: We could probably the last generation of people on Earth and capitalism is not doing anything to solve it, it is a virtual museum that goes out to be an extremely well representation of 2020 and beyond as far as this scenario continues. And a lil part of my anger comes from the fact that this game paints a hopeless image and I don’t like that I’m in it. It doesn’t help that I do have family in Australia and I’m aware of the red skies and also the possibility of New Zealand having this appeal of a bastion from the apocalypse in the future.

My sister married a white Australian guy so you know, there's always that, but I can't help but feel that I would feel so insanely detached from the entirety of the liberal politics that came with that, a game literally commenting on that and directly linked to Australia makes me have bad thoughts already.

I was recommended this game, and I can’t properly review games like this (even though all of the text above me shows me doing so) because to give it a score means that I am comparing it to other video games, and it doesn’t help that when I go out of my way to give a game a lower score than this one, that literally means that I am more content and think it is more serviceable to do LESS gameplay. Like you know, even the flawed game I gave 3/5, well it had a lot more to offer, and! And! All of those games have photography too if you press the screencap button and mess with the settings in Ms Paint, a pirated copy of Photoshop or- You get the low jab here. But really, this review is coming from someone who gave Shenmue an extremely low score because of some very similar philosophies of virtual tourism alone.

I know this whole review makes it seem as if I was wronged by this game but not really by the game itself, more by the people around it who ended up recommending it to me, get this, I don’t like being recommended games like this without people being fully honest about what it is before I get the game and I have to install it and then i discover oh wait… This is... Just a first person I-spy game…. I hate i-spy games, I’ve had enough I-spy games in my lifetime from those weird freemium 1000 in 1 games discs that were sold in tabloid magazines.

Do you ever think of personally having to be mean to indie developers? No, nobody wants to, unless you know, they eat babies or something but, yes, I think indie developers for the most part have it hard enough as it is, however, I do live in a world where I can easily criticize a game like lets say, uh, Death Stranding, which might as well also be about Climate Change, but doesn’t excuse it from being what it is, and in that case, I might as well be insulting everyone involved in that project. I guess it’s like comparing a really good poem made by 1 person to a huge theater play, like of course I’m gonna give a higher score to the play, like how much more it has to dissect?

There is undoubtedly a culture that is extremely soft on games like this, or we live in a world where these are categorized on the same level as anything else, which they shouldn’t be, you know? If you just want to spend 15 dollars on a series of a guy’s maps and mostly model detail (and they are really well made, like I said, style wise, this game is good and obviously a lot of effort has been put in it and it would have probably given me the same sense of wonder I got when I first experienced an artsy Team Fortress 2 map), with some of the strongest actual messages in a long time, than this is your game, but I can’t really sugarcoat it and call it unique or anything, or even go as far as saying it is the best like many have, I feel as if I am being recommended something that is clearly not simply what it is, cameras have been in games before and there are even other walking simulator games that have done this. But… If there is any walking simulator one would have to play, this is it. Before you get insanely tired of the medium.

Scoring this game goes against every single thing this game stands for honestly, it should have never even gotten close to the hands of a cynical old school video game critic like me who doesn’t seem to have mercy, if anything, from all of the multiple people saying that this was their favorite game of the year because they also like photography and they connect with it. Photography seems to be one of the most common hobbies out there for anyone who can afford a DSLR and an online course on how to do ratio.

Who hasn’t picked up photography by now honestly, they’re practically mandatory on our daily carry devices (even if the lenses on a DSLR have a completely different perspective), anyways, being a game about photography is honestly just enough to win people who grew up with photography, there has to be at least one of me.

The developer is probably a very very cool person, because you know, artists with class consciousness! Even though I have a very bad history with artists, they do make some cool looking things. Aesthetics on their own isn’t exactly what I’m looking for in a video game and I usually try to avoid virtual museums because it ends with me feeling the need to write a review on them rather than just experience them for what they are. Perhaps in a way, me being post-post-post-post-conformist to what video games usually are like and have to offer and scoring it that way is very punk, especially considering most people don’t wanna do that.

I probably entered the worst mindset to ever play this game in, and maybe one day I’ll return to it with someone else preferably, like I'll play it with my fiancé in the bomb shelter due to climate change because I do believe exploration games are more fun to experience with someone else, having to explore a world and have no one to talk of it besides yourself is a weird feeling, I mean, that’s why we take photos right? To show to others the sights, it is barely for ourselves, I’m not exactly someone who does single player experiences for my own creative enrichment, there needs to be an active conflict or larger interaction to carry me (the text on how you take photos is kinda good though).

And if it’s to bear witness to a world that is like ours (virtual tourism) well, I never was too much of a tourist because I have already been too much of a witness my entire life, trust me I’ve had enough of a late capitalist world in person, I don’t need a virtual museum for that. UNLESS, it is a map editor, then it’s just a canvas, and honestly that is what this game feels like, a canvas, but someone painted on that canvas already and I’m just taking a photo of the canvas without the fun of the canvas itself.

Fucking amazing soundtrack though, and way better than Gone Home. So it gets 1 star above that. Next review: A walking simulator virtual museum tour of Auschwitz.

Umurangi Generation is a good game that had the potential to be something very special. What's frustrating is that there is really only a handful of issues that hold it back from greatness, and honestly just a quick patch or two would resolve the majority of my issues with the game.

I loved how detailed the worlds were, the non-linear story-telling, the incredible atmosphere, but I also really hated the basic player movement, the clunky feel of the camera, and the ever-present parcel timer that had me speedrunning my way through a game that was really meant to be played at a relaxing pace while exploring every detail of its world.

Sure, you can always go back through after finishing the main campaign, but the worlds aren't quite as incredible to explore a second time around, and it's hard to ignore that timer for your first playthrough since that objective helps you unlock the cool attachments that you'll want for your camera as you take more advanced shots.

Umurangi Generation is a game I liked, but god dammit I really wish I loved it. Literally just remove the parcel timer and you have a far superior game. Unbelievable how one small design choice like that can tarnish the whole experience for me.