Umurangi Generation's vibrant ambience validates the rebellion of its doomed youth culture. It also renders the player a transient witness to a surging tragedy. Umurangi Generation's key is its camera, as it allows its protagonist and its player the agency to access and capture a world beyond their control. It creates a vantage point untended since Jet Set Radio, and Umurangi Generation didn't even need skates or spray paint to get there.
It is difficult to look at Umurangi Generation’s lush presentation and listen to the energetic melodies of its soundtrack and not immediately think of Jet Set Radio. Smilebit’s cel-shaded skate-and-spray-paint sensation captured Japan’s youth culture (and its innocuous insurgency) at the apex of the year 2000. Two decades later, Umurangi Generation uses a similar blueprint to build its own distinct world in its own precarious time. Its locations are just as vividly painted and judiciously constructed as a Jet Set Radio level, but it trades whimsical mischief for meditative and actionable instrumentality. After replacing graffiti with photography as its method of resistance, this feels like a fair transaction.
Umurangi Generation is a photography game. Think Pokémon Snap without the rails and razor sharp timing windows or Afrika without the extensive periods of opportune monotony. If you’ve never played a game that focuses on taking pictures—there aren’t many and you aren’t to blame—Umurangi Generation takes the point-and-shoot mechanics of a first-person shooter and adapts them to shoot pictures instead of people. Finding an object of interest and pointing your camera at it, mechanically, isn’t too different from timing a headshot. It’s one of the most simple and effective methods of interaction in gaming; the difference is the former creates art while the latter pumps fleeting serotonin.
Admittedly, it took me a fair bit of time to come to terms with Umurangi Generation’s control system. Using the mouse wheel to zoom-in made sense, but holding shift and trying to find a focal point demanded practice. Managing the double jump mechanic (why your human character can do a double jump is not explained but, also, it is rad as hell that they can perform a double jump) was also an exercise of its own, as I went through different periods where I thought I was nailing it and I definitely wasn’t nailing it. There are a zillion first-person shooters and few modern photography games—there sure isn’t a battle-tested model for Umurangi Generation to adapt—but that bewildering incoordination can be frustrating early on.
Progression is handled with leniency. The player is deposited in a level, usually a dense but contained location, and tasked with finding and taking pictures of six or seven distinct objects. Get fifteen candles in one shot. Wait for a cat and a bird to be in the same frame. Look for a kiwi, and wonder if it’s asking for the fruit or the flightless bird. Umurangi Generation can also task the player with capturing specific images at difference ranges or with difference lenses. All of the information is accessible in the pause screen, though I did wish my brain worked well enough to remember all of my targets simultaneously.
Umurangi Generation also exhibits a liberal definition of what constitutes a skilled photograph. It understand (it outright states) that art is subjective and only evaluates a shot’s content, color, and composition. The rule of thirds probably helps attain all of these, but Umurangi Generation doesn’t demand a skill beyond a basic interest in photography and a willingness to learn and improve. It feels nice to snap a shot of passing jets or catch a friend in their best pose, but all you really need to make it to the next level is to turn in your assigned shots.
There are extraneous goals, too. Each level has optional tasks that include reproducing the pause-screen postcard for that level, finding hidden film rolls, and taking a group shot of all four of your friends. Snapping the friend photo is especially challenging, although it’s a bit easier once you realize your pet penguin always belongs in the group, too. Completing all of these, plus your required shots, in fewer than ten minutes apparently unlocks bonus lenses and additional post-processing options, but I always found myself one film roll short of nailing all of them.
At times, I thought some objectives Umurangi Generation considered clear were actually oblique. I had to photograph a 2 and 3 next to each other with the telephoto lens in the Karangahake train car level. I found them, right next to each other, on a passenger’s laptop keyboard and repeatedly tried get the Umurangi Generation to recognize my ace shot. It never worked, and later I saw it was asking for a much more obvious sighting of 2 and 3 in a different part of the level. It’s a classic case of overthinking a problem, but I wondered why both shots couldn’t have met the objective. More often than not, though, Umurangi Generation finds balance between clever and obtuse with what it demands of the player.
None of these objectives and mechanics would work if Umurangi Generation didn’t allow the player to test them in suitable levels. Thankfully, every single one is a compact clockwork kingdom ready for exploration. Mauau View is a two-level rooftop venue and perfect for the player to collect their bearings. The Subway is split between different vertical levels and loaded with activity. Kati Kati Walled City is a dirge of desperation and uses darkness as a companion instead of an obstacle. There seemed to handful of one-off events, but the environments are usually static repetitions. People stay in the same place and have the same routines, and they’re always eerily photogenic.
Levels are constructed with purpose and feel open to efficiency. One of Jet Set Radio’s understated assets was the revelation that it was really a racing game. Players could practice their routes until they had planned the most efficient path to evade the police while tagging all of their targets. It turned a haphazard maze into a natural ballet. I used the same part of my brain when I was gunning to get all of Umurangi Generation’s shots done in fewer than ten minutes. I memorized levels, planned a route, knew which lenses I needed and where, and turned the game into photography and platforming hybrid. The Run when I executed everything as intended always felt great.
As challenging as some of those basic shots could be, they may be the least interesting parts of an investment in Umurangi Generation. I have more experience in Photoshop than I do messing around with the DSLR I bought fifteen years ago, and unlocking successive post-processing options like color balance, saturation, shifting hues, and inducing bloom transitioned my shots from products I had to live to photographs I could really enjoy and call my own. They weren’t rewarded with Umurangi Generation’s highest cash/score payouts, but I felt a sense of pride with what I had captured and created.
Umurangi Generation understands light and color even when the player decides to completely change the presentation its artist had in mind. Shifting hues to the opposite of their primary colors or playing with exposure, somehow, never outright ruined my photographs. Everything always looks cool. I tinkered with options every time until I had *the* shot that I knew I wanted to keep. A bit of talent or skill in composition can make any shot a keeper, but exaggerating or (understating) light and color can feel like a shortcut to making an ordinary picture intro a striking work of art. And you’ll always be the only person who made it.
When I first got a DSLR body and a few lenses, I was enamored with the idea of taking on the world with my camera. I had photography-focused adventures in Japan and Las Vegas, and I became addicted to the rush of feeling invisible in a crowd, or that I would be there to document, however insignificant, what was happening at this exact time. Umurangi Generation reignited an interest that I had left behind a decade ago. People in its locations will occasionally pose for you, but otherwise you’re a ghost. You can move in and out of groups or environments and no one seems to notice you’re around. Being perceived drove me away from the hobby, but Umurangi Generation’s implicit stealth brought me back in through its virtual world.
Adolf Nomura’s soundtrack is an inseparable companion to Umurangi Generation’s art. Electronic compositions, heavy on percussion and samples, are capable of inducing surprise moments euphoria, striking fear at uncanny times (those screams), whipping the player into a frenzy, and encouraging subtle periods of reflection and relaxation. It feels young and new, and not tempted by the synthwave hallmarks that have run rampant through games after Hotline Miami. It’s modern, but it’s not of its time—it’s of this time and devoted to the ethos of Umurangi Generation’s fluorescent and frozen culture.
The overarching narrative of Umurangi Generation showcases a world falling out of balance, and one that is indifferent to the plight of both the weak and the powerful. It begins with alarming but normal references to an escalating global conflict and builds toward ruminative and somber depictions of the humanity’s twilight. Umurangi Generation excels most when it showcases the fallout of violence alongside the mundanity of existence. The player isn’t challenged to pick a side, but rather to observe the juxtaposition and photograph the consequences accordingly.
It’s easy to get lost in the contrast. In every level the player and their friends are cosmetic bystanders. Some NPCs dance in the neon streets without a care in the world while others are clearly conspiring toward some kind of resistance. Soldiers are projected as confident until they’re portrayed as defeated. The player’s role drifts in and out of conflict, a shifting, almost ethereal presence concerned with their fate but indifferent to their danger. Cowardice will kill their culture, removing it from the list of options.
All of this may have struck me as blithe and absurd had COVID-19 not engulfed the planet over the last two months. I doubt Umurangi Generation was created with the anticipation of a pandemic, but it feels like an authentic component of the world 2020 has furnished. At this point I would give anything for normalcy, and a population inducing that sense of security in the streets by protesting fascists or having a cigarette on a park bench feels like a mechanism to gain control. The player, with their camera, is capable of a different form of control. They can capture their world and then manipulate it into an idealized version of reality. In this moment it can be perfect. It’s reality as an aspirational fantasy.
There’s more going on inside of Umurangi Generation that I either can’t piece together or lack the context to properly understand. Its director Veselekov, as an indigenous member of the Ngāi Te Rangi Iwi, wishes for Umurangi Generation to depict an authentic piece of art from a historically maligned and mistreated group of people, the Māori. As a white guy from Kentucky in the United States, the pain and insight that let Veselekov build Umurangi Generation goes right over my head, but the product is a piece of art that I feel like I can appreciate. Umurangi Generation is an expression of culture that adheres to zero stereotypes, and this is evident (to me, egocentrically) by having never played a game like this before. Plenty of games have taken inspiration from Jet Set Radio but few have used it as a vehicle for personal expression. You don’t have to make a skating game to feel that pulse, and Umurangi Generation doesn’t remake Jet Set Radio as much as it uses it as a blueprint for its own emotion and expression.
There is also the nature of Umurangi Generation’s aberrant antagonist, the “blue bottle” Portuguese Man Of War siphonophorae. Photographs that include this creature are not permitted and, while Umurangi Generation does not explicitly state why, it’s hard not to see it to its conclusion and ignore the behavior and practice of a “colonial” organism. Obscuring the metaphor behind fiction and photography doesn’t conceal the agony of its presence and futility of fighting it. The blue bottles, along with other references I am absolutely overlooking, make every corner of Umurangi Generation feel calculated and valuable.
Ultimately, it feels like Umurangi Generation depicts a conflict between those who create or indulge in culture and those who destroy it. When threatened with violence, be it authoritarian oppression or existential horror, maintaining normalcy isn’t a retreat or a coping mechanism, it’s a valid form of resistance. Umurangi Generation feels like a statement of culture and photography is a means of access for outsiders. I love being in this world, and its clarity and versatility make me want to learn more about what inspired it.
Umurangi Generation’s vibrant ambience validates the rebellion of its doomed youth culture. It also renders the player a transient witness to a surging tragedy. Umurangi Generation’s key is its camera, as it allows its protagonist and its player the agency to access and capture a world beyond their control. It creates a vantage point untended since Jet Set Radio, and Umurangi Generation didn’t even need skates or spray paint to get there.
