Umurangi Generation Macro

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.

The preceding paragraph, pulled from my review of Umurangi Generation from last spring, positioned its power alongside its closest cousin, Sega’s Jet Set Radio. Macro, Umurangi Generation’s downloadable content, blesses the entirety of Umurangi Generation with an optional pair of roller skates. Macro also showcases four gorgeous new levels, adds some post-processing photography tweaks, and injects a Not Fucking Around volume of social commentary but now it also has roller skates. Come back in for the zippy locomotion, stay for the dazzling photography, and marvel at a commercial product bold enough to take a hard political stance.Macro shares its set of objectives with Umurangi Generation. The player, a commissioned photographer, scours a dying world with a list of targets to photograph. Ten tall glasses with the default lens, the world “lump” from close up, and five flags with a wide-angle lens are easy targets to find with modest exploration. Challenge arrives in sorting out more vague descriptions, (“Two 2D Insta Waifu & One 3D with a telephoto lens”), applying some intuition, and maybe snapping the shutter enough times to luck your way into a checkmark. Some bonus objectives are a bit more demanding, but none are necessary to progress to Macro’s conclusion.

A second objective is piecing together Macro’s indirect narrative. Like Umurangi Generation, Macro does not tell a direct, plot-focused story, but rather furnishes its environments with expressive artifacts and challenges players to come up with their own interpretations. Suspicions of an impending apocalypse by way of kaiju (a theme that ran rampant through Umurangi Generation) remain present in Macro’s levels, but exist alongside reflections of what 2020 has made of the modern world. I live in Kentucky and Umurangi Generation was made in New Zealand, but it was hard to observe its spaces and not think of the social justice marches and anti-police protests that has engulfed the United States. Macro suggests the battle against oppression isn’t unique to your specific geography.Macro’s final objective is, of course, the freedom of photography. Each its four dynamic worlds are rife with gesticulating occupants, lush vistas, and plentiful opportunities to capture everything from gratifying still lifes to marvelously orchestrated spectacles. Adjusting the color balance, shifting hues, blowing lights out with bloom, and playing with color balance serve as functional filters to shape dreamy transcendence from otherwise blithe normalcy. The bulk of my time with Umurangi Generation was spent trying to frame the perfect shot with the perfect colors and I liked my work so much I hung a few in my office. Some shots from Macro, which you’re seeing in this review, may join them.

The stars of Macro’s show are its collection of four brand new environments. Gamers Palace, a neon-lit gaming-focused nightclub, is its opening salvo. A trio of ladies dance over an illuminated floor, VIP’s engage in contentious behavior in an upstairs lounge, and virtual reality stations and arcade cabinets are available everywhere. Equally alarming, albeit at completely different ends of the spectrum, are shades of squalor behind the scenes and the Gamers Palace’s in-house DJ, Tariq. I may have experienced a manic episode had I been exposed to both Tariq and the derelict underground simultaneously, but Macro was wise enough to keep the two separated.  The shitty future bears enigmatic fruit.

Hanger is a multistoried cube of scaffolding, military equipment, and makeshift platforms. It’s centered around some kind of aircraft, but surrounded by pockets of weary soldiers and pathways with exhausted workers, all of which are observed by silhouetted figures high above in a brightly-lit room. Environmental hazards, like electricity, are minor obstacles but still demand a bit of consideration. Hanger also has an adventure game element to it as well, challenging the player to find a keycard to access a restricted area. Hope is never absent from any of Umurangi Generation’s space, but Hanger ultimately serves as Macro’s most defeated and downtrodden locale.

The Depths represent Macro’s busiest and mostly densely packed environment. A militant group of the populace has claimed the area as their own, clustering survivors alongside a community of activists. There’s a bar (and a cat!) inside a shipping container, desperate touches graffiti, and a de facto throne on prominent display near the sewers. The Depths may be Marco’s toughest space to navigate, and falling in water pushes players back to the starting point, but canvassing every inch is its own puzzle. Attention is paid to every corner.

The paradox of Underground City serves as the loud and understated finale of Macro. In place of bombast and convolution is a simple city street showcasing the stage of a protest. Neon graffiti extends across walls, over concrete barriers, and on top almost every inch of the asphalt. It absorbs popular rational for police brutality and empties a full clip when it returns fire. Macro goes hard with its politics and refuses to pull any of its punches. The final pair of sequences, while open to interpretation, say more about how our world treats expression and vulnerability than Umurangi Generation’s more otherworldly, existential nightmare. The police do, in fact, want to kill you.

Macro’s roller skates are nice. Unlocked after the completion of Gamers Longue, skates add a quick burst of speed that can be maintained with a bit of spatial awareness. The cramped environments make that more of a challenge than it, perhaps, should be, but I have no doubt we’ll see speed run videos of people with better dexterity demolishing every location. Skates also, hilariously, can add a burst of speed while leaping in mid-air. No, that doesn’t make sense, but neither does Umurangi Generation’s penchant for double jumps. Both make for satisfying and rewarding senses of movement and motion.

Unfortunately, some of the better photography options are tucked behind Macro’s more demanding bonus objectives. Getting even lower to the ground, adjusting the shutter speed, and glowing spray paint appeared to unlock only after I did everything a level asked. This makes sense, Umurangi Generation is a game and it’s satisfying when games reward players for practicing their skill, but if I were operating it at as a pure photography sim, I would prefer not to have to find every hidden film roll inside a densely packed level. In a perfect world Macro and Umurangi Generation’s would feature some kind of exploration mode suited for virtual photographers but, like, I get it.  Everything here was designed with purpose and intention.

Macro made me think about how at-risk populations respond to systems of oppression. It allowed me to better understand that the creation of art is a suitable means of processing trauma and turning it into a positive and tangible form of resistance. It also made me laugh out loud at DJ Tariq’s hysterical production and chill to my heart’s content with its infectious grooves of it synth soundtrack. I got all of this from a photography game, a means of interaction sideshowed into puppet theaters of AAA games or so prosaic, restrictive, and clinical that they either never survive on their own or only come around once every twenty years. Macro is a game about taking pictures and practically anything else you’re willing to find in it, provided you can be bothered to look around.

Umurangi Generation’s camera granted players the agency to capture a despairing world and reframe it however they pleased. Macro expands this objective across four profoundly photogenic locales and tosses in a giddying pair of roller skates. Vicious social commentary, newly material to 2020’s unique ills, serves as a compliment to Umurangi Generation’s existential dread and completes one of the most powerful and relevant games assigned to this cursed year.