It's the end of the world, and you have a camera. Have fun!
Umurangi Generation
is a cyberpunk First-Person Snapshooter Environmental Narrative Game developed by Māori programmer Naphtali Faulkner (under ORIGAME DIGITAL) with a soundtrack by ThorHighHeels, and published by Active Gaming Media (in the Anglosphere) and Playism (in Asia). The game is inspired by Faulkner's personal gripes with the 2019-20 Australian bush fires and COVID-19 pandemic, as well as governmental ignorance towards climate change at large.
The game leans on minimalism, with the narrative mostly implied visually rather than told to you. Taking place in a "shitty future" version of Tauranga, Aotearoa (New Zealand), you play as a courier who goes around taking "photo bounties" of hard-to-find things while delivering your packages. Meanwhile, there's an ongoing Alien Invasion which has led to the United Nations occupying the country.
The photography is the main part of the game and very relaxed; even pics of random things will net payment based on the '3C' evaluation (color, content and composition), and there's no way to fail a level besides running out of film by taking an absurd amount of photos. After accumulating certain amounts of money, you unlock new equipment such as a wide-angle lens and color adjustment options.
And before we forget, don't take photos of bluebottle jellyfish.
The game was released on Steam on 19th May 2020, and on the Nintendo Switch on 5th June 2021. A Downloadable Content pack called Umurangi Generation Macro was released on 7th November 2020, adding four new levels revolving around what's happening within the UN, new camera equipment, spray paint, and roller skates for faster traversal.
This Game provides examples of:
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- The game's photography system is pretty lenient, as the tutorial states "art is subjective". You can get good rewards no matter how you bungled the shot if you follow the "3C rules". Some color correction options are just flatout not considered by the game's reward system.
- There is no real penalty for falling off the map or going out of bounds. The worst you get is the time wasted walking back to where you want to shoot your photo again, which only becomes a problem if you want to deliver the photos under the optional time limit.
- Ambiguous Ending: At the end the player character stands on a beach with the spirits of several Māori, mudcrabs, and extinct birds called Huia, watching a shadowy creature on a mountain overlooking utter catastrophe.
- Armies Are Evil: Played with. The UN foot soldiers are humanized and treated as either kids out of their depth or incredibly stretched thin, which is fitting since near the end of the game you become a war reporter embedded with a squad and so the game wants you to sympathize with them. However, the generals and command staff who actually run things are portrayed as incompetent, out of touch, hedonistic, and corrupt.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: "Kaiju" aliens attacking humanity. In response, the United Nations diverts a massive amount of resources into a series of Eva-esque giant Peace Sentinel mecha (complete with depressed young pilots) that turned out to be ineffective.
- Bilingual Bonus: "Umurangi" is Te Reo for "Red Sky". The game ends with a dedication to "The Umurangi Generation: the last generation that has to watch the world die."
- Crapsack World: New Zealand has gone to hell in a handbasket since the UN occupied it: street crime and police brutality are rampant, mental health standards are in the gutter and the UN forces are incredibly oppressive. Combine that with the alien invasion that humanity is losing against, and it's little wonder that most people would rather do drugs and party in VR than try and make something of themselves.
- Child Soldiers: Presumably to further the deconstruction, the pilots of the Peace Sentinels are all indoctrinated teenagers way out of their depth.
- Cyberpunk: In particular, the developer is frustrated with the aesthetic in mass media refusing to evolve and continuing to be a reflection of the 1980's, and instead aimed for Umurangi to be a reflection of modern times.
- Deconstructor Fleet: Of tropes related to giant mecha/kaiju anime. The military force building and deploying the giant mecha is hated and distrusted by the populace, the people in charge don't seem to care about their own soldiers or the citizens those soldiers protect, and rather than being the last hope of humanity, the mecha pilots are at best delaying the inevitable, or at worse simply being fed into the grinder to justify the existence of the military occupation.
- Downer Ending: The gradually worsening situation and The Final Delivery all but imply that most of humanity is wiped out by the aliens/kaiju in the end.
- Escapism: In face of the regime's incompetence and knowing the inevitable end at the hands of alien invaders, many people choose to spend the time by holding dance parties out on the streets or lose themselves in VR at Gamer Palace. Even some of the occupation's commanding officers have been doing it.
- Fling a Light into the Future: There are posters talking about recruitment programs for Japanese offworld colonies, as Japan, fittingly, is apparently Genre Savvy enough to know the Kaiju are going to win. Because of the phrasing used, it is left ambiguous if any of these colonies are actually up and running or if anyone has even left for them yet.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: The United Nation personnel don't seem to care about a courier jumping around in restricted areas and openly taking photos of their debauchery and evidence of incompetence. With the end of the world all but imminent, it's likely the UN simply doesn't care about their reputation anymore. That said, if you blatantly enter "do not enter" areas within their view, they will blow a whistle and drag you outside.
- Humongous Mecha: The Peace Sentinel units created by the United Nations, which look eerily similar to Eva Units from Neon Genesis Evangelion (complete with depressed young pilots) as seen in the UN Hangar level. The project turned out to be an utter failure.
- I Have Your Wife: Disobedience and insubordination among Peace Sentinels is apparently punished by detaining their families until they obey.
- Irony: It's implied in posters that England has become a third-world country and was subjected by its former peers to the same colonialism it perpetuated at its height. There's even an In-Universe war flick about American Marines defending an embassy from a mob of British rioters.
- No Biochemical Barriers: Played with. As food has gotten harder to come by, people have begun butchering and eating what parts of the Kaiju the human body can actually digest. But it seems the parts that can be safely eaten by a human are a small fraction of the total bodymass, to the point people are even harvesting the mold that grows on the Kaiju.
- No Endor Holocaust: Averted. Part of the fury of the people towards the UN is that the robots seem to be as good at causing collateral civilian deaths as they are mediocre at actually killing aliens.
- Police Brutality: One of the DLC missions involves covering a protest that gets attacked by the police. And then by the mechas.
- Propaganda Machine: The United Nation proclaims on various posters and television channels that humanity is winning the war against the aliens. In truth, it's an utter Curb-Stomp Battle in the aliens' favor. The military outpost you re-visit ended up stuck fighting Kaiju with only a handful of foot-soldiers and no reinforcements, eventually being forced to retreat, and the giant Peace Sentinel units are implied to be largely created as part of a token effort to show that the UN did something, without regard to how ineffective the mechas are against the alien threat or how many civilians they end up killing in the collateral. All the while, some of the UN higher-ups drink themselves senseless and party inside Gamer Palace.
- Running Gag: Many of the newspapers scattered around the levels mention someone only known as Griffith, who seems to be a little too into the prospect of trying to nuke the alien menace, seemingly oblivious to how risky and difficult that would actually be to pull off.
- Shout-Out:
- In the Macro DLC, the laptops in UN Hangar level that hint at the existence of the Yellow Keycard Room are displaying a menu screen with a cartoon bespectacled scientist on it, which is very similar to the console Solid Snake has to upload photos on during the Tanker Chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.
- In the same level, one of the other laptops will display a message "N1RV Ann-A awaits", N1RV Ann-A being the name of the then in-development sequel to Va 11 Hall A.
- Also in the DLC, the low-resolution camera lens is based on the Game Boy Camera.
- The ending is one huge one to The End Of Evangelion, complete with red sky/sea, and the souls of humanity fluttering up to the sky under the watch of a giant alien creature.
- The Peace Sentinel unit of the UN (AKA the division with the giant robots) appear to be a reference to the unit of the same name from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Fittingly both are foreign occupying powers who work with giant robots.
- Take That!: The prime minister of New Zealand holidaying abroad while his country goes to hell is a not-so-subtle jab at then-Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who, in December 2019, infamously took a family trip to Hawaii while Australia was in the grip of catastrophic bushfires.
- United Nations Is a Superpower: The UN has its own military that's occupying Aotearoa and enforcing crackdowns on the residents.
- While Rome Burns: While his country is facing both giant monster attacks and brutal oppression from its supposed protectors, the Prime Minister of New Zealand is... holidaying abroad. At least, according to a newspaper. Perhaps he's been silenced.
