Umurangi Generation plays In the near future, and you are a photographer earning money by selling pictures of interesting motives. In order to do that you are put into levels of various size which you explore in order to find the asked for motives. After reaching an earnings threshold you can advance the plot and leave for the next level. You obtain multiple lenses in order to fulfill requests or just take some artistically interesting shots.

When you play the first level it’s just you and some friends partying on top of an abandoned under construction skyscraper and the only strange thing are some fighter jets flying above you, but with each level more is revealed about this games world without explicit dialogue. Instead you see various facets of the world at those levels, with you directly documenting how people are reacting to the crisis. Protests, governments reaction to those protests, the underlying problem and so on.

Spoiler level easy

In the beginning you may see some small blue creatures you lose money for photographing them. As it turns out: they are part of an Kaiju invasion that is currently attacking humanity. The government wants to crack down on free press reporting to downplay the situation, which is why you are fined as unaffiliated photographer if you sell pictures with those alien invaders on them. You are taking pictures of ghettos and the youth trying to still have fun, of the more and more autocratic reaction of the government to keep the population placated and the failure of those methods. It is cyberpunk in it’s original form of high tech and low life, not coming from big companies like Bethesda, but instead from the peoples view.

Now to the discussion which spoils the whole thing:

Spoiler level ending

The last level is some kind of antechamber of the afterlife where souls of humanity are converging and moving on. Well, you didn’t make it. Humanity didn’t make it. And this last level had an for me interesting twist to proceed: the game doesn’t tell you what it is but it didn’t need to. The whole game you are taking pictures of everything, so for me it felt completely natural to take out my camera and take one last picture of the Kaiju that successfully annihilated mankind. I was surprised to see that this was the trigger for the credits roll. But it was perfectly in line in what you did the whole game: documenting the downfall of mankind and that picture is the one for the last page. Job and book finished. On a side note, I love how this game is also a good cosmic horror story. Nobody knows where the Kaiju is coming from. What are its goals? Nobody knows. It is just suddenly arriving, annihilating humanity and the game ends with the job finished, without ever learning anything more than that. Just the pure terror of humanity at its wits end and struggling to futilely survive. While you are powerless except to document the progress.
The DLC partially reveals a bit that the government has at least some knowledge about the Kaijus, but it is still not clear if they tried to use their power against them or if they started the crisis in the first place.

To understand this game, the background of the games developer is relevant: he is Maori and was frustrated by the Australian governments mishandling of the bush fire and Covid19 catastrophes in 2019/20. That frustration is what generated the protests in the game and the government completely ignoring it’s citizens plight and declaring more and more autocratic laws to stop unrest instead of helping the people. And especially in view of the ongoing climate catastrophe, he felt that there will be more and more political unrest of the rich against all others with everybody paying the price.

So is this a good game? If you go simply by game mechanics then no, Eastshade does the “take pictures inside the game” better and more well rounded. But that is not the goal the developer intended to portray. If you go the way of RagnarRox and judge it not by its isolated performance, but rather by it’s intention, then in my eyes it fulfilled that. This game is less about artistically taking pictures and more about the story it tells by putting you in various situation with the goal of documenting it. If that is something you like, then try it out! It’s not long, so if you really don’t like it and are not hooked by the third level, then you are still in the 2 hour return time. But the first 2 level are just for setting the scene and should not be seen as the representative of the whole game.