Umurangi Generation Special Edition (Xbox Series X)
The right picture at the right time can say more than pages upon pages of words, it able to present a harsh reality shown in a way that’s hard to deny… and yet, despite the political angles and social commentary present in the photography game Umurangi Generation Special Edition, you aren’t going to be taking such cutting photos. In fact, the fact you aren’t focusing on the game’s dark futuristic vision of New Zealand in terms of your photo subjects seems to be partly the point, the game not just building environments to criticize the present by showing a future it could lead to, but showing even in such times, there will be mundane parts of life and people carrying on.
The word “Umurangi” in the title is a Māori word for “Red Sky” as well as one for the extinct Huia bird that was wiped out due to European settlement in the region, this meant to tie to the game’s messaging focusing on topics like cultural colonialism, climate change, and wealth disparity. Initially, the exact form of the future you find yourself in isn’t exactly clear, Umurangi Generation Special Edition not doing a lot of direct story-telling. The first level has you hanging out with your friends on a rooftop, and while there are some unusual elements like bluebottle jellyfish corpses somehow strewn about and plenty of United Nations barriers erected in the city below, it will take some time for more direct information on this science fiction setting to become apparent. You’ll need to stop and read screens, posters, and papers to start getting a picture of what has happened to the world, especially since you and your buddies mostly just seem to be trying to live out a normal day while you work your job as a photographer and courier.
While this bleak future where giant robots are used to suppress the populace and creatures keep humanity on edge certainly has a lot you’d likely want to capture on film to document it, your courier work will often ask for shots of mundane objects around the area instead. When you start a level you have a set amount of photo bounties you need to meet, some of these only requiring you to find the right object and take a snapshot of it while others have additional conditions attached. You might need to get a few different items in frame or a certain amount of an object, the player needing to figure out a good angle for these shots rather than merely searching for the object of interest. Over time and as unlockables for clearing levels you acquire different lenses for your camera, so some later bounties will instead ask you to use specific lenses that can complicate the picture taking like needing to use the telephoto lens that has a high zoom on an object that would have been simple to photograph up close. Finding the right perch to get a shot that properly shows the object is the challenge there, but at the same time, the game is oddly forgiving, not caring too much if the picture is poorly framed or incredibly blurry.
This focus on searching over proper photography does hamper some of the enjoyment in the photography gameplay, especially since every level has a timer in place. Beyond the bounties most levels have additional goals like snapping a picture of your friends, reproducing a postcard shot, or earning cash through the photos you take. One of these extra goals is to finish the level in 10 minutes, and while this does introduce the challenge of trying to clear all the goals in one perfect run, you’re likely better off doing this in your second run after scouring the place during your first visit. Having the timer does encourage sloppy picture taking though, and while a photo editing tool pops up after taking a picture so you can fiddle with colors and other elements with the timer frozen, there’s no reward for doing so and it’s often better to take a picture and move along quickly. This is partly because Umurangi Generation Special Edition has a somewhat unappealing art style, simplistic characters and fuzzy textures limiting the kinds of interesting images you can construct. There are definitely interesting sights to be found, and unfortunately the blurring in textures can sometimes restrict your ability to read some of the lore found on objects, but unless you’re going to take pictures just for the sake of it, the rewards for trying to capture a nifty sight are paltry. You get paid a bit of cash for every photo as part of that cash quota goal, but they don’t seem to factor in the photo’s subjects very well and even struggle to detect if they’re looking at humans or a landscape at times. Even more discouraging is the fact that simply slapping on a lens or tilting the camera funny gives you more valuable photos so nice staging is almost antithetical to the smart way to clear the money-focused objectives.
A lot of the challenge thus comes from learning the new level you’re in, and it’s not necessarily a bad idea. The fact there are collectible film canisters that are incredibly small and black so they blend into the environment makes for a very weak and annoying goal, but the photo bounties and extra objectives most often go hand in hand in encouraging you to explore a level, find its interesting sights, and then eventually scrounge up the objects of importance. Sometimes it can be quite easy to snag a photo of a subject by accident just by looking at a general area due to the game’s odd detection parameters, but at the same time you still need to think to take that photo then and you can run out of film if you blindly waste it. The disparity between the best set pieces and what you’re instructed to find must be deliberate, since for example you’ll be instructed not to take a picture of a tunnel full of beautiful neon street art but instead the spray cans people used to make it. Sometimes it will draw your attention to an object of beauty like a Maori memorial, although the meaningful tributes in that same level are left out and even the postcard photo you take there focuses on some ugly pipes instead of the artistic creations of the lower class people living there. It doesn’t feel like you are completely ignoring some of the social unrest and dissatisfaction with your photos, it’s hard to say you took photos of body bags without that having some deeper meaning after all, but many of the most striking and artful sights are left for you to drink in as the player rather than capture on film.
A lot of those beautiful and intriguing sights are the results of the so-called Umurangi Generation attempting to live their normal lives in this world in decline. At the same train station you can find people lining up for aid you can find nearby younger people trying to express themselves and engage with the counter-culture. The bleak world is punctured by the brightness of them trying to form their identity and live how they please in a cultural climate full of harsh truths, and even when your gang of friends witnesses something rough on your courier journey, they will still end up back on that rooftop at the end of the day relaxing and striking silly poses because you can acclimate to awful conditions. Funnily enough, the often subtle story-telling and environmental cues you might not even necessarily notice as you’re scurrying about trying to photograph ferns and markers is approached differently in the levels you unlock after the main adventure. Umurangi Generation Special Edition includes a set of four levels that were originally downloadable content in the PC version and the simmering anger at the state of our world told by way of a dystopic future is now boiling over in stages that are overt in their opinions on certain political issues. There are still some moments that seem to play more in the space of speculative sci-fi like a sewer an underground resistance operates out of, but one level has plenty of protest graffiti that is meant to tie into current issues like police brutality. It doesn’t feel like it undermines the game to be more direct in saying how the creators feel, but since picking apart the social critique is perhaps the most fascinating element of Umurangi Generation Special Edition, it isn’t quite as captivating when the game directly presents it rather than couching it in something clever like your courier work’s odd priorities.
THE VERDICT: Umurangi Generation Special Edition feels like it benefits very little from its photography element. The graphical style is not a great fit for being focused on so closely, many environments and individual pieces of art looking great and holding meaning worth investigating but losing their luster when you’re noticing their blurry textures and scouring every inch for mundane objects. The searching element does have some appeal as you try to concoct a perfect level run, but the objectives are easily cheesed due to a lack of meaningful standards in photo quality. The strong social messages and clever unspoken themes do keep it usually compelling enough to keep playing the game, but it feels like a great setting concept has found itself hamstrung by a weak focus on doing simple camera work.
And so, I give Umurangi Generation Special Edition for Xbox Series X…
An OKAY rating. Picking apart what Umurangi Generation Special Edition is trying to say outside of its less-than-subtle DLC levels is an interesting thought exercise and the game clearly wants to stoke your brain and make you think about why it places characters and objects in the way it does. If the game was merely a narrative exploration game where you needed to identify a few objects and then move to the next stage, than you could leisurely absorb the world around you and focus more on trying to unravel the environmental story-telling. The graphics would probably need a bump, it quite likely the current visual style had to make some compromises considering how many lenses and photo editing tools you can use to observe it now that might strain the code considering the reported issues the game has in its less powerful Switch port. The photography scavenger hunt could have been an exciting premise for a game on its own, the player trying to snap a shot of all indicated items in a time limit feeling like it has potential in something more kinetic or a game world that was more interesting to navigate, but here it only lightly taps into those potential thrills and sometimes discourages you from really analyzing what’s going on around you. Levels are often small enough you can spot most things of importance and so the themes are hard to miss, and as said the photo bounties focusing more on meaningless goals like a photo with two coffees in it over something overtly political or distressing to look at does feel like an important piece of the statements the game wants to make. As odd as it sounds, potentially making the photography even more barebones and focused more on just being a means to guide you around likely would have made touring the levels more interesting since the designers’ focus is clearly more on what the game wants to present to you than those goals.
The environmental story-telling and slight challenge in figuring out your courier bounties carry this short experience well enough that this is at least not a case of good art trapped in a bad game. Instead, it feels like the strong vision that influences the world-building is paired with a weak vision for how a photography game should be realized. You are given plenty of tools that mean very little due to lenient grading systems, but that leniency also means you aren’t hung up on the little things. The timer encourages you to blitz a level, but that first run where you need to actually learn the lay of the land also means you do have some time to find important world-building details as well. Umurangi Generation Special Edition deserves to be heard even if it can’t construct itself the best, and while it might not work too well if you’re looking for an interesting picture taking game, its artistic energy makes putting up with the mediocre camera play worth it.