Umurangi Generation is about finding normalcy during abnormal times
Since it can be difficult to find time to finish video games, let alone find interesting ones that will provide a complete entertaining experience in a few hours. For this series I’ll talk about a short game that could easily be played to completion over a weekend.
One of the side characters in Neon Genesis Evangelion, Kensuke, is a high school kid who is really into military stuff, and spends most of the series walking around with a portable video camera. He ends up using it to film some of the battles, but mainly he has it so that he can document for himself all the military hardware around him in a city that is constantly besieged by giant monsters. In a sense Umurangi Generation is about being Kensuke, only cooler.
Umurangi Generation is a first person photography game set in a neon and spray paint infused city that is like an aesthetic cross between the Tokyo-to of Jet Set Radio and the environments of Blendo Games like Thirty Flights of Loving and Gravity Bone. Gameplay wise though it uses photography as the lens through which you experience and discovery Umurangi’s world and story. Making the game more akin to Gone Home then to a photography game like Pokemon Snap. As each level tells you a little bit more about what happened and what is currently going on, but this is all implicitly done through the designs of each level. Which you explore in order to complete the photography objectives you are tasked with.
Each level has a number of things you need to photograph in order to complete the level. These can be something like get a shot with seven birds in it, or get a close up shot of the word “Boomer.” How you do these objectives is up to you, as there are often multiple ways to get the shot you need. Completing levels gives you new equipment for your camera giving you additional post processing options for your photos, or giving you a new lens to swap onto your camera.
In early levels the photography feels like something your character is doing for fun, just taking shots of friends hanging out and the cool art and stuff around you. There are big hints that something just happened in this world, but it isn’t the focus. However as the game goes on the realism of the photography: swapping lenses, adjusting focus, and post processing image adjustments starts to feel detached from the world around you. As what was hinted at becomes more explicit and fascinating you are never directly engaging with it, but instead seeing it all from an arm’s length away through the lens of a camera.
But the detachment here feels right, and true to life. As we’ve seen in the last few months of abnormality in the real world, having those moments of doing something that distract you and give you a sense of normalcy can be comforting. And we constantly see examples that people will attempt to go about their normal lives, even when things aren’t normal, as a way to keep from becoming too overwhelmed by it all.
Umurangi Generation is a fascinating exercise in having the gameplay effectively not engaging with the narrative at all, and yet also being the vehicle by which the story is experienced. For the character you play as photography is effectively their safety blanket for engaging with this world. Like Kensuke in Evangelion, it’s their way to detach themselves from what is happening in a way that also lets them keep living and moving forward. And for a game to convey that particular feeling, especially right now, is kind of amazing.
Umurangi Generation was developed by ORIGAME DIGITAL, and is available on Steam (Windows) for $14.99. It takes about 3 hours to finish.
