Umurangi Generation: Photography After The World Continues

[Fyonn]

You should play Umurangi Generation. It's a photography simulator about finding stuff in an environment and taking pictures of them under certain conditions with a soft time limit that you can absolutely ignore. I can't say much else about it, because it's essentially environmental storytelling: the video game. But suffice it to say, it's immediately obvious something bad happened, but life didn't stop.

When you play the game, be sure to click on the tutorial - it's a good tone-setter and also there's a thing you're not supposed to take pictures of, and you might take pictures of it if you don't know and that would be bad!

Instead of diving into the game's details, here are some photos I took in the first two levels, some for objectives, some for fun.

speculation / spoiler as to what's going on zone
hate to see it when your city gets attacked by a whole evangelion

 

[Zef]

It's a photography simulator about finding stuff in an environment and taking pictures of them under certain conditions

Righty-o, then, if you'll excuse me,

 

[Fyonn]

The parts of this game where it's like "we want you to take a picture of thing X, which is going to make you take a picture of scene Y, which is the actual important part" is dope.
The parts of this game where it's like "use a telephoto lens" is suffering. Fuck telephoto lenses. I've never used a real camera in my life, but I will go to my grave with this grudge against telephoto lenses.

 

[JBear]

I hear from multiple folks that I trust that the narrative in this game is worth experiencing, so I want to play it for that reason, but on the other hand, I hate taking pictures and know basically nothing about cameras, so I find myself conflicted.

 

[Zef]

I'd rather get this on a console, especially since I prefer the PS4 Share functionality to the Switch, but as of now it's only coming to the latter. I guess it's time to figure out how to do efficient screencaps on PC.

 

[Fyonn]

Zef, the game saves every photo you take to a folder by default. You can toggle the "save this photo" option on a photo-by-photo basis. In the options menu, you can open your gallery folder, which will take you straight there.

I hear from multiple folks that I trust that the narrative in this game is worth experiencing, so I want to play it for that reason, but on the other hand, I hate taking pictures and know basically nothing about cameras, so I find myself conflicted.

I also know nothing about cameras. Luckily, the game literally doesn't even care if the photo you take is in focus or not! It only matter how "good" your photos are if you're playing to get a high score. Otherwise, it's point and shoot, with controls for zoom, focus, and rotation. You get more lenses as the game goes on, but their functions are pretty straight forward, and tbe game will tell you if it wants you to use a specific lens. This game is a photography simulator in the sense that Ace Combat is a flight simulator.

You also unlock stuff like bloom and saturation, but the game literally doesn't even factor those in to how "good" a photo is. Now, the DLC does unlock some real-ass photography shit like shutter speed and ISO, but it also unlocks some upgrades for non-photography people like rollerskates, hover boots, and graffiti.



I "beat" this game! It's pretty short, but there's a Tony Hawk-esque appeal to going back to levels to do all the optional objectives. If you do all the objectives in a stage, you get lens variants sometimes, like the ultrawide lens that takes 180 degree photos, or the macro lens that has more extreme differences between focus levels.