ponti reviews

Umurangi Generation

Fundamentally Umurangi Generation is a game in which you take pictures and get Tony Hawk-style trick scores for them. To describe it as "photography at the end of the world" makes it sound more trite than it is--this is very much not a world-ending that the photographer and their friends asked for. Though assuming a science-fictional logic, it's a logical burning-out point of colonialism and western capitalism.

It's a game worth taking your time with. Each level has a time limit, but this is an optional objective, and the tools you're given encourage you to look for shots outside the short list of requirements. Your real goal is to poke around the setting and to witness.

It's angry and funny and specific. The aesthetic is wildly good and the soundtrack is basically perfect--I've spent several times more hours listening to it than playing the game at this point. Umurangi Generation is exactly what cyberpunk should look like, if we insist on dragging that zombie genre with us through the 21st century and want it to mean anything other than regressive retrofuturism (something the cyberpunk granddad himself warned us about in 1981, three years before Neuromancer). It's a hell of a thing and everybody should play it.

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