The Switch version of Umurangi Generation comes with extra DLC that includes 4 additional stages as well as over an hour of extra music, good. More on Thor High Heels’ audio skills later!
Presented from a first-person perspective, the game takes the form of your protagonist getting plonked in various areas of a neon-drenched and clearly troubled city with their trusty camera and a list of objectives to keep them exploring. Initially, you’ll only have access to the standard camera lens as well as various options to tweak each photograph in order to capture the challenges set before you.
The challenges range massively from ‘a cat and a bird’ to ‘the word boomer’ or perhaps ‘two guns’ or ‘a sarcastic message’. Whatever they are, you’ll wander the area with your eyes peeled. Each stage also has various bonuses such as completing it in under ten minutes, perfectly recreating a postcard or earning over a certain amount of money (each shot nets you some cash). The further you get into the game, the more equipment you’ll unlock such as a telephoto lens, fisheye, wide-angle etc.
The games’ angular art style really works in allowing you to capture (and fiddle with) some really stylish moments, you can ask people to change posing position and double jump to find other areas as well as rotating the camera for funkier captures. The game works perfectly when ‘passing the pad’ between two people, we found ourselves challenging each other as to who can take the coolest picture, tweaking those sliders to get the perfect outcome.
My skills do NOT lie in the visual medium but it’s undeniable how Umurangi Generation sucks you in, the level of control - and the accessible way in which that control is given to the player – means you can’t help but get involved in just snapping away for fun. Whether it was on a construction site, the neon-filled streets, in a warzone or an arcade, I was reading everything, making sense of the world I was wandering through and getting hips deep in Thor High Heels’ awesome (SIX HOUR PLUS!!!) soundtrack. The music switches from buzzing, boxy electric guitar chords to trip-hop, electronica and beyond, the kaleidoscopic audio matching perfectly with the eye-bursting. colourful visuals on-screen.
Whilst I really did like Umurangi Generation and the ability to create that it bestowed upon me, there are some areas of design that remove you from the world. The frame rate rarely feels steady and whilst this isn’t a massive issue when you are staring down the camera lens, it does make exploring each stage slightly less fun, this combines with quite stiff controls, again, when you are on a flat plain, it’s all good but jumping and traversing – which you often have to do to get the right/perfect shot – feels cumbersome, especially when stairs are involved.
Umurangi Generation is a unique and beautifully expressive experience, but it did feel slightly hamstrung by the Switch’s capabilities with this particular game engine. As much as I enjoyed playing, I can very much see myself working through the game again on the Xbox Series X if it becomes available, as the power of that machine will solve some of the problems I had on the Switch, although the motion controls are a very cool addition on Nintendo’s system.
I have no interest in photography and yet I adored my time playing the game and even watching others capture their own magical, abstract moments. One minute they’re snapping some graffiti on a wall, the next, super-zooming in on a skyscraper-sized monster attacking a distant bridge.
"Right, I’m off to not take pictures of squids."
ðe-Shop link: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Umurangi-Generation-Special-Edition-1982485.html ð
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