Umurangi Generation, being a photographer documenting a crisis

Umurangi Generation plays In the near future, and you are a photographer earning money by selling pictures of interesting motives. In order to do that you are put into levels of various size which you explore in order to find the asked for motives. After reaching an earnings threshold you can advance the plot and leave for the next level. You obtain multiple lenses in order to fulfill requests or just take some artistically interesting shots.

When you play the first level it's just you and some friends partying on top of an abandoned under construction skyscraper and the only strange thing are some fighter jets flying above you, but with each level more is revealed about this games world without explicit dialogue. Instead you see various facets of the world at those levels, with you directly documenting how people are reacting to the crisis. Protests, governments reaction to those protests, the underlying problem and so on.

Now to the discussion which spoils the whole thing:

To understand this game, the background of the games developer is relevant: he is Maori and was frustrated by the Australian governments mishandling of the bush fire and Covid19 catastrophes in 2019/20. That frustration is what generated the protests in the game and the government completely ignoring it's citizens plight and declaring more and more autocratic laws to stop unrest instead of helping the people. And especially in view of the ongoing climate catastrophe, he felt that there will be more and more political unrest of the rich against all others with everybody paying the price.

So is this a good game? If you go simply by game mechanics then no, Eastshade does the "take pictures inside the game" better and more well rounded. But that is not the goal the developer intended to portray. If you go the way of RagnarRox and judge it not by its isolated performance, but rather by it's intention, then in my eyes it fulfilled that. This game is less about artistically taking pictures and more about the story it tells by putting you in various situation with the goal of documenting it. If that is something you like, then try it out! It's not long, so if you really don't like it and are not hooked by the third level, then you are still in the 2 hour return time. But the first 2 level are just for setting the scene and should not be seen as the representative of the whole game.