Editor’s note: The developer provided us with a prerelease build of Umurangi Generation: Macro.
There are some games that you know for a fact should not have gotten any DLC, that suffer for constant additions to the base campaign. You slowly watch as everything you enjoyed in a game gets whittled away with more and more New Things to Do and See and Become. If you simply described Umurangi Generation to me, if I had never played it, I might be tempted to say that it was one of those games. After all, the game is only about two hours long, has a pretty tight “narrative” built almost entirely on environmental storytelling, and puts a premium on efficiency – that timer speeds you along no matter if it’s your first or your 40th playthrough. But I have played Umurangi Generation, and I know that, at least personally, there’s a lot of small questions I had that have gone unanswered. It is both a tone piece for the state of the world circa 2020 and a game with a lot of interesting Lore Possibilities™.
When I heard that developer Tali Faulkner and Origame Digital were going to do a DLC for the game, I approached it with cautious optimism. After all, it could be a way to tighten some of the nuts and bolts from the base game and give additional contexts to some of the stark imagery that shows up in that original campaign. That being said, I had trust in the dev team to essentially make more of the same – if nothing had materially changed from the game’s release to now, then we were yet again going to get a pretty incredible photography sim and just the right sandbox to play with it in.
Umurangi Generation: Macro adds four new maps, nine new upgrades, and a lot of surprisingly emotionally intense moments that not only provide the contexts we asked for but really give us more than we bargained for in that regard. We asked to see the emotional toll of the fight between the UN and near-otherworldly force of nature threatening us – well buddy, we’re getting it in spades. We wanted to know just how bad the UN was treating people – that becomes incredibly apparent in several spaces. In my original review I remarked on how much I felt like a tourist – the DLC even addresses this, by showing the strain our job places on our relationships with our friends.
If there’s one point of contention I have with the game that Macro makes apparent it’s this: you are really the only person with any sense of motion, of action, in this game. There are sparse pockets of movement – like the dancers in Gamer’s Palace – but once again, we are mostly just documenting moments that are frozen in living time. There is a BIG exception at the end, but it’s the exception that proves the rule. You notice it because up to this point, everything else had largely stood still.
Still, finding out the identity of DJ Tariq, learning more about the UN anti-Kaiju strike force, including seeing the machines they fight in up close, seeing what happened to the first-responders in this crisis and developing a much clearer understanding of why people are so upset – it definitely doesn’t feel bad.
The upgrades we receive in the course of playing the DLC not only make taking photos better (see this piece), but they make playing the game itself feel much better. Being able to sprint and do tricks with the Roller Blades upgrade (aside from the obvious Jet Set Radio homage) practically means we can get around each level much quicker, which is incredibly helpful under the oppressive eye of that ubiquitous timer (kidding!). We still have several photo bounties to complete and film canisters to find in each new zone, and the better we do the more money – or social media likes – we get, so time is of the essence. After all, the Tauranga Express is still the fastest courier service in the area.
With the additions to our camera system, the new quality of life changes to movement speed and control, and the injection of more knowledge into our understanding of the shitty future world we inhabit in-game, Umurangi Generation: Macro is a necessary addition to the base campaign. It’s a must-get.