Let’s be honest: most “deep” games about climate change are about as subtle as a brick through a window. You get the heavy-handed metaphor, the guilt-trip soundtrack, the ending where the protagonist gives a speech about how we’re all doomed unless we recycle more. Congratulations, you’ve been educated. Please feel bad now.
Umurangi Generation does none of that. Instead, it hands you a camera, drops you into a brightly colored cyberpunk Tauranga, and lets you spend the first hour taking photos of graffiti and your friends’ cool jackets. Then, very slowly, it pulls the rug out from under you and reveals you’ve been photographing the end of the world the entire time.
What Even Is This Game?
Umurangi Generation is a first-person photography simulation developed by Origame Digital and directed by Naphtali Faulkner, a Māori developer from the Ngāi Te Rangi iwi. It launched on PC in May 2020, made its way to Switch and Xbox, and landed on PlayStation and VR platforms in April 2024. It won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the 2021 Independent Games Festival, the highest honor in indie gaming, along with the Excellence in Narrative award.
On the surface, the premise is simple: you’re a courier in a retro-futuristic version of Tauranga, New Zealand. You deliver packages, but your real job is photography. Each level gives you a list of Photo Bounties, specific things to capture, and you earn money based on your photos. That’s it. That’s the game.
Except it’s not, and that’s the point.
The Trick
The first level is lovely. Bright colors, upbeat music, a rooftop party with your friends. You photograph graffiti, plants, people hanging out. It feels like Jet Set Radio had a baby with Pokémon Snap. The game even encourages this comparison.
Then you start noticing things.
The sky is red. Not sunset red. Fire red. The word umurangi literally means red sky in Te Reo Māori, a reference to the skies above Australia during the 2019-2020 bushfires that inspired Faulkner to make the game. There are UN soldiers everywhere. Mecha towers loom over the city. There are posters about a contagious parasite. The prime minister is on holiday during a crisis, which sounds absurd until you remember Scott Morrison did exactly that during Australia’s bushfire season.
You’re not photographing a fun cyberpunk city. You’re photographing a society that has decided to keep vibing while the world burns.
As Faulkner told GamesIndustry.biz: “One of the things about a neoliberal political system is it’s all about making you comfortable in the face of things that are going to kill you.” The game’s marketing, the in-world advertisements, the cool car designs, the movie posters, they all work to normalize catastrophe. You’re not living in a dystopia. You’re living in a nicely packaged dystopia where the horror is smoothed over by consumerism and partisan bickering.
The Indigenous Lens (And Why It Actually Matters)
Here’s where Umurangi Generation does something genuinely rare in gaming: it centers Māori identity not as decoration, but as the ethical framework of the entire experience.
The game takes place in Tauranga, on the sacred mountain Mauao, the ancestral home of Faulkner’s iwi. You see koru spirals and huia feathers in the street art. The final scene features spirits of Māori ancestors overlooking the catastrophe, alongside mud crabs and the extinct huia bird. The game is dedicated to the last generation who has to watch the world die.
This isn’t representation in the corporate sense, a checkbox on a diversity report. Faulkner has spoken openly about how gaming has a very comfortable relationship with fascists and how colonization is treated as a neutral game mechanic in most titles. Umurangi Generation is built on what he calls Respectful Design, a philosophy emphasizing decolonization of art and community-driven knowledge.
The result is a game that feels like it could only have been made by someone with a specific cultural relationship to the land and its history. The apocalypse isn’t abstract. It’s personal.
The Photography Is Actually Good
Let’s talk about the actual game part for a second, because it’s easy to get lost in the themes and forget that this thing plays well.
The photography system is surprisingly deep. You unlock lenses, fisheye, telephoto, and the Macro DLC adds shutter speed, aperture, and ISO adjustments. You can edit your photos in-game, adjust color grading, and the game scores them based on content, composition, and color. If you’re a photographer, you’ll feel at home. If you’re not, the game teaches you without being condescending.
The objectives are flexible enough to encourage creativity. The game’s Steam description boasts that Photo Bounties can be completed in thousands of different ways, and that’s not marketing fluff. Players have found creative solutions the developers never anticipated. You’re not railroaded. You’re invited to look.
And looking, it turns out, is the whole point.
The Sarcastic Bit (You Asked For This)
Here’s the thing about Umurangi Generation: it’s a game about taking photos during the apocalypse, and it somehow makes that feel cozy. You’re snapping pics of your friends, vibing to lo-fi beats, while giant monsters attack the city and the UN turns the place into a police state. It’s like Instagram, if Instagram were run by a militarized peacekeeping force and the influencer economy had collapsed into a barter system for film canisters.
The game’s central mechanic, photography, means you’re never actually fighting anything. You can’t shoot the jellyfish monsters. You can’t punch the fascists. You can’t fix the climate. You just… document. You take pictures of the red sky and the protest graffiti and the memorials to dead pilots, and you submit them for a score, and you move on.
Which is, honestly, a pretty accurate metaphor for being alive in 2026. You can’t fix the world. You can’t even really slow it down. But you can look at it. You can pay attention. You can refuse to look away.
The game even punishes you for taking photos of the blue jellyfish aliens, the enemy. You lose money. There’s no explanation given in-game, and players have complained about it. But the meaning is clear: don’t photograph the spectacle. Photograph the people. The resistance. The mundane moments of joy that persist despite everything.
The Verdict
Umurangi Generation is not for everyone. If you need clear objectives, constant action, or a happy ending, this will frustrate you. The pacing is deliberate. The story is told through environmental details, not dialogue. The ending is bleak.
But if you’re willing to meet it on its own terms, it’s one of the most affecting games of the last decade. It understands something that most serious games don’t: that the apocalypse isn’t a single dramatic event. It’s a slow erosion of normalcy, a gradual acceptance of the unacceptable, a sky that stays red until you forget it was ever blue.
Faulkner made this game because his mother’s home burned down in the Australian bushfires, and he watched politicians talk around the problem while the world literally caught fire. That’s the experience at the heart of Umurangi Generation. Not abstract anxiety about climate change. Specific, lived grief about watching people in power fail to act while the sky turns red.
It’s a game about photography. It’s a game about resistance. It’s a game about the last generation that has to watch the world die.
And somehow, despite all that, it’s also kind of beautiful.
Quick Reference
- Developer: Origame Digital
- Director: Naphtali Faulkner
- Publisher: Playism
- Release: May 2020 (PC), later Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, VR (April 2024)
- Awards: Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Narrative, 2021 Independent Games Festival
- DLC: Macro (adds advanced camera controls and new levels)
- Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, VR
- Genre: First-person photography simulation
- Themes: Climate catastrophe, Indigenous sovereignty, neoliberalism, documentation as resistance
Tips for New Players
- Don’t rush. The game rewards observation. Spend time in each level before submitting your photos.
- Read everything. Posters, graffiti, dialogue. The story lives in the details, not in cutscenes.
- Experiment with angles. The scoring system rewards creativity more than technical perfection.
- The Macro DLC is worth it. If you enjoy the base game, the expanded camera controls add a lot.
- Don’t photograph the blue jellyfish. Seriously. Just don’t.