Umurangi Generation is BACK, and this time, it's meaner, nastier, and it's coming for YOU.

Umurangi Generation was an incredibly accomplished and compelling piece that captured the pre-apocalyptic feeling that much of my generation feel looking outside our windows and through our screens, one that was cutting yet broad in its applicability.

Macro, by contrast, is sharper and cuts deeper. Throughout this [REDACTED] set of levels, Macro offers an incisive look at the commodification and weaponization of outsider art, the rot at the heart of online posting and gaming culture, and of the mentality, conscious or otherwise, that art is by its nature praxis and that we can change the world by Posting.

The tasks you are given feel particularly pointed, encouraging you to present a specific vision of the world through your shots that is reflective of a narrative that an authority wishes to convey, rather than the full reality of the space. HANGAR is a particular triumph, turning you into a propagandist snapping puff pieces for the regime while your friends, once vibing and dancing through these spaces with you, wait outside, dejected and unmoving.

No matter how rebellious and violent and angry it is, the more your art resonates, the more the status quo will take it from you, offering wider and wider audiences in exchange for the edges being slowly sanded off your work until all you're doing is reproducing the monoculture, until there's nothing about it that cuts.

Macro never lets its brazen cynicism turn into outright nihilism however, as the final level boils over with such righteous fury at the state of the world that it thoroughly rejects falling into the pit of nihilism the game sometimes feels like it's dancing on the edge of.

Fuck the cops. Black lives matter. Free Palestine. But saying that isn't enough. You won't change the world by tweeting that. I'm not going to change anything by writing Backloggd reviews, and I'm kidding myself if I think I am. We gotta get out there. We gotta do something.

There's a story in my head that I've been searching for, searching for as long as I can remember. Somewhere along the way, I realised that I couldn't find it anywhere else, and would have to tell it myself. Until I found Umurangi Generation.

This isn't that story, exactly, but it was a hand reaching out across the vastness of digital space, resting on my shoulder, telling me I'm not alone. We're all here, all watching the same thing on the same screens, but seeing different things through different eyes. Living in the final moments before the light burns out forever, making what we can with what little we have.

Few games are so evocative and creative and atmospheric. Few works of fiction period feel so intensely relatable to me.

A modern masterpiece.