One of those games that makes you realize how weak you are. How much you crave that little hit. “Just one more floor,” you say. “Then I’ll turn it off. I mean, I’ll probably die soon. And have to start over. How… terrible that would be…”

Three hours later, you’ve attempted five more runs, experimenting with aggressive strats as opposed to defensive ones, writing down different combos in your pathetic little notebook, just sitting in a tired stupor in the dark playing your fucking virtual cards against nobody.

So… yeah, cool game!

being firm in its beliefs, umurangi generation executes its world, its gameplay, and its message stunningly. the music also rocks. what tali faulkner provides the player is a series of vignettes inching along a plot that is just barely there, with the players main job being to observe. what's genius about the gameplay is by taking photography as its core mechanic it plants a metaphor in the player's head. though the art form of photography captures things that objectively exist, different photos of the same object can be and generally are radically different from one another. taking a photo of a sculpture is creating art, just as sculpting the sculpture was. so umurangi declares similarly that while making a video game is art, so is playing it. what this photography mechanic means for the game is that player can express themselves infinitely within the finite set of actions the game designer allows them to do. there's a lot to talk about in umurangi generation, its politics, its aesthetics, its music, but i just wanted to highlight this area that it succeeds in where so many other games, especially those that are trying to tell a story, fail. by providing the player with this two-in-one metaphor and game mechanic, it encourages gameplay and story-interaction as self-expression, not as a challenge. and that feels extremely refreshing.