Umurangi Generation VR

Nice to play the Generation game, to play it nice

You would, perhaps, expect a game that hands you a camera and asks you to do nothing but take photos to be about photography. And to an extent, this one certainly is. Yet as we progress through what turns out to be a story, it quickly becomes obvious that this is about so much more than the art of taking pictures.

Umurangi Generation’s premise is so perfectly suited to virtual reality, and its implementation so superb, it’s genuinely surprising that a VR version of the game has only been made available this year (the non-VR game was first released on PC in 2020). The camera is your ever-present friend. When you want to take a photo – which you can do at any time and any place – you just reach down to grab it, bring it up and hold it in front of your face, wait until you’re happy with the framing, focus, and zoom, and hit a button to capture the moment. Just like a real camera.

You can take photos of whatever you like (and you’re encouraged to do so), but in order to unlock the next stage, you have a list of specific ‘targets’ to capture. This might be a single object or, often, multiple objects that must be framed within the same shot. The trick is in exploring the environment to find them, then finding the right position and lens (the latter sometimes specified for the task) to get them in view.