**spoilers for Umurangi Generation follow below**
Few games take the kinds of narrative and tonal swings that Umurangi Generation does. Even fewer do so with the constraints of a small,independent team and a highly specific mechanical lens with which to view the world of the game. Fewer still hit as hard and as accurately as Umurangi Generation and its subsequent expansion, MACRO. It's been a good year for fans of the cyberpunk genre, but Umurangi Generation absolutely emerges on top as the game for our political moment.
One can see a world in which Umurangi Generation sat on its own: the story closes off at the end of the world. Developer Playism used the Te Reo word for the title, literally translating to "Red Sky" Generation. This refers to the concept of the eventual and inevitable "final generation". How will these people choose to live their lives knowing the end date? We are all burdened to grapple with our own fleeting existence, but what does one do when faced with the obvious and apparent collapse caused by systems that have failed them and others? How does one deal with the psychological and existential horror of knowing the die was cast? The systems that have failed and will continue to fail them were built long ago, and the time to course correct has long since past. The base Umurangi Generation is a meditation on the purpose and meaning of art in a world in the middle of collapse. By recontextualizing the real-world existential threats we face every day (the coronavirus pandemic, rising fascism, looming economic devastation, eviction crises, climate change) with the bold, pop culture mixtape of neon cyberpunk aesthetics, classic, chunky gaming iconography, and giant robot design that skirts close to copyright infringement, Umurangi Generation masterfully forces us to face the more abstract doom that we can put out of our minds in our day-to-day lives. It forces us to look at the end.
Or so it would seem: Umurangi Generation Macro drops you off in the stage after, in a virtual gaming club. It first seems as though everything is "back to normal" so to speak -- you're taking photos and fulfilling client requests and exploring this neon-drenched space while listening to new tracks from the incredible ThorHighHeels (who returns to score this update), but then something happens -- you step outside. By climbing a staircase, you can find yourself outside the barcade and back on the streets. Only now, you're underground. The music does not follow you outside, instead, it thumps along muted by the walls. The partying and the drinking and dancing stays behind. This is Umurangi Generation's greatest magic trick: it won't allow you to simply engage with it on an aesthetic level. This expansion is in conversation with the previous game. You cannot go back to vibing with your friends. The world is forever changed. You can try to ignore it, but it's just outside, and you can't hide forever. MACRO's objectives for each stage force you to go to these "changed" spaces, where there is a significant tonal shift from the rest of the stage. MACRO is an expansion that forces you to take in the horror and loneliness of these spaces, that won't allow you to simply ignore that the events of the previous section have forever changed the world, and that the player and those around them must continue to live in that world.
In the base game, the threat revealed over the course of the stages was concrete: unimaginable kaiju-esque creatures doing battle with U.N. forces and destroying the world. Even though the U.N. were not the direct aggressors in the original game, it could easily be inferred that, in Umurangi's version of the future, the systems at play here are not blameless, and that the state of Neo-Tauranga is the result of countless systemic failures on top of the giant beasts stomping around and laying waste to the city. Umurangi Generation Macro implies that the direct threat of the kaiju has been either defeated or avoided and takes the further step of asking: now what? At so many points in our real-world history, the tools of a nation's battlefield supremacy eventually wind up turned on its citizens in some regard. Umurangi's future is no different. The mechs from the original aren't cool, they're weapons, and a the same systems that allowed the apocalypse to come knocking on humanities doors will absolutely turn them on their citizens to retain what little control they have.
As if the parallels could be no clearer, Umurangi Generation Macro's final stage is a protest in the middle of an underground UN jurisdiction, as the people inhabiting fight to be freed from UN control. However, soon, the protest is turned violent by UN police agitation, and the mechs that defended Earth are turned on the very people that they were to save. The last moments of the game are spent in quiet reflection of a burned city, as the protagonist awakens after being beaten unconscious by police. They and their friends quietly make their way across rooftops to access a sewage pipeline to return to the surface. To write it out explicitly, it appears hopeless and bleak, but I feel that Umurangi Generation Macro's message is ultimately a hopeful one. Even though the violence of a crumbling regime is extreme and seemingly insurmountable, pushing for radical change and liberation from these failing systems is, like creating art, valuable and worth fighting for. Umurangi Generation spends every minute of its brief runtime making the case that the fight, the act of creation, the establishment of community, it all matters, and may be the most human thing we can do. As Tariq puts it: "the world is going to shit, we're all going to die, but no matter: for we have DJ TARIQ".