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# Come and See: What to Play, September 25
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/come-and-see-what-to-play-september-25/
- Published: 2026-09-25T17:55:39.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-25T17:57:49.000Z
- Description: Six cinder blocks, seven cats, two body bags.
- Author: Jamin Warren
- Tags: Playlist, What to Play Now, Photography, war, grief, memory, violence

An aside 

This week: a photography game where the camera is the only thing you can do, set inside a war you cannot stop. Playlist is for Killscreen members. Membership starts at five dollars a month, and the first month is free.

[Become a member ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=playlist-aside) 

![Umurangi Generation reveal card](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/Playlist-290-Reveal-Card-Still---Umurangi-Generation---Origame-Digital---web-header.jpg)

## Playlist 290

## Umurangi Generation (2020)

## Origame Digital

### Play Time: 2 hours

[Available on PC, Switch, Xbox and PlayStation](https://umurangi.tapiki.io/?ref=killscreen.com)

> Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.

*\-Susan Sontag,* [*Regarding the Pain of Others*](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312422196/regardingthepainofothers/?ref=killscreen.com)

> *Bear witness,* we say \[...\] we must ask—what does all this looking do?

*Sarah Aziza, "*[*The Work of the Witness*](https://jewishcurrents.org/the-work-of-the-witness?ref=killscreen.com)*"* 

I am voiceless, but there are sounds everywhere. They are the sounds of nightlife, of my friends. We are huddled on a rooftop, surrounded by the leftovers of construction, a perfect location for mischief. Abandoned sofas, walls covered with graffiti and, of course, a skyline of Tauranga, New Zealand. I pull everyone in for a photo. A little to the left, and smile; maybe I can catch everyone in a frame on this rooftop against one of those cherry-pop-red evenings on a night that will never end.

And then, the sky is shattered with the roar of a fighter jet, so low I can smell the jet fuel, and I'm reminded that today will not be a good day. So why not take another photo? It's really all one can do.

![Fighter jets pass over a rooftop under a red sky in Umurangi Generation](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/Playlist-290-Rooftop-Jets-Still---Umurangi-Generation---Origame-Digital---fighter-jet-over-the-red-sky-rooftop.jpg)

In Naphtali Faulkner's (Ngāi Te Rangi iwi) *Umurangi Generation* (2020), you play as an unnamed Māori courier on assignment (newspapers still exist in the future!), who documents the incursions of an alien squid species. Tooled only with an arsenal of lenses and a shot list that ranges from the demure (six cinder blocks, seven cats) to the profound (two body bags), you hurtle through different scenes in this society on the verge of collapse, from a gripping front-line sequence to a somber trainbound retreat to a final encounter on the beaches of the island country. It is a game about photography, a rare breed that centers your activity entirely on the daily lives of the beleaguered citizens in the last throes of an invasion. But this isn't really a game about aliens, thank god.

Faulkner's [stated reason](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/using-photography-to-document-the-end-of-the-world-in-i-umurangi-generation-i-?ref=killscreen.com) is straightforward enough: photography is perhaps the only way to truly get players to take a deep breath and look. It's such a small thing, that. Look. "The photograph is never anything but an antiphon of 'Look,' 'See,' 'Here it is,'" French philosopher [Roland Barthes would write](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374532338/cameralucida/?ref=killscreen.com) in his reflections on photography, *Camera Lucida*. The point is that the taking, the taken, and the takeaway of a photograph are all active, as dynamic as any activity we have inside a game. And yet, that is typically not the way that we engage with virtual environments. They are set dressing and rehearsal spaces, not sites of contemplation, and given the backdrop for *Umurangi*, it can be tempting to think that dynamic sequences off-world (one sequence positions giant mecha against the squid from that same opening rooftop) are the subject, and taking a photo is simply something that you do. Even in games with a more meditative bent, it's rare that the gaze truly lingers on a single object. 

This gazing, of course, is not without reward. You receive a modicum of symbolic cash and new lenses for completing each assignment, and even for taking your photos. It's the look that changes your context through this thing called the camera inside this other thing called a videogame. "Their intention is not to change the world but to change the meaning of the world," media theorist [Vilém Flusser writes](https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/towards-a-philosophy-of-photography?ref=killscreen.com). Through my little camera, the soda cans and dining tables and police cars and Day-Glo graffiti of *Umurangi*, I can transform the conditions of my deeply fallen world.

![Framing a portrait of two friends with the camera in Umurangi Generation](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/Playlist-290-Camera-Friends-Still---Umurangi-Generation---Origame-Digital---framing-a-portrait-of-friends-with-the-camera.jpg)

But a funny thing about human sight: even when we are looking through a lens, our peripheral vision still sneaks through. The big things are easy to notice (the constant presence of the UN), but the small things (candles arranged in an alcove, two cats leering at each other from a staircase) can't help but catch my eye. It's part of what [Faulkner calls](https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.5765159?ref=killscreen.com) "respectful design," a term from Norman W. Sheehan, a Wiradjuri academic, that suggests that beauty lies not in the eye of the photographer but is a distributed talent to be shared by the community. To that end, *every* photo in *Umurangi* is a good photo and receives a passing grade (no F ratings here). *Umurangi*, then, is a break from the shorter tradition of photo-based games like *Pokémon Snap*, but also from the [now-ubiquitous photo modes](https://www.killscreen.com/virtual-light-exploring-game-photography-and-photo-history/) that only serve as an advertisement for the latest and greatest GPUs.

Of course, there's the fiction. The kaiju, the UN occupation and rebellious sloganeering spray-painted on every sidewalk. Faulkner said that the national complacency around [the bushfires that consumed his mother's home](https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-umurangi-generation-captured-2020s-despair-and-neoliberal-decay/?ref=killscreen.com) was a signal of the looming disasters that await our climate future. So yes, it *is* a game about climate change, something almost all critics return to, but my mind, again wandering toward the periphery, couldn't help feeling the role of a photographer places me somewhere else.

![Neon streets under UN signage in Umurangi Generation](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/Playlist-290-UN-Streets-Still---Umurangi-Generation---Origame-Digital---neon-streets-under-UN-signage.jpg)

Of course, I am talking about the genocide of the people of Gaza and the war in Ukraine. Before that, it could be any of the innumerable horrors perpetrated on the people of Afghanistan, Rwanda or Cambodia. Through all of those, there have always been photographers throughout the 20th century deployed by media or photo agencies to document each and every moment. To pick up a camera and to document pain and suffering is to [place oneself in a tradition](https://www.killscreen.com/corpography-battlefield-1-beta/) that sits outside of games, and thus *Umurangi Generation* is less about the specific otherworldly tragedy that has befallen Tauranga than about the act of observation and our inability to do anything in the face of incomprehensible violence. In the town of Katikati, you're asked to take a photo, in low, narrow, neon-tinged city streets, of 15 candles, many of which are lit in memorial. How many candles are there? How many have died? In another sequence, The Strand, a building has collapsed and is now protected (?) by UN soldiers. Was it an apartment building? Was it a school?

There is a longer tradition of games that tackle serious subject matter through a change of setting. I am thinking of [*This War of Mine*](https://www.killscreen.com/this-war-mine-interrogates-nature-war-game/) (2014), which was inspired by the siege of Sarajevo, where you are asked to make hard choices to survive. But there is another way through entirely: games can elide historicity and simply focus on what an interaction does to us through the act of doing. In this instance, Faulkner's stripping the range of actions to *only* observing and never interacting mirrors the helplessness of our contemporary social media- and television-fueled interactions with daily violence and suffering. For Sontag, the concern was that television, and then by extension [TikTok or Instagram](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/watching-the-worlds-first-tiktok-war?ref=killscreen.com), does not allow for "a more reflective engagement" because you can always change the channel. We can always look away; we can always escape. In an essay on photographs of suffering in *The New Yorker*, [Sarah Sentilles recounted this story](https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/how-we-should-respond-to-photographs-of-suffering?ref=killscreen.com).

> I thought of a friend whose son was diagnosed with a fatal disease. When he was dying, people would say to her, "I can't imagine what you're going through." She would respond, "Yes, you can imagine it. You just don't want to."

With games, you can imagine that tragedy. You must. You simply have no other choice. Faulkner doesn't provide that respite, and now the question becomes: what will you do with what you have seen?

Before you go 

You just read the whole thing. Playlist is the main reason people pay for Killscreen — one game a week, played properly, written up on Friday. Membership starts at five dollars a month, and the first month is free.

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