Undercooked Mechanics in ‘Urban Myth Dissolution Center’ Leave You Wanting More [Review]

One of my favorite episodic formats is investigating strange happenings. The X-Files, Supernatural, Fringe, these shows all set up a case of the week about a weird incident, then unravel the truth behind it through a series of compelling twists and turns. This is the vibe that Urban Myth Dissolution Center, a new adventure game/visual novel from developer Hakababunko, tries to capture, but with its own anime-inspired flavor.

You play as Azami Fukurai, a young woman with clairvoyance powers to see ghostly images of the past through her glasses. At the beginning of the game, she gets awkwardly roped into working for the titular organization (long story short: she breaks a cursed chair and has to repay the damages), pairing her with Jasmine, who drives her around and helps her with the more mundane aspects of the investigation. Running the center is Ayumu Meguriya, a psychic who runs operations from afar due to being wheelchair bound. This character setup all happens pretty quickly, setting you off to the races on your investigations.

The game is broken up into six chapters, each with their own case. These start out standalone, but by the final case, threads from all previous investigations end up tying together into a bigger mystery that’s been building in the background. It’s a clever variety of urban myths and occult mysteries, allowing each case to feel different from the others. You’ll go from investigating a streamer who caught a ghost on camera to infiltrating a tour that allegedly takes its participants to the Netherworld, providing a good deal of narrative variety. The pacing on each of these could be tightened up, the game runs a bit long at 16 hours, but it feels like a good number of cases overall.

Gameplay in Urban Myth Dissolution Center feels like a hybrid between a point and click adventure game and a visual novel. Each scene within a case drops you in a specific area, giving you a goal of uncovering a certain amount of clues before moving on. To do this, you’ll interact with objects in the scene, talk to characters, or use your clairvoyance to see echoes of the past. As you do these, more interaction options will open up with other elements in the scene. Maybe an echo you see with clairvoyance will give you a reason to look closer at a shelf, and the object you find on that shelf will give you a new dialog option with one of the characters.

On paper, it seems like a good idea, but it never really nails the feeling of an investigation. Since all these interaction points are called out, it just feels like you’re bouncing from one place to the next, exhausting your options at each until you move on. I can’t tell if it’s a translation issue, but sometimes the text of these options can be extremely similar, starting with “observe,” before unlocking the ability to “look closer,” which will then allow you to “examine.” It just feels like an extra layer that’s added on for no reason, when it would be just as good to keep clicking through dialog as you continue to examine it. Occasionally, it won’t be clear what new options are available based on the information you just received, forcing you to go back through all the different interaction points until you stumble upon the correct one to keep moving forward.

There is an attempt to try to force you to synthesize this information, but for the most part it feels underbaked. After getting certain clues, you’ll be given the option to try to make a deduction from it. This comes in the form of a fill in the blank sentence where you’re trying to use the info you learned to come to a conclusion. For example, it might say something like “Maybe _________ did _________ and then _______” and you’ll have to use a set of words and phrases to complete it. Sometimes these are overly easy, where it feels like there’s only one arrangement of words that will even make a coherent sentence, but other times they can be super specific in ways that are frustrating. I wish there were more of a connection between your phrases and the clues you’re acquiring, as this would make it feel a lot more like you’re doing a real investigation.

At other points during these scenes, including the dissolution process at the end of each case where you put together all the details, you’ll be asked multiple choice questions about the information you’ve been presented. These can be laughably easy, oftentimes just asking you to repeat the information you just discovered. This mechanic does work better during the dissolution process at the end of a case, where you’re answering a series of five questions that consolidate all the information of the case in one place, but even then it never feels particularly challenging, especially since there’s no penalty for being incorrect. There is a really cool visual motif of you stylishly opening a lock while doing the dissolution, which helps add a dramatic punch to the moment that the mechanics don’t quite provide.

Another element of your investigation uses the internet in a cool way, asking you to comb through social media feeds for clues to look into. You’re presented with a bunch of posts, and by clicking on them Azami and Jasmine will react to their contents and come across clues. Azami can also use her clairvoyance to discover important words, which are moving slightly as you look at them, that can be typed into your search bar in various combinations to find more posts. These sections are a way to keep the formula fresh, but also tend to be hit or miss. On occasion, I would click on two very similar posts, and one would give me a clue while the other wouldn’t, with no real indication about why one was more significant. The social media and the internet in general ends up being key to the plot, so I’m glad they mixed up the presentation a bit, but it still can fall into the same pitfalls as the other elements.

No matter what part of the game you’re doing, it always looks stellar. The environments are presented with a striking minimalist pixel art style, while the portraits and cutscenes have a stunning anime vibe. It makes great use of a minimal amount of animation to imply motion. One of the most impressive and unique elements of the art style in general is its limited color palette, which mostly uses blues with pops of red for important elements. It’s legitimately gorgeous to look at, creating unsettling ghosts and bizarre occult imagery to great effect.

The plotting of each case is pretty solid, starting with a strong hook and taking many twists and turns before reaching their conclusion. Things are never exactly what they seem, keeping you on your toes as new information comes to light. The slow development of a larger picture also feels pretty satisfying, building to a climax that ties things together in a satisfying way. Unfortunately for me, the final twist of the game has one of my least favorite plot tropes. It’s not something I can really go into without spoiling it, but it definitely had me rolling my eyes. This could just be a taste thing, so your mileage may vary, but unfortunately the note the game ended on for me soured my experience.

Dialogue in the game felt rough to me, and again I’m not sure if that was a translation issue or not. There were many times when it felt repetitive, going over the same information too many times in order to make sure you got it, while other times attempts to inject personality leaned too heavily on tropes that irritate me. Jasmine often felt like she was too heavy on snark, with phrases like “loose cannon much?” being thrown around, and Azami very frequently was portrayed as a submissive anime girl stereotype. She was constantly apologizing for being a bother, which was coupled with an animation of her holding up her hands while sweating with nervousness. This overly apologetic girl trope is another one that gets under my skin, so for the main character to so often fall into that is pretty grating for me.

Despite liking a lot of the plot beats in Urban Myth Dissolution Center, I always found myself wishing there was more to do as a player. It’s a combination of mystery adventure game and visual novel that doesn’t lean enough into the elements that I consider strengths of either of the genres. It doesn’t have the element of narrative choice that I value in visual novels, and the mystery mechanics are never in depth enough to give me the “eureka” moment of figuring out a solution for myself. There’s a lot to like here, from the clever use of occult themes to the uniquely gorgeous visual style, but the game just keeps getting in the way of itself with repetitive dialogue and overly simplistic mechanics.

Review code provided by publisher.

Urban Myth Dissolution Center launches February 12 on PC via Steam, the Nintendo Switch, and the PlayStation 5. A demo is also available on Steam.

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