Hello Gamers, Racula here and welcome to another XPN Gaming review!
Do you believe in urban myths? Some of them may be mere rumors, but some might just be true. It's that ambiguity that keeps us coming back. We've tried to recreate that feel for this game itself, aiming to create a game that spreads through word of mouth and lives on in the public mind, beyond individual lives and memories.
HakabaBunko - The Developers
Based in Japan, HakabaBunko are long time aficionados of mystery themed content.
The team creates adventure games that explore innovative forms of pixel art, such as their renowned game series - Makoto Wakaido's Case Files.
Winning the Shueisha Game Creators CAMP award at Google Play Indie Games Festival 2021, led to a close collaboration with Shueisha Games and the birth of Urban Myth Dissolution Center.
Let's dive in on and see what this game is all about.
Do you have what it takes to uncover the truth?
Urban myth dissolution centre takes you on an episodic, digital, mystery adventure.
Players find themselves taking on the role of the heroine protagonist - Azami Fukurai for the detective legwork, whilst under the supervision of Ayumu Meguriya, a level S psychic and the Centre Director and accompanied by fellow colleague, known as Jasmine.
Collecting circumstantial evidence and social network posts, to unravel the truth behind each urban myth, as well as pasts of each client and why they came to encounter each oddity they find.
However, the dissolution of each urban myth, leads to unexpected consequences and hidden truths.
The majority of the game, pretty much plays like a visual novel, there's more dialogue in this then your standard walk around type of games.
The only time you get to play as Azami and walk around in the game, is whilst investigating at the site of the case and interacting with other characters and objects.
Players will read through the game's dialogue and it will automatically update in your journal. So you can keep track of who you have spoken to and how their statements, relate to the current case. Also Azami makes her own notes on people and will also do a hypothesis on the case, with the help of the Director, in her mind.
In each case's location it may seem to look ordinary at first, but using Azami's gift of clairvoyance and the special glasses she was given, to help see glimpses of the past, changes these cases from ordinary, to the unordinary and overall adds an eerie atmosphere to the game.
These red shadows that appear whilst wearing the glasses, are pretty creepy looking at first glance, but they are not all what they appear to be.
As you progress further with the case, the more the truth of what they really are becomes clearer.
Before you arrive at any case in Urban Myth Dissolution Centre, players will find themselves doing a social media research, to try and find out more about the case and the urban myth that surrounds it.
Basically, what you have to do here is scroll through people's posts, pick out any keywords and important information that "stand out" for Azami specifically, by wearing the glasses when the words start move.
Sounds simple enough, but when there's twenty plus posts to comb through, just to find anything with some important information for the clues on the case, I'm going to be honest here, I found this part very tedious and annoying at times and overall didn't enjoy it.
Overall, the gameplay for Urban Myth Dissolution Centre does become quite repetitive at times when it comes to solving cases.
You're pretty much doing the same thing over and over again in each case, like asking questions, making notes, combing through social media, look around the scenes, making conclusions and solving the case.
There were at times, I felt like I was playing Vampire Therapist combined with Phoenix Wright.
For example coming up with the hypothesis, it basically was click the right text to go with statements and you keep going till it's right, along with the director talking to you in your mind. This very much reminded me of Vampire Therapist and how its gameplay style is fairly similar.
For the similarities to Phoenix Wright, it was the cut scenes when making a conclusion and solving the cases, it all looked very similar to one another.
Thoughts on Urban Myth Dissolution Centre's Pixel Art Style Graphics
As mentioned at the start of this review, the team behind Urban Myth Dissolution Centre like to explore innovative forms of pixel art in there games.
Playing this game and seeing this game style of pixel art, brings me back to my childhood days of playing on consoles and pc's such as the SNES, the PS1, or dare I even say the Atari and Commodore 64, now I'm starting to feel old hahaha.
I enjoyed watching the cutscenes in each chapter, it gave the game a real anime style vibe, the art style combined with the soundtrack brought everything together really well. It was nice to see how each character actually looks in the cutscenes, compared to the game play.
Graphics for the gameplay, especially for the main character, was a bit harsh at times, you can't really see any facial details on the characters and when Azami puts the glasses on, she looks completely different and the glasses just don't look right on her at all.
In the cutscenes when she has them on, they look like a normal, every day pair and she looks like a normal school girl. But in the gameplay, the glasses look more like a thick, bottle lens style and her character build just doesn't look right at all, if anything more like a geeky boyish look.
Now the colour scheme of each character being red, whilst the back ground is either blue, purple or green, it did hurt my head a little bit, purely because I have a slight problem with certain colours being close together. For me, putting red and green colours together, tends to blend and blur and I can't see it properly, which then causes headaches, due to my eyes being strained a bit too much.
The background detail in each chapter stood out for me more then anything else. For example, each book on the shelves in the director's room looked like they had a lot more detail put into them then the character's did, but by making the character's red, does work in drawing the player's attention more onto the character's, rather then looking at the background, it's a nice little touch I will say and it does make the "ghosts" a lot more creepier to look at.
My Final Thoughts
Overall, as much as I loved the story and what happens in the final chapter of Urban Myth Dissolution Centre, I won't say for spoilers but what I can say is I did not see that coming, sadly the gameplay and repetitiveness of it, does kind of bring it down sadly. Solving the cases was fun and had me guessing the whole time, at who was really behind the supposed myth, kind of like an old school Scooby Doo Mystery if I'm honest. The plot twists that came with it, made each cases even better.
That being said, with it being more a visual novel, adventure style game, there isn't really much gameplay to it, to me it felt like more of a point and click game with a lot of text. But instead of using a pointer, you're using a character instead to go to the objects and click on them. However, if you are a fan of this genre, like Urban Myths, are able to commit to the six chapters that it has, the finale is truly worth it.
Thank you to everyone who took time out of their day to take a moment to read this review, your support is always appreciated and means a lot to me.
Urban Myth Dissolution Centre is available to play and is out on:
XPN Rating 4 out 5
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