Urban Myth Dissolution Center is an unnerving headscratcher, but one that I can’t wait to play further.
Shueisha Games is a new frontier for the veteran company, and one where their skills as a publisher of some of the world’s biggest manga and the hallowed pages of Shonen Jump don’t necessarily transfer. It’s a new indie label that seeks to pluck promising indie creators from Japan and across Asia to either work on Shueisha IP or be supported by the company to bring their titles to life. Such work has seen everything from a turn-based tactics game utilizing Jump+ characters to a deck-based game set in the Tower of Babel, yet of their upcoming titles this adventure game from Hakababunko may be one of their most exciting projects to date.
At minimum, it served as the basis for one of the most eye-catching displays on the show floor, a row of lights mimicking a stairway to the sky with an illuminati symbol. The game itself is an adventure title in the realm of Famicom Detective Club or Paranormasight, steeped in ghost stories and urban myth. Azami Fukurai is a girl who can see the supernatural, causing her to enlist the help of the Urban Myth Dissolution Center. With such talents, however, the visit turns into a hiring opportunity and she soon finds herself working for the agency to solve the exact cases she has been afflicted with personally.
Each case in this adventure is inspired by urban myth and legend to various degrees, some of which are inspired by very Japanese rumors and legends while others will be more familiar to the global audience the team hopes will pick up the game upon its 2025 release. At least, that’s what it promises to hold. The demo I played was more focused on the initial introduction to this world, its mechanics and characters, the case we played being little more than a ‘cursed chair’ that was actually rigged with poison as a test before Fukurai’s inadvertent hiring.
That didn’t stop the game being undeniably thrilling and engaging, with the promise that more complex mysteries will give us time to truly play with this unique premise. My first interaction with the game came in a brief introduction at the Shueisha Games booth at Kyoto-based indie games event Bitsummit in 2023 where the game was first revealed. Although a strictly hands-off unveiling limited to a trailer and the key visual which has remained consistent to this day, I was immediately struck by its bold pixel art drenched in shades of blue and a sense of unease, which certainly translates to the mysteries at play.
This is very much anime-inspired in its art, but with a proportionality and edge to its pixel art that never feels truly welcoming at any point. Much of this can be credited to the limited color palette that really takes advantage of those complex shades of blue to give the appearance of a world drenched in midnight haze and back-alley malaise, even in more mundane scenes. It helps the paranormal stick out even further as they would to our protagonist, considering these are elevated from the world in a sharp red.
Much of the game is also punctuated by the blue light of a computer screen, as you browse there and explore in search for clues to answer the case at hand. Much of the puzzles I had to face were simple, but it’s easy to imagine as cases become more complex the questions surrounding it and the clues that must be uncovered will only become more unknowable and a quandary to decipher as time goes on.
2024 has been the year of the adventure game, as Square Enix have revived classics and made new entries in the genre, indies have stepped up in their droves, and even Nintendo made an all-new entry in the genre with the first all-new Famicom Detective Club title in decades. Can Urban Myth Dissolution Center even stand out in such an environment, especially when in spite of this influx of new titles this ultimately remains a niche genre? It’s hard to say, but it certainly deserves a chance.
Just make sure the paranormal doesn’t get you before it releases.
