I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to try outUrban Myth Dissolution Center– I almost had a chance atTokyo Game Show, but was turned away from the booth because the queue was too long.
If, like me, you haven’t had a chance to play the demo yet, you have a chance right now – you canplay it on Steamas part of the currentSteamNext Fest. I jumped on it the moment I saw it had a demo, and I’m glad to say that it has everything I could possibly want from a scary game.
To be clear, that’s because I’m generally pretty intolerant of horror games. I can just about deal with the creepy and somewhat unsettling, but I have a pretty low threshold otherwise. Thankfully, Urban Myth Dissolution Center – at least in the demo – wraps up all its creepy vibes in an amusing, pixel art package with endearing characters and a killer atmosphere.
I was still spooked enough that I didn’t really want to walk around my dark house after I wrapped up the demo, for what it’s worth.
The game follows Azami Fukurai, a college student with possibly the worst luck in the world. She has the gift of clairvoyance and has seen it as an affliction her whole life, which you’re able to’t really blame her for. You’d probably be pretty scared too, if you saw ghostly apparitions all over the place. She sees a poster advertising the Urban Myth Dissolution Center while she’s out shopping, and thinks, hey! Maybe I can get these people to help me get rid of this ability.
Unfortunately, the director of the center has other plans. He knows everything about her, being a clairvoyant himself, and tricks Azami into becoming the center’s newest employee after teaching her how to investigate a case relying on facts and not speculation. This poor girl is really going through it.
The demo takes you through Azami’s first case, in which her classmate Mio is being harassed by some kind of stalker spirit. The investigation itself is pretty straightforward. You look around the scene, talk to witnesses, collect clues, and piece together hypotheses in a fill in the blank system that reminded me a little ofThe Case of the Golden Idol. Urban Myth is much less mechanically complex than Golden Idol, but I appreciated that it at least let me use my brain a little bit.
What’s interesting about this game, though, is how it uses social media as part of its investigative loop. Not only do you get to scroll through your timeline and search for keywords to narrow your search parameters, but the game reflects pretty accurately how awful social media is. Before investigating her first case, Azami looks at the viral photo posted online that triggered the director’s interest, and scrolls through the comments. A lot of them arereally mean– in fact, she only realises the victim is her friend Mio because the victim got doxxed, like, immediately. It’s bleak, but I get the sense that Urban Myth Dissolution Center might have something more sophisticated to say about how we use social media that might only become fully apparent at launch.
I’m also really into the art style. The pixel art makes the creepy myths it describes a little more tolerable to look at, obscuring just enough to induce dread but not terror, and the limited colour palette is thoroughly evocative while being artistically minimalist. I can see this game being pretty welcoming to younger players who might be more easily scared, as well as grown adults (me) who are definitely easily scared.
Urban Myth Dissolution Center is slated for a Jul 24, 2025 release, though I wish it was a Halloween launch.
Urban Myth Dissolution Center
WHERE TO PLAY
The Urban Myth Dissolution Center – your one-stop solution for researching and (dis)solving monstrous oddities, cursed relics, and dimensional anomalies! Take on urban myth cases as heroine Azami Fukurai, under the supervision of Ayumu Meguriya, Level S psychic and Center Director.The game is an episodical digital mystery adventure themed on multiple urban myths that roam the internet and presented in stunning psychedelic pixel art.The player takes control of Azami for the detective legwork, collecting circumstantial evidence and social network posts to unravel the truth behind each urban myth, the hidden pasts of each client, and why they came to encounter each oddity. Dis(solve) each myth and case to discover each episode’s resolution and unexpected consequences.
