Urban Myth Dissolution Center - Switch Review

Ashley H -

The newest puzzle adventure game from the developers at Hakababunko, Urban Myth Dissolution Center, has come to Nintendo Switch. In this investigative game, you play as Azami Fukurai, a girl who is gifted with clairvoyance—a power that allows her to see events that have happened in the past. This scares Azami, so when she sees a flyer for the Urban Myth Dissolution Center, she believes that they can help her get rid of these visions. Therefore, she decides to give it a shot and go check out the place.

Ayumu Meguriya, the director, who is also highly gifted with a kind of psychic power, gives you a run-down of how your gift works. Whilst doing this, you end up breaking an expensive chair and are looped in to work for them to pay off your debt… classic.

The Good

The whole premise of retelling myths and investigating anomalies was what put Urban Myth Dissolution Center on my radar. I thought it was a fresh take on the point-and-click detective type of game. When you first boot up Urban Myth Dissolution Center, you are hit with the monochrome colours and the eerie sense that something isn’t quite right. This mood carries on throughout the game, supporting the overall idea that different strange phenomena are occurring. I think that the tense and suspenseful mood that Urban Myth Dissolution Center creates throughout the game made playing it that much more immersive.

Urban Myth Dissolution Center has a tab in your journal where all urban myths that you have interacted with or stumbled across are listed, and you can read more about them. This is a wonderful touch, especially for people like me who love to be able to read more about the lore of a game in order to get a more complete picture of its world. Not only that, there are also other tabs where you can read more about the people you’ve met and their relationships with other people in the game, among other things.

TL;DR

  • Cool story concept
  • Intriguing in-game lore

The Bad

There are some games where not having any voice acting is completely fine and satisfying to play. That isn’t the case for Urban Myth Dissolution Center. For a game that is almost entirely reliant on dialogue and reading to formulate your hypothesis to solve the myth at hand, I found myself extremely disappointed that there were zero voices for the characters. I feel like if they even just added a few spoken scenes here and there, it would have improved the gaming experience a significant amount. Since at times, for me, the lack of spoken dialogue made the game feel more like an interactive book than a game.

Another reason why it felt more like an interactive story than a game is the lack of interesting gameplay. After a couple hours of playing Urban Myth Dissolution Center, I felt as if I were having deja vu. There’s essentially a gameplay loop that I’ve noticed. You get a case, check social media, interact with objects and talk to people, then formulate a hypothesis about what may be happening. Rinse and repeat, with some short cutscenes splashed in for flavour. In some cases, looping gameplay can be kept fresh with mini games or other things like that to break the monotony. I was desperately wishing for something—anything—to do that for this game. The gameplay wasn’t bad, per se, simply monotonous.

TL;DR

  • Lack of voice acting
  • A bit repetitive

Final Score: 6/10

I had high hopes for Urban Myth Dissolution Center. It had a super interesting premise that I was excited to play through. However, the monotonous gameplay and reading simulator really weren’t for me. If you enjoy detective-type games where you have to read a tonne of dialogue and the gameplay takes the back seat, then you would probably enjoy it more than I did. Urban Myth Dissolution Center isn’t a bad game, but also nothing to write home about. It’s a lukewarm game at best for me, and I’m sorely disappointed that it isn’t as great as I think it could have been.

Thank you for checking out our Urban Myth Dissolution Center Switch review, thank you to SHUEISHA GAMES (via Plan of Attack) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support: