I didn’t get the chance to play Urban Myth Dissolution Center at last year’s PAX West, but it was lurking over my shoulder. A prominent booth near several of my other appointments featured UMDC, with enormous key art that featured some guy staring at me with ominous intent. I figured I’d have to check it out eventually, if only to find out what it was.
UMDC came out this week, and it turns out that it’s a detective-themed visual novel about solving folklore crimes. The vibe can be adequately described as a PG-13 season of “Scooby-Doo”; it’s a spooky all-ages story about a teenage detective who has the worst first day at a new job since Leon Kennedy.
You play UMDC as Azami Fukurui, a university student in Japan who’s started seeing strange spirits everywhere she goes. Worried that she’s going crazy, she decides to visit the offices of an obscure government organization called the Urban Myth Dissolution Center to see if it can help her.
The Center’s director Meguriya explains to Azami that what she’s seeing are actually images of the recent past, as she’s weakly clairvoyant. Meguriya gives her a pair of special glasses that allow Azami to focus her gift to the point where it’s useful, but also blackmails her into working for the Center as a field investigator.
Azami’s clairvoyance gives her the potential to become a great detective, and her job at the Center is to determine the truth behind sightings of the supernatural throughout the city. However, her appearance at the Center is also apparently the first confirmation of a prophecy that foretells the end of the world.
UMDC plays out over the course of 6 episodes, each of which is built around a new case. Notably, Azami isn’t sent to actually solve crimes, but instead, to figure out the truth behind reports of paranormal activity. Sometimes someone’s using an urban myth as cover for something more mundane; other times, there actually is something supernatural going on, even if it’s just Azami herself. Either way, Azami’s job is to flag the specific phenomena and clear out. She’s not a cop.
In each scene, your goal is to discover a set number of possible clues through interviews, exploration, monitoring social media feeds, and using Azami’s clairvoyance to get hazy visions of past events. Once you’ve got enough information, you can put together Azami’s working hypothesis through a simple word puzzle, then present your conclusions to Meguriya to close the case.
The first real hurdle to enjoying UMDC is that it’s absolutely aimed at a young teenage audience. If you’re an adult with any taste for mysteries at all, you’ll likely figure out each of UMDC’s cases about half an hour before Azami does. You have to cut Azami some slack, as she’s explicitly traumatized from the jump and only becomes more so over the course of the game, but I can only take so much haplessness in a protagonist at once.
The second issue is the same problem I had with Vampire Therapist: UMDC doesn’t appear to have any failure conditions. You can’t miss any clues and I couldn’t get Azami to move forward with a flawed hypothesis. There’s nothing at stake here besides wanting to see what happens next.
That being said, I probably would’ve gone crazy for UMDC when I was about 12. It’s a young-adult interactive horror manga in the spirit of something like Goosebumps or “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”, with a love of creepy monsters and weird history. There’s even an occasional halfway decent moral, like “don’t be a dick on social media.”
Urban Myth Dissolution Center falls into a critical blind spot, as I’m well outside its obvious target audience. For adults, it’s slowly paced, features some entry-level pseudo-mysteries, and revolves around a few obnoxious story beats. Azami simply rolls with every punch she’s given, rather than ever exhibiting the slightest hint of a spine, and it makes her hard to empathize with. (The American adaptation of UMDC begins the same way, but the moment Meguriya starts the blackmail plot, American!Azami tases him and runs for the door.)
On the other hand, if you know a kid who’s a big manga and/or horror fan, UMDC would be perfect for them. It’s a gateway product by design, made as a useful introduction to a few interesting, potentially socially devastating topics at once. As an elder weirdo, anything that’s meant to inform and create future generations of young weirdos has my uncritical support.
[Urban Myth Dissolution Center, developed by Hakababunko and published by Shueisha Games, is now available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam for $17.99. This column was written using a copy of the Steam version that was purchased by Hard Drive.]
