What you get when playing Urban Myth Dissolution Center is probably not what you’d expect from the game’s description of itself. It gives the impression that it’s a spooky game about encountering cryptids and monsters, but the real experience is more Scooby Doo than Twilight Zone. Similarly, you might think it’s going to be a thinky mystery adventure, but the handholding is so aggressive that there are only a couple of times in the entire game when you need to do anything more than click on everything and then select a painfully obvious choice. It has merits despite those issues, but I mention them right away because that’s likely all a lot of potential players need to know. If you want a game where you have to solve a difficult puzzle to determine that a ghost really did do it, UMDC is not that.
That said, if an easy game where the solutions are rarely as dark as they seem is still appealing, UMDC does plenty of things well. It does manage some genuinely spooky scenes along the way to solutions that are often more mundane, and the journey to get to the solution is usually interesting. Each case follows a general pattern of hearing about a mystery, doing some basic investigation to identify the urban myth, doing some more investigation, and finally completely a quiz to perform the ‘dissolution’ and solve the mystery. This gameplay loop will likely be the most disappointing thing about the game for a lot of people. There’s no inventory system and no choices to make in the investigation sequences, so it becomes a game of just clicking on everything even if you’re trying to take a more thoughtful approach to it. It often tells you exactly what to do next anyway, and then the quizzes at the end have such obvious answers that you could solve most of them without ever having read half of the text anyway. Even if you do get some questions wrong, there’s no punishment for it, so randomly clicking on everything is a valid strategy here as well. Really the only place where you get an opportunity for agency is when you’re crafting search terms for social media research. There are many more combinations of terms than you actually need to use, and some of them go to pages that exist purely for flavor, so you technically have a choice about whether or not to find them.
So UMDC’s gameplay isn’t likely to win awards from anyone, but it fares much better in terms of aesthetics. The monochrome graphics look excellent and cutscenes are fully of remarkably detailed sprite work that manages to convey emotions and creepy atmospheres despite the limited color space and resolution. I can’t praise the art enough, and it looks even better in motion. The soundtrack is similarly well done. It sets the right mood in every scene and there’s even an anime-style closing song between cases that really helps build the excitement for what comes next.
Finally, if the gameplay is a mess and the aesthetics are outstanding, the writing is somewhere in between. I’ve already mentioned that it’s disappointing that the story ends up feeling so much like a Scooby Doo story, but the individual events and characters that get you there are well done. The main characters have great chemistry and Azami’s character has a satisfying arc that sees her grow more confident and capable with each case. Even with the underwhelming case resolutions and excessive handholding, I was prepared to give this a pretty strong score right up until the ending. Unfortunately, the ending is incredibly stupid. There’s a six page thread on the Steam forums you can read through if you want details about what exactly happens and why it doesn’t work, but the short version is that there’s a twist at the end that is tropey, completely unnecessary, and creates plot holes basically everywhere. The final case up to that moment is fairly well done, but the final moments are such a disaster that they drag the entire experience down.
Conclusion
UMDC is a difficult game to review because of how uneven the experience is. Halfway through the first case, I really thought this had a good chance at a 90% or even 95% score. Despite the absurdly excessive handholding, I still expected a score in the 80s right up until the final twist. But for as much as UMDC has great characters and aesthetics, mystery games live and die on their resolutions, and the ending to this game is disappointing in the extreme. I would not recommend it to most players, but I also have to give it a higher score than most unrecommended games because it does some things so well. If the devs have a bit more faith in their players and worry about less about elaborate twists in the next game, they could make something special.
Rating: 75%
Price: $20
Time to beat: 13 hours
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