Talk about a rough first day at work. You sit down to start explaining all the strange ghosts you’ve been seeing lately, only for your new boss to suddenly pipe up and say that, sorry, that chair is actually cursed and anyone who sits on it is doomed to die. My bad! It certainly makes for a chilling start to Hakababunko’s brilliant Steam Next Fest demo for their upcoming, spook-filled mystery game Urban Myth Dissolution Center, and fans of last year’s excellent Paranormasight would do well to keep this one firmly in their sights when it launches in full next February.
Urban Myth Dissolution CenterDeveloper: HakababunkoPublisher: Shueisha GamesRelease: February 2025Download the demo on: Steam
For starters, it has the same keen focus on discerning fact from fiction, and its striking pixel art is just as nuanced and characterful as Paranormasight’s moody cell-shaded portraits. Sure, it probably won’t be quite as devious or twisty-turny in the long run, at least not based on its hour-long demo, or from my experience playing the developer’s previous detective game, Makoto Wakaido’s Case Files Trilogy, last Christmas (which also has a free demo at the moment, too, if you fancy a more straightforward crime thriller). It’s clear that both of Hakababunko’s games share a lot of the same basic DNA on this front. But still, for those after a knotty and haunting little scare ahead of Halloween this week, this is one Next Fest demo you absolutely must try for yourself.
Urban Myth Dissolution Center 2nd Trailer Watch on YouTube
Of course, with your own life at stake right from the get-go, it definitely lends the tutorial section of the game a welcome bit of perilous zip. For the freshly afflicted Azami to avoid her unfortunate fate, she’ll need to get to the root cause of the curse by carefully studying points of interest in the room around her, gathering clues based on what she observes, and then using her deductive skills to propose some possible answers. The former plays out like a classic point and click adventure, and as in Makoto Wakaido, the number of clues you’ve got left to find is always flagged up in the corner so you always know how close you are to reaching your goal.
Some clues aren’t immediately visible in this plane of reality, however. Fortunately for Azami, she possesses the rare power of clairvoyance, and thanks to a handy set of glasses that focus her nascent abilities, she can swiftly swap between each state to identify all kinds of supernatural nasties that are naked to the human eye. In the case of the cursed chair, there’s a ghost who helps direct her to a particular set of files that will help her investigation, for example, but later on in the demo’s first big case, these apparitions become traces of past events that allow her to work out how her friend was attacked by a mystery spirit.