The pixel style visual novel “Urban Legend Disintegration Center” developed by Japanese independent game team Hakababunko and published by Shueisha Games will be officially released in February. At the 2025 Taipei Game Show, 4Gamers invited the development team to talk to us The development story behind it gives you a glimpse into the charm of “urban legend”!
“Urban Legend Disintegration Center” is named after the organization of the same name in the game. It is an organization that specializes in investigating urban legends such as curses, haunted houses, alien worlds, etc. In this game, the player will play the protagonist Fukurai Asami, and work together with the director of the “Urban Legend Disintegration Center” and a psychic, Kaiya Wataru, to solve various tasks involving “urban legends”.
The development team of this game “Graveyard Bunko” is a small team with 4 members. In the past, it produced the mystery adventure game “Wakaido Makoto Casebook”. In the upcoming new game “Urban Legend Disintegration Center”, players You will play the role of an investigator and explore and deduce the truth of “urban legends” by tracing the origins of legends on SNS and personally visiting the scene of the incident.
What is an “urban legend”? In the case of Taiwan, the elephant slide that moves in the middle of the night, the bronze statue that moves, the woman who hails a taxi on the roadside in the middle of the night, etc. These familiar stories are urban legends, and “Urban Legend Disintegration Center” is exactly that. It’s about challenging the answers behind these “stories”.
The development team stated that they think it is very interesting to “find the truth of urban legends”. After searching a lot of information, they will slowly discover many clues about “urban legends”. By deconstructing and re-examining these clues, people will actually experience the discovery of brand new “Truth”, so they chose “Disintegration of Urban Legends” as the theme, hoping that players will experience the importance of exploring the truth and feel the fun of it.

From another perspective, “urban legends” originate from “rumors.” In the past, “urban legends”, like “folktales”, were mostly spread by word of mouth, but now they rely more on the Internet and social platforms.
As SNS has become an important part of modern people’s daily life, many games have begun to incorporate SNS elements. Inspired by this, the development team combined the behavior of “exploration” with the mechanism of “discovering new clues from existing information” and applied it to SNS interaction, forming an important system in “Urban Legend Disintegration Center”.
Players will need to use the messages on the SNS platform to find out more information about the event, and the characteristics of SNS are restored, not only constructive and helpful messages, but also trolls and advertising accounts. Wait, faithfully present all kinds of chaos on current social platforms.

The development team revealed, “We hope that players can experience the interactive impact between online rumors and reality in the game.” When we talk about rumors or spread other people’s stories, these seemingly harmless conversations may actually have an impact on reality. Subtle influences, and vice versa – real-life events can also affect our communication.
There are different urban legends circulating around the world. We asked the team how to overcome regional differences. The development team said that they had considered that if they only selected famous Japanese urban legends, it might not be friendly enough to overseas players. Therefore, the urban legends that are well-known overseas and the urban legends that are original from Japan are equally divided in this work.
In addition, we also considered that some players may not be familiar with urban legends, so we designed an explanation mechanism in the game and presented the characteristics of urban legends through “investigation” so that even players who are not familiar with these legends can fully enjoy the plot of the game. .
“Urban Legend Disintegration Center” is expected to be translated into multiple languages for release. The development team stated that the translation of 13 languages would be almost impossible to achieve without the help of Shueisha Games. In addition, being able to attract a lot of attention and followers at the game show is also thanks to the support of Shueisha Games.
Whether in terms of planning, game mechanics or plot, Shueisha Games has given the development team great help, allowing them to launch a satisfying work.
The Graveyard Bunko team’s previous work “Wakaido Makoto Case Book” and this new work “Urban Legend Disintegration Center” both have pixel style and reasoning elements. This time the game draws on the experience of the previous work and uses higher-resolution images to It expresses the emotions in the game. In addition, new elements such as animated cutscenes are added to enrich the performance effect.
The team even said that in their development philosophy, “restrictions” often bring unexpected positive effects. For the screen part, they chose to limit the resolution and use a pixel style, allowing players to interpret and deduce the development of the plot in the blank areas of the screen.
Finally, Graveyard Bunko stated that their goal is to allow those who “no longer play games” to enjoy “Urban Legend Disintegration Center”. This game is very suitable for players to advance the plot through their own efforts, and in the ending Get a sense of accomplishment from completion.
For this reason, they alsoThe interactions between characters are carefully designed, hoping that players will like these characters and have their own predictions and expectations for their endings or futures.I hope more people can experience this game!
“Urban Legend Disintegration Center” is expected to be released on Steam / Nintendo Switch / PlayStation5 and other platforms on February 13, 2025.