Urbano: Legends’ Debut Impressions – An Rhythmic Attempt At The World Ends With You

Whenever Steam Next Fest comes around, there’s a treasure trove of indie games to explore. And what perhaps stands out from the crowd are the indie developers who try their hand at some beloved franchises…and when I was browsing the demos this morning, Urbano – Legends’ Debut immediately stood out to me. Not only because its design and aesthetic looked incredibly cool but also because I’m a fan of rhythm games in general.

Urbano – Legends’ Debut tells the story of Vailo, a regular dude with a mysterious past. While he may just look like your typical gamer who just wanders the streets during the day, but at night he becomes the Retaliator, a mysterious entity that goes around solving urban legends in the titular city of Urbano.

In this demo version, players will solve the case of the Creepy Fashionista, an urban legend who goes around dressing and kissing mannequins in a rather strange way. What’s perhaps really cool about Urbano and its characters is that everyone, from its antagonists to its characters, each has a different typeface for their dialogue, similar to Undertale.

Furthermore, the way the art style is presented is also very similar to The World Ends With You, with strong white and black strokes around the characters and speech bubbles of varying sizes. The demo also supports two languages: English and my native language, Brazilian Portuguese.

Unfortunately, despite Steam screenshots showing texture changes between languages, they don’t seem to happen in the demo, and I noticed some font issues with Portuguese, particularly with how special diacritic characters are handled, but I’m sure these will be fixed. Despite these small issues, the translation work was really well done, and I loved the rather quirky “slang” words used by Vailo.

As you go through each of the days, you can either do two activities: dancing at the nightclub or going through the basement floors of a mysterious building. The former will have you copy the movements by pressing one or two buttons at once, and the latter will feature a stage where you must dodge projectiles and advance to the end or sometimes survive for a certain amount of time.

When it comes to the rhythm portion of these minigames, I found the timing rather strict, and the song beat maps barely leave enough time for you to advance to the end, and the way the controls work in the dancing portions would have benefited from using a better control scheme such as a combination of the D-pad plus the buttons. These minigames can earn you items and money, which will increase your HP and grant abilities in battle.

You can also hang out with two people: Honor or Lofi. And this is where a third minigame comes into play, where you must press a button to have Vailo answer the person’s conversation. Doing so correctly will earn you points and deepen their relationship. The developer also mentioned that this mechanic will play a big part in changing how the story will go.

Urbano’s demo only showed but a glance of what the game has to offer, but with an art style inspired by The World Ends with You paired with a lot of charm shows that there’s a lot of potential just waiting to be explored and I hope that the developers manage to reach their goal on Kickstarter. If you’re interested in Urbano, the demo is currently available to play on Steam Next Fest.