Last week, a mysterious trailer for a Nintendo game threw the internet into speculation mode with its cryptic vibes and lack of any concrete details. A man with a bag on his head and the word “emio,” which translates to “smiling man” spelled out in kanji were the only clues it offered. It wasn’t even clear that the word, Emio, was the name of the game. Now, we know exactly what it was hinting at, as Nintendo has revealed Emio — The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club, coming to the Switch next month.
Revealed in a new, far more informative, trailer, Emio is the first entry in the Famicom Detective Club series to be released in 30 years. The series saw two games released only for the Famicom Disk System in Japan in the late ‘80s, both of which were remade for the Switch in 2021. But Emio is a totally original game, the first in the series to launch on the Switch. Like the existing games in the series, Emio is a murder mystery visual novel where players take on the role of the members of the Utsugi Detective Club to solve a crime spree.
“Emio — The Smiling Man is the culmination of everything my most trusted colleagues and I have learned and the ideas we’ve accumulated from working on the previous games and their remakes,” Yoshio Sakamoto, the game’s producer and writer, says in the new trailer. “I’m confident in saying that this is the Famicom Detective Club series at its best.”
Emio centers on an urban legend about a figure called The Smiling Man. In the urban legend — made up for the game — The Smiling Man shows up before crying girls and gives them a paper bag mask with a smiling face on it before executing them. When real people start turning up dead with the same paper bag mask, the Utsugi Detective Agency starts investigating.
Diving into ghost stories and urban legends is familiar ground for the series. Both previous Famicom Detective Club games, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind, mix more down-to-earth crime stories with supernatural occurrences. Still, it sounds like Nintendo is aiming to take more risks with Emio than it did with the earlier games in the series.
“The story’s ending may be divisive for some people,” Sakamato says. “I hope it will make players curious about experiencing it for themselves, and bring people from around the world together to discuss their thoughts and feelings on it for a long time to come.”
According to Sakamoto, the idea to bring a brand-new Famicom Detective Club entry to the Switch came after Nintendo remade the series’ original games. The game’s listing on Nintendo’s website reveals that the main character of the story is a new assistant private investigator, but The Missing Heir’s protagonist, Ayumi Tachibana, will also return as a playable character.
The 2021 Famicom Detective Club remakes were mostly well-received, though they did get some criticism for their old-school gameplay. The actual investigation system wasn’t changed much from the original releases, and reviewers said that the gameplay really showed its ago. On the other hand, the remakes’ art and writing got nearly universal praise. That could be a good sign for Emio, given that it sports the same art style as the recent remakes, along with Sakamoto as its writer. Nintendo hasn’t shown off gameplay in any detail, so the process of solving a mystery could be getting the overhaul it needs this time around.
We don’t have long to wait before Nintendo’s first horror project in ages sees the light of day.
