Emio: The Smiling Man is faithful to the ’80s Famicom Detective Club games, to a fault

Of all the surprises Nintendo has delivered over the course of the Switch’s life, it’s fair to say the resurrection of the Famicom Detective Club was among the least expected.

The decision to remake the first two games may not have been the most seismic announcement in terms of its impact on the gaming community, but the fact that Nintendo took two Japan-only visual novels from 1988 and 1989, localised them and re-released them in 2021 was a huge deal as far as gestures go.

Not content to simply give two vintage Famicom Disk System text adventures a new lease of life, Nintendo has actually now decided to continue the Famicom Detective Club series with a brand new third game.

Produced by Yoshio Sakamoto (the director of Metroid and Kid Icarus), Emio: The Smiling Man is clearly no throwaway project. It’s also tonally quite different from most of Nintendo’s fare, with its trailer being one of the only first-party videos on Nintendo of America’s YouTube channel to have an age restriction.

Its presence, then, is an unusual one but a welcome one, and although it’s a brand new title it does attempt to mimic the gameplay mechanics of the first two Famicom Detective Club games. This is both to the game’s credit and its detriment, however.

The game initially revolves around the murder of Eisuke Sasaki, a high school boy whose body is found in a quiet part of the countryside. Eisuke has been strangled to death, and a paper bag with a smiley face has been placed over his head.

That isn’t the unusual thing. Well, it is, but not the most unusual. It soon emerges that Eisuke’s death is similar in many ways to that of some teenage girls who were found dead decades earlier, also with bags over their heads.

All the murders also seem to be making reference to Emio, an urban legend about a mysterious man who confronts crying girls, offers to help them then kills them before popping a paper bag onto their heads.

Who’s behind the murder of Eisuke? Is the same killer as before, or someone completely new? And why have they killed a boy when the previous murders – and the Emio urban legend – suggest that girls are supposed to be the victims? Obviously that would be telling, and we’re no grasses.

Given that Emio: The Smiling Man is 95% narrative, it’s impossible for us to go into too much detail regarding the plot without quickly getting into spoiler territory, which we won’t do here.

All we’ll say in that regard, then, is that the story remains engaging throughout, with its fair share of twists and turns and a supporting cast featuring plenty of dodgy characters designed to give you multiple potential suspects in this whodunnit story. In terms of the plot alone, Emio is a winner.

It’s the way this plot is delivered that will divide players, however, because Nintendo has made no major effort to refresh the game’s general gameplay mechanics to make the adventure feel more intuitive to navigate.

On one hand it’s an authentic move because, the high-res illustrations and voice acting aside, the decision to offer a UI similar to that of the previous Famicom Detective Club games makes Emio feel like a natural progression of the series, almost as if it was a remake of an unreleased third game developed back in the ‘80s.

On the other hand, however, it’s 2024. The visual novel has evolved over the past 35 years, and often beyond the ability to simply review previous dialogue and auto-play the text (both things offered here, incidentally).

Other than the occasional ‘Review’ sections – which usually appear at the end of each chapter and have you answering questions to make sure you were paying attention – the majority of the game is clicking through menus, and not necessarily in any logical manner.

You’ll frequently engage in lengthy chats with other characters over the course of your investigation, but the way in which you do so is far too trial-and-error to feel satisfying.

Usually you’re given an Ask/Listen option which leads to a handful of topics. The general ‘strategy’ is to select one of these topics and keep selecting it until the character starts repeating themselves, then move onto the next one.

Once every option is bringing up the same answers, you choose the Think option. This makes your protagonist have a little ponder about the answers they were given, which usually then refreshes the Ask/Listen option and gives you some new answers for that.

Rather than feeling like you’re conducting a proper investigation with multiple dialogue options, then, it really does feel like you’re just selecting menu options over and over again until you’ve exhausted all the options available to you.

“Rather than feeling like you’re conducting a proper investigation with multiple dialogue options, it really does feel like you’re just selecting menu options over and over again until you’ve exhausted all the options available to you.”

Sometimes it’ll throw you a little curveball to keep you on your toes. Sometimes instead of choosing Think you have to choose Look/Examine and select the character, so you can study their expression a bit and think of more things to ask them. By and large, though, that’s about it.

The result is a game with a heavy emphasis on interrogation, but one that never really feels like you’re actually interrogating anyone. The illusion it gives of offering you multiple topics to discuss is quickly eroded when it turns out that most of the time you have to choose them all anyway to move the game onto the next section, turning things into a box-ticking exercise.

Obviously, the limitations of the visual novel genre mean that the player only has so much agency, but there are numerous examples of similar games – the Ace Attorney series immediately springs to mind – that offer more interaction to at least give the player the illusion that they’re helping to progress what is ultimately a linear plot.

The failing of Emio, then, isn’t that the story is predetermined – or even that the story itself is bad, because it isn’t – but that the lack of perceived choice (even if it’s all just a clever illusion) means the result is a $50 / £40 whodunnit story that’s constantly interrupted by admin work.

As a consequence of this, Emio is still recommended, but only to those who are die-hard devotees of the visual novel genre and have no qualms about playing one that appears visually modern but mechanically harks back to the series’ 1980s roots.

Visually the game is fantastic, and the plot really is a compelling one, but the interface is so archaic that some parts become an exercise in patience rather than engaging, interesting fact-finding missions.

There’s currently a demo available on the Nintendo eShop which offers the first couple of chapters. If you’re new to the genre we’d strongly recommend trying that out first and seeing if you get along with the pace and the menu-based gameplay. The full game is mostly the same sort of thing all the way through, so it should be a good indicator of whether you want to fork out money to see how it ends.