Nintendo’s Latest Murder Mystery Is A Dark Treat 

Review: Emio – the Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

It wasn’t long ago that Famicom Detective Club was an unknown series in the West. I was surprised in 2021 when Nintendo announced and released remakes of the first two games in the series – surprised to see them released, but also because I wasn’t really aware of these games at all before that. After playing and enjoying both of those niche releases, I never dreamed that we’d get a brand-new game in the series so soon. Emio – the Smiling Man is one of the biggest surprises Nintendo has ever given us on the Switch – and that surprise is compounded by how weird, meditative, and harrowing the game is.  

As with those first two Famicom Detective Club games, Emio is a story-based, text-heavy experience that largely focuses on working your way through conversations. The game picks up a few years after the previous games in the series, and starts with a murder – Eisuke, a 14-year-old boy, has been strangled, his body abandoned near a pumping station just off a main road. The killer placed a paper bag over the victim’s head with crude drawing of a smiling face on it – an echo of the actions of a serial killer from 18 years earlier, who murdered three young women. The locals tell an urban legend about a monster called Emio the Smiling Man, who appears in front of crying girls and kills them if they don’t smile. It’s up to the team at the Utsugi Detective Agency to figure out how these threads connect, and who the killer is.  

This is unusual territory for Nintendo, and from the jump the game’s subject matter is bleaker than even the previous games in this series. Emio looks and feels like a cool anime series with high production values and excellent design sensibilities, and the gameplay largely boils down to picking options from a text menu. What unfolds is a slow series of conversations, observations, red herrings and, as a little bonus, a few awkward tangents about young love and the obvious crush your protagonist has for his coworker, Ayumi Tachibana (a character from the original games in the series who has been promoted to a playable protagonist during a few sequences of this entry). 

 Mileage and patience will vary between players. As someone who loves a slow, thoughtful story told through a game, I enjoyed the game’s focus on socialising and reasoning your way through a conversation. Emio is fascinatingly focused on the embodied experience of talking to another person, knowing when to change subjects, when to stop and think before replying, when to study a character’s perspective. It brought me closer to the protagonists, and I experienced a wider range of emotions playing this game than I expected. 
 
Still, there are some long conversations in the game that feel slightly too meandering. Some characters wore on my patience with the way they’d occasionally whisk you off on a tangent not related to the plot. Many of the game’s characters feel oddly unfussed by the possibility that there’s a serial killer on the loose, and there’s not much urgency to the case.  

But for the most part, the slow pace worked for me. There’s a lived-in feeling to Emio, and it gives the game time and space to really flesh out the core cast of characters. I was often surprised by the direction plot threads went in, even when it felt like the central mystery was often progressing at a snail’s pace. 
 
It’s also worth noting that the game’s ending sequence – which I will not spoil here – wraps things up in a very satisfying way. There’s a lot resting on whether Emio can nail the landing, and after 15-odd hours of storytelling it absolutely does. It’s surprisingly dark, but that darkness felt earned – this is fundamentally a sad story, even if many of the characters are funny and charming.  

While solutions and paths forward in the previous two games could often be obscure, they’re much more straightforward here, and I never once got stuck. This is a game you’re playing to experience the story, so there’s not much of a sense of being a detective, solving a mystery. There’s no real puzzle solving to be done, although the game will often pause to quiz you on details you’ve uncovered so far, asking you to ‘review’ the day’s events by answering questions.  

These can be multiple choice, or require you to pull the answers from your frequently updated notebook, and, in a few instances, you’ll be asked to type an answer out on a virtual keyboard. I loved this mechanic – it’s a great way to ensure that you ground yourself in the facts of the investigation, and keep track of every new development and what it might mean for the mystery. 

Emio – the Smiling Man is a unique game for Nintendo, even though it’s the third game in the series on the Switch. There are better visual novels out there, but this one benefits from high production values and strong writing, as well as its effective commitment to the slow build. The final reveals of Emio retroactively elevate everything that came before – it’s a dark mystery with a satisfying, haunting conclusion. I never expected to get a third new Famicom Detective Club game, but now I’m really hoping for a fourth one day.  

 
Emio – the Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is available now on Nintendo Switch. A review code was provided by the publisher. 
 
James O’Connor has been writing about games since 2008. He is the author of Untitled Goose Game for Boss Fight Books.