Hands On: Emio

Image: NintendoAs an M-rated game being published by Nintendo, there’s certainly been a lot more interest in Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club in the lead-up to its release than there might have been with a more…well, Nintendo-esque content rating attached.

Whether it deserves the full-blown adult treatment, we’ve yet to discern as we’ve only had time with the prologue and first chapter so far, which you too should have access to at the time of writing via the multipart demo hitting the Switch eShop. But what we can say, is that this is an intriguingly dark game from the get-go whilst still remaining something that long-time fans of the Famicom Detective Club series should feel right at home playing.

Emio – The Smiling Man, is an urban legend created especially for this game by Yoshio Sakamoto, who returns as producer for this third (well, including the Satellaview entry, technically fourth) installment. It’s a legend that tells of a child killer who offers his victims a paper bag with a smiling face drawn on it in exchange for their lives. So, yeah, that’s quite dark, really. It’s now up to you, as a lead detective at the Utsugi Detective Agency, to question witnesses, explore crime scenes, and progress through the grim plot by slowly picking at clues presented in a point-and-click style.

If you’ve played the original Famicom Detective Club games, or their excellent Switch remakes, you’ll know the drill here. This is slow-placed stuff, delightfully detailed in how it’s written and presented, that charges you with pulling together clues and asking the right questions to trigger the next revelation from a wonderfully kooky cast of screwball characters (and that’s just the cops).

In our reviews of the 2021 remakes, we pointed out that the new graphical style on show does a lot to lift action that can be plodding by its very nature, and here we have another example of that. This really is a very nice-looking story to play through, very much an interactive anime comic in how it’s presented. The off-kilter atmosphere is just right, too, with a surprising amount of colour for a horror game, and normal daylight locations that somehow carry a strange, unsettling air about them in the early hours of the story. The mundane made exceedingly creepy; it’s hard to do, but so far Emio is managing it.

As with the remakes, you’ve also got full Japanese voice acting to enjoy this time around and, combined with those slick looks and a sharp script, we’ve been settling in very nicely to the mystery at hand so far. Of that mystery, well, we can tell you precious little thanks to one thing or another, but the early stages see a 15-year-old schoolboy turn up dead in what appears to be the first murder from a renowned serial killer in 18 years. It’s got all the hallmarks of an Emio murder, but surely that’s just a myth, a legend, right? Early conversations with colleagues show off neat detective mechanics that allow you to do plenty of picking and choosing with regard to the order in which you question persons of interest or peruse locations for clues.

You can call on multiple characters within a scene for their detailed take on events, freely look around a location’s backdrop with your magnifying icon for clues, take and inspect objects, use your phone (as long as it’s not rude), rifle through an ever-expanding notepad full of names and important info, and even ‘think’…whatever that means.

All of the choices available to your detective at any given time are shown in the top left of the screen, with some appearing and disappearing as required, making for a clean and concise UI to match the game’s slick graphical style. There’s also plenty of choices for those who like to auto-skip dialogue, speed up conversations, and so on. You can even turn off the protagonist’s voice in the options if you so choose!

There’s nothing particularly new in any of this stuff, to be clear. It’s not reimagining the genre or doing anything different, and as usual you can sort of just push all the buttons to brute force the thing along, but the beauty of these games is always in their writing. It’s in the strangeness of the cast and unpredictability of what exactly is going to happen next that we find ourselves fully invested. Emio – The Smiling Man has already got its hooks fully into us with this stuff as we wrap up the first chapter, and we can’t wait to see where our investigations lead us as the plot thickens.

Of course, not everything here is right up our street. This is a series that’s often been criticised — even in its revamped 2021 form — for being very old-fashioned in its trial-and-error design. We’re already seeing that stuff creep in again early on in this new adventure, with some choices in dialogue or resolutions to discussions requiring us to exhaust every available option. Again, with the strength and depth of the writing, this isn’t something that bothers us personally, but if you don’t jibe with the slow nature of things, and if trial and error bothers you, well, it’s something to be keenly aware of.

So, with an instantly intriguing premise and the prospect of some rather nasty goings-on down the line, this M-rated effort from Nintendo has certainly got our attention so far — we’re fully engaged and expecting to go some very twisted places. Let’s hope we get exactly what we deserve.

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Will you be diving into the M-rated mystery when Emio – The Smiling Man releases later this month? Make sure to let us know in the comments!