Emio — The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is a dark murder mystery adventure that’s almost unmissable on Nintendo Switch.
As the first new entry in the Famicom Detective Club visual novel (VN) series in almost 30 years, Emio — The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is nothing short of a triumph and easily one of the best Nintendo Switch games right now. Building on the strong foundations laid by the underappreciated remakes of the first two games, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind, released back in 2021, Emio — The Smiling Man is a wonderful example of how you can successfully modernize a franchise while staying true to its roots.
Ostensibly, not much has changed since the remakes. You still play as the same young detective, though now as a 19-year-old rather than a young teenager, who is tasked with solving a sinister, almost supernatural case. You interact with the world through a series of prompts found on a small command menu, such as “Call/Engage”, “Ask/Listen”, “Look/Examine”, and “Think”.
It’s a very old-fashioned way to interact with the medium, unfolding much more like a traditional choose-your-own-adventure novel than the mechanics of other investigative VN franchises like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa. It certainly takes a little bit of getting used to at first, but is an incredibly rewarding system once you get the hang of it. Each scene is effectively a little puzzle, requiring the right combination of commands to progress.
This is perfectly encapsulated in one memorable moment where our hero arrives outside a bar. The player can hear screams coming inside. The absence of the usual “Travel” option, which would normally allow you to open the door and go in, is your cue to hit “Ask/Listen” so the protagonist can notice the sound and proceed with the appropriate level of urgency.Chasing the bag
The underlying systems may not have changed hugely, but Emio — The Smiling Man is both considerably more intuitive and more engaging than the remakes of its predecessors. As much as I enjoyed The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind, anybody who has played those games will know that they proceed at a frankly glacial pace. This is especially true of the first few hours, which can honestly be a little painful to sit through. Of course, this is the almost inevitable result of their age, having originally launched in 1988 and 1989 respectively for the Famicom.
Still, I was delighted to find that Emio — The Smiling Man opens with a bang and maintains that momentum for its entire runtime. The narrative begins with a schoolboy found dead, seemingly strangled, and with a creepy, smiley-faced paper bag placed on his head.
