Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club review

If you’re the kind of person who grabs every first-party release for Nintendo Switch, there’s a chance that Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is going to be a bit of a shock to the system. Rather than the vibrant, cheery atmosphere found in most of Nintendo’s games, this is instead a point and click adventure game featuring all manner of dark narrative tones, but it’s also the first new game in the Famicom Detective Club in a very long time, and is a thoroughly engaging story, told well, with plenty of surprises.

First up, though, it’s perhaps important to note what Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club isn’t. It may look like a visual novel, but that’s not quite the case. Instead of simply paging through text for the entire runtime, you will have to interact with environments, analyse clues, and keep an eye on your notebook so you don’t forget names, or important information. Emio is more engaging to the player, and is actually more like an old fashioned point and click game. And yes, this does mean it includes some minor frustrations when it comes to progressing.

I’ll tiptoe around story, for obvious reasons, but Emio – The Smiling Man begins with a young student found dead, and the only real clues to what happened are the smiley-faced paper bag over his head, and some similarities to a case that was never solved 18 years ago. You get to name your protagonist, a member of the Utsugi Detective Agency, and you’re assigned to help the police uncover the mysteries of this new case. Are things connected? This and many other questions that arise during the game are all answered satisfyingly, and it’s quite refreshing to see a story told this well, and this thoroughly.

Given how important the story itself is to Emio – The Smiling Man, I can say I was completely engrossed throughout. If you’ve played a good amount of adventure games then you’ll have working theories as you play, and be convinced that character A might be a baddie, or that there’s more to person B that meets the eye. Emio is very clever at the way the story is delivered, and as many times as I thought I had solved things in advance, I was never quite right.

You will explore the surrounding areas, and chat to numerous people during your time investigating the case, of course. The majority of the time you’ll be offered the choices to “call/engage”, “ask/listen”, “look/examine”, or simply “think”. Essentially, at times, it becomes a slight war of attrition to progress the story. You will have to repeatedly go back to ask/listen, and get the same line, until you’ve clicked on “think”, which will cause your character to ruminate on events, and may give you a hint to go back to asking, or listening to someone.

Sometimes it feels as though you’ve hit a dead end, but the way it all works is that this simply means you’ve not spotted something in the background via “looking”, or you simply haven’t exhausted your options. It may be a simple case that you need to “look” at someone’s face and notice a change in their attitude, or demeanour. For a game without too many moving parts, Emio – The Smiling Man is nice to look at, with small animations here and there that accentuate things you might want to be paying attention to.

Towards the end of chapters you will be asked to sum things up with your partner at the Utsugi Detective Agency, Ayumi Tachibana. These sections are, again, more engaging than expected, as not only will you have to pick things out of your notebook to sum up the case’s current facts correctly, but at times you even have to use the controls to input text to answer questions. There doesn’t appear to be any proper fail state to these moments, aside Ayumi simply reminding you that your answer isn’t quite right, but it’s a good way to keep players engaged and on their toes.

Speaking of Ayumi, she is playable in Emio – The Smiling Man, and this offers the chance for the story to be fleshed out further, as she will investigate areas and people that the protagonist wouldn’t really have the same access to. The voice acting and characters are well done throughout, too, and this is another part of why the story is delivered so well.

If there’s to be a criticism of Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club it’s that, in truth, I don’t think it’s quite as scary as it thinks it is. There are creepy moments, for sure, but a lot of the darker moments come fairly late in the story. Despite it not being a visual novel, playing through Emio reminded me of reading a good book: that feeling of not being able to put it down is here in droves, and it has a real “one more chapter” feel to it. It might be 35 years since the last title in the series, but Emio proves that the team behind it certainly hasn’t lost its touch.