Emio - The Smiling Man

After the masterpiece that is Outer Wilds, I wanted to chill for a moment, and what a better way to do so than by going through a detective story!

Famicom Detective Club is a pretty niche series by Nintendo, with only a couple games that were only on the NES—though recently remade for Nintendo Switch.

Emio The Smiling Man came out in 2024, and it brings the formula to current times!

I first heard of this game a couple of years ago in an episode of Into The Aether, brought up by Brendon Bigley, and literally this past week, now that Stephen is finally playing it as well.

I decided to give it a go during my Summer Game Challenge, and it’s finally time to write a review for it here.

Story

The game happens in Japan, and it seems to be dated somewhere in the 80s or 90s. The story begins when a high school student is found dead, wearing a paper bag with a creepy smiley face drawn on it.

You take control of a junior detective—which you get to name! Jules Poirot in my case—working for the Utsugi Detective Agency and the police to uncover the truth of this murder.

The case is linked with the urband legend of Emio, the Smiling Man—it’s the name of the videogame, wooooow!—which mentiones a creepy man wearing a paper bag who approaches young girls crying and—unless they smile when seeing him—murders them, covering their face with a paperbag with a smiley face drawn. Matching almost exactly with the event that triggered the game and investigation.

At the same time, this murder is linked with a different case that went cold eighteen years ago, involving the serial murders of girls who died by strangulation too, although there are differences that need to be accounted for. You’ll have to research from multiple perspectives to find out the truth.

Besides your character, you’ll work with Ayumi Tachibana, another junior in the agency that will go through her own investgation with a different group of characters to question. Both of you work for Shunsuke Utsugi, the private detective that runs the agency and mentors you both. He follows yet another lead in the case and seems to have a history working on the previous murders as well…

The game will switch perspectives between both junior detectives as the plot unfolds, and feature separate cutscenes and sequences that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the end!

Gameplay

It’s basically a visual novel. You can Ask/Listen, Look/Examine, Think, Call with your cellphone, check your notebook and such.

During any talk with a character, the conversation won’t simply be fed into you, you’ll have to react to things in a way that sort of makes sense, and it’s not just about mindlessly pressing talk over and over. The game provides hints of what could be done next as well.

Sometimes you’ll have to think before talking again, sometimes a character will make a nervous face and you’ll have to look at them before continuing a conversation. There are a couple simple puzzles where you’ll look at the environment to figure out what to say next, and the like.

At the end of every day, there’s a review time, where you go through all you’ve learned, fill up some blanks and check notes of your notebook to link clues together.

Although the order in which you find out clues can change slightly, the game itself is rather linear, the reviews are a nice challenge for yourself, but getting something wrong doesn’t punish you much, it only leads to a correction later on to put you in the right track.

The overall gameplay is really simplistic, but it can get confusing sometimes, when a chain of dialogue cuts off suddenly and you have to figure out what to do next. Thinking often helps a lot if you need a hint, but there are definitely situations where I was like a whole minute stuck and making no progress.

You also have the Travel option, that shows up at the end of some dialogues, or while exploring the city. Most of these actions are pretty self-explanatory and will make sense as the game goes on.

Admittedly, tha game it’s rather linear, don’t expect multiple endings and such. It’s a mystery slowly revealing itself to you and it’s very much worth it!

Art

This game is absolutely beautiful, as long as you are okay with the anime artstyle. It is easy on the eyes, minimal in interface and features plenty of high quality animation as well, such as mouth movements, expressions, hand gestures and the like. This is not your regular visual novel or JRPG with drawings being swapped around. Blinking, changes in posture, there are details everywhere. It kinda feels like they are rigged characters, like some VTuber streamers and YouTube channels. Looks fantastic.

The backgrounds are also very well crafted, with a great amount of detail and many descriptions for you to find using the Look action. There are city streets, forests, the police station, and plenty of other environments, some of them featuring multiple NPCs in the background that have some small animations as well.

This is the kind of stuff that a big company like Nintendo can do within a genre often lead by indie developers and small budgets. The budget doesn’t reach the heights of a Mario or a Zelda at all, but it’s clearly superior to what most visual novels would get, and it really shows in the presentation here.

Music & Sound

The soundtrack of this game is fitting of the occassion, it has a nostalgic 80s vibe that makes me think of the origins of this series back in the Famicom, exclusively for Japan. The main theme already sets the mood of the whole thing, but it’s not all there is to it!

It will get tense and emotional, as well as happy, carefree and even comical! The game is not afraid to jump between high stakes moments and comedic relief, and this is perfectly showcased on its soundtrack!

Emio also features fully voiced lines in Japanese. This is absolutely wonderful stuff. Even though I don’t understand the language itself, the emotional expressions and tone is easy to pick up from the excellent performances, and they really enhance every scene during revelations and the like.

Overall

Something I really appreciate about this game is how well it manages the tone of its story. There are really gruesome implications and dark moments here, some stuff that I would have never thought Nintendo would even publish, but this game does handle things well.

There are also quite a few fun moments, the game is not afraid to play with your assumptions and use them for comedic relief. There are also a couple genuinely charming moments between the characters. The dialogue is quite fun and easy to go through (as long as you don’t get stuck in a dialogue trying to figure out what’s next!) and the writing of the whole thing is really marvelous, drip-feeding you information in the best of ways.

The final chapters and the build up of the big reveal is genuinely fantastic, and I really think it makes every little nitpick worth it! However, it did feel a bit rushed, and some things are not explained after the credits rolled, so make sure you stick until the end to see that side of things. Definitely worth it in my opinion.

At the end of the day, this is still a visual novel. If you don’t want to basically read and read and click on things, this game will not be for you.

If you want multiple pathways and different endings, this is also not the game you’re looking for.

However, if you are up for an excellent murder mystery story to read through and find out clues before the game gives them to you, this is genuinely fantastic stuff.

This is day 50 of #100DaysToOffload