Famicom Detective Club was a short series of two visual novels that released in 1988 for the Famicom Disc System that never left Japan. That kind of changed in 2021 with the release of remakes for the Nintendo Switch which did find their way over here. If you’ve been a reader for a long time, you know that I loved those remakes, with them being tied for fourth place in my top ten list that year. I always assumed that that would be the last we’d see of the series, but to my surprise, Nintendo announced a brand new game and it released this year.

The announcement itself was interesting. It started with a teaser video featuring a creepy man with a paper bag that had a smiley face drawn on it on his head. The teaser asked the question, “who is Emio?” and nothing else besides an ESRB rating of M. This led to lots of speculation of a new survival horror game, and one that’s being made by Nintendo. But a couple weeks later, the game was revealed to be Emio- The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club. The internet at large seemed mostly disappointed, but I was ecstatic.

Getting my hands on the game, I was immediately reminded of why I loved the first two games. Emio keeps the same visual style as the remakes, a very sharp anime aesthetic. Like most visual novels, the characters are largely still images, but they slightly animate to look like they’re breathing. It makes them feel more alive.

The story starts with the discovery of a dead student. He has a paper bag on his head with a smiley face drawn on it. Your detective agency (and it is an agency, not a detective club) has been contacted by the police to help investigate. Pretty quickly, you learn about an urban legend of a man named Emio who finds young girls who are crying. He promises to give them a permanent smile, before killing them and giving them their own paper bag. You also learn about several murders from years ago that appear to be related to the urban legend. So now, there’s a possibility that a serial killer from a case that wasn’t solved is back.

While the past games did deal with murders, they had a relatively light tone to them. Especially the second one, that was more about a supernatural mystery at a school. A serial killer is a drastically more intense subject to be dealing with, and the mystery surrounding him stays interesting the whole time. Despite being just a guy with a bag on his head, any time Emio makes his presence known in the story is intense and almost otherworldly. In a game where you’re mostly just reading text and looking at pictures, it’s really shocking just how effective this game was at making me feel actually threatened.

But this is a video game, not a movie, so what is it you’re actually doing? It’s a lot like other visual novels, like the Ace Attorney series, but without those games’ court sessions. You’re basically using a menu to go select different locations to go to and talk to different people. You can look around the screen with a curser and select things you want to look at. At the end of each chapter, you talk things out with your partner, Ayumi, which plays out like a quiz, which helps with making sure you’re keeping all the information straight.

There really isn’t that much more to the gameplay. It’s not anything particularly difficult, although sometimes I would struggle with what specific thing to select to make the story go forward. There’s enough here to still feel like you have some agency in what’s going on. Even though I’m sure the story would work great as a movie or anime series, that little bit of agency that you do have does help make the story feel more personal.

Without getting into spoilers, it’s the supporting cast that are the real draw in this story. There’s the main couple police detectives that you deal with, one who’s kind of goofy but has a heart of gold and the other who doesn’t want anything to do with you or your agency, but has a personal connection to the mystery at hand. There’s multiple people with connections to the victims with varying degrees of wanting to help you out. At one point, there’s a group of kids who are wearing paper bags and “playing Emio”. And then there’s the actual director of your agency who spends most of the game out of town, investigating the origins of the urban legend of Emio while you work on the current case. All of these characters come together to make a really charming game, even when it gets into very dark territory.

Emio is a very special game. It looks wonderful, has great writing, and gets shockingly dark for a first party Nintendo game. As much as I liked the remakes of the old games, I think Emio is the best entry in the series. It’s also a standalone story, so even though this does have the same main characters, there’s really no reason you couldn’t start here. If you’re a fan of visual novels or are curious to try one, this is an excellent playthrough. I give it my highest recommendation.