Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club Preview
A few years on from the two-case collection of Famicom Detective Club remakes, Nintendo is following up on the promise and potential of this visual novel series with the first fully new entry in 27 years. Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is coming out at the end of this month, putting our youthful sleuths through the wringer of another traumatic murder case.
From today and through to the game’s launch on 29th August, Nintendo is teasing out the first few chapters of the game with a free demo, and we’ve sampled the prologue and first chapter of the game a little ahead of time.
It’s another day at Utsugi Decetive Agency, with our 19 year old protagonist (who you get to name) continuing on as an assistant detective at the agency. Barely have you said hello to Utsugi when the phone rings with the police calling you to a strange and unsettling crime scene.
A body has been found that morning, a teenager still in middle school… but they were found with a paper bag on their head, marked with a smiling face.
This quickly grows into the revelation that this could be tied to a decades old case that Utsugi was aware of and the urban legend of Emio – The Smiling Man, a person with a bag on their head who finds crying girls and tells them quite specifically that they’re going to give them a smile that lasts forever. But is this the same killer? A copycat? Something else entirely?
If you’ve played the remade Famicom Detective Club duology, or even the more jovial Ace Attorney series, you’ll immediately find your footing with the visual novel-style gameplay of this game.
The early conversations and interactions through the Prologue and Chapter 1 gradually set out the scope of what you’ll have to do. Most of the time you’ll select ‘Ask/Listen’ and potentially a sub-topic to engage in conversation with someone, but sometimes the conversation might dry up, nudging you to ‘Look/Examine’ the person or the environment to prise out new clues, or to ‘Think’ and have your internal
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