If You Own A Switch, Don't Miss Out On Famicom Detective Club

thegamer.com:

If you've been in a book shop lately, chances are your eye has been drawn to the many beautifully illustrated re-releases of novels by Japanese mystery author Seishi Yokomizo. Stories like The Honjin Murders, The Inugami Curse, and The Village of Eight Graves have secured Yokomizo's place as one of the world's most beloved crime writers—and among his famous fans is Nintendo veteran Yoshio Sakamoto. You most likely know this influential dev from his work on the Metroid series, but in the late '80s he was involved—along with fellow Nintendo legends Gunpei Yoko and Satoru Okada—in the creation of something very different: namely a series of visual novels known as the Famicom Detective Club, the first of which, The Missing Heir, launched for the NES in 1988.

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For decades these games were only available in Japanese, until 2021 when Mages Inc. (of Steins;Gate fame) was hired by Nintendo to remake them for the Switch—with input and guidance from Sakamoto. This collection contained two games, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind, both of which feature a 15-year-old boy solving complicated, labyrinthine crimes in the Japanese countryside. Why is a schoolboy working for a detective agency? And why does no one question this, even when he's poking around in bloody crime scenes? I have no idea. Just go with it. Despite his age, the protagonist (whose name is decided by you) is a talented tantei with a knack for solving mysterious murders.

When he wrote Famicom Detective Club, Sakamoto was inspired by Yokomizo's novels, Dario Argento movies, and The Portopia Serial Murder Case, an interactive murder mystery developed by Enix in 1983. The result is a pair of brilliantly