Sample a multi-part demo for Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club next week

thesixthaxis.com:

Nintendo has announced that a demo for Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club will arrive for Nintendo Switch next week, albeit in an unusual multi-stage fashion.

Starting on 20th August (19th August in North America), the Emio – The Smiling Man demo will dole out the prologue and first three chapters of the game over the course of eight days. At first only the Prologue and Chapter 1 will be available, followed by Chapter 2 a few days later and finally Chapter 3.

Here’s the dates that everything will be available:

New chapters unlock at 6PM PT / 9PM ET / 2AM BST / 3AM CEST / 10AM JST, with the demo needing to be updated in order to access the new content.

The goal, from Nintendo’s perspective, is to build a little bit of communal intrigue for the game, with each chapter sure to end on a cliffhanger or some kind of revelatory bombshell. It’s another atypical marketing move by the publisher, which started off with just a creepy teaser trailer for the game.

This all builds up to the full launch of Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club on 29th August. Any progress that you make in the demo will transfer across to the full game, you’ll be glad to hear.

Emio – The Smiling Man is the first completely new Famicom Detective Club game in 27 years, though the series was revived a few years ago with a remake collection of the 1980s Famicom originals for Nintendo Switch.

I reviewed Famicom Detective Club back in 2021, saying “It’s wonderful to have the classic Famicom Detective Club games remade with modern artwork and with full Western localisations, but the flow of these visual novel detective stories is distinctly lacking and infuriatingly obtuse at times. Still, we can hope this is a sign that Nintendo is considering a truly modern revival of the Detective Club series in future.”

Guess what? It was a sign!