Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club hands-on preview – Nintendo horror-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Could this be Nintendo’s strangest game ever? (Nintendo)

The latest game from Nintendo is an 18-rated murder mystery and you can try it out for yourself now, as a free demo is released.

Nintendo and horror is not an obvious combination, but it’s not one that is completely unknown. Silicon Knights’ Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is the most famous example but around the same time there was also Geist, and not only did Resident Evil 4 debut on the GameCube but so did Resident Evil Zero and the remake of Resident Evil 1.

In fact, by their standards, Nintendo was obsessed by horror games during the GameCube era, which also led to a strange fascination with the Project Zero/Fatal Frame franchise (rumours that they’d bought the IP from Koei Tecmo proved not to be true, but they did seem to have some sort of vested interest in it – that they never explained).

That brief interest in survival horror quickly subsided, until the surprise announcement, this July, of an unknown game initially named only Emio. The teaser trailer, of a trenchcoat-wearing man with a paper bag on his head, featuring a crudely drawn smiling face, looked more like something out of Silent Hill than a typical Nintendo game and at first nobody knew what on earth it was.

It was later revealed that Emio is part of the Famicom Detective Club series, which was certainly not what anyone expected. Famicom Detective Club is a short series of games released only for the Japanese version of the NES (the eponymous Famicom) and all but unknown in the West, at least until the release in 2021 of a remake compilation for the Switch.

The games are relatively similar to the Ace Attorney franchise, in that while they’re a little more interactive than a visual novel they’re still much more passive than a traditional Western style adventure game. The remakes were hard to appreciate if you didn’t have any nostalgia for the originals, but they were made with obvious enthusiasm and now there’s a new entry, with an 18-rating (the remakes were only a 16).

From today, a demo of Emio is available for free on the Switch eShop, which we’ve already played. The prologue and first chapter is available now, while the second chapter will be released on Friday, August 23, and the third chapter on Wednesday, August 28. All your progress will transfer over to the full game too, so you won’t have to start from scratch if you buy the full game.

We’re only allowed to talk about the prologue and first chapter at the moment and… that makes it hard to say anything definitive about the game. What is obvious, is that it has the same basic interface and graphics as the remakes. Despite the subject matter, that means a disarmingly cartoonish appearance and while the characters are 3D models the animation is very limited, and all the backgrounds are just static screens of hand-drawn artwork.

That was fine with the remakes, since they were obviously trying to retain something of the look and feel of the originals, but it seems more questionable now, given this is an entirely new game; especially as they’re still no English voice-acting, only Japanese.

It’s also unfortunate that nothing significant seems to have changed in terms of the interface and the lack of signposting. A simple text menu allows you to talk to people or examine them or the surroundings but even in the first chapter it feels largely random as to whether this advances the plot or not.

The graphics look fine but the animation is very limited (Nintendo)

Choosing the ‘Think’ option sometimes gives you a clue, but sometimes not, and while we never got truly stuck, we also frequently felt we’d done nothing purposeful to move things forward. You can try it yourself – that is, after all, the point of the demo – but judging the game at this point it doesn’t seem as if anything substantial has changed when it comes to the gameplay.

Tonally, things are different though. The visuals, and the strangely cheerful soundtrack, are the same but the crime involved is much more disturbing than before. You play as a 19-year-old private detective who works at an agency called in by the police, to help when a 15-year-old schoolboy is found strangled in a remote area.

You never actually see the body though and your teenage detective partner is the one that goes and talks to the parents, off screen. This makes the tone seem very peculiar, with the only interaction that hints at an adult tone being a sex pest junior police detective – although it’s currently unclear how far that’s going to go.

The same can be said for the game in general, especially as the age rating warnings talk about domestic abuse and suicide. We’re not expecting Doki Doki Literature Club! but it does seem possible that the chirpy presentation is setting things up for a change in tone later, but that’s only a guess.

In this first demo the most disturbing moments are flashbacks to the smiling man himself (emio translates to smiling man, so the title is a tautology) as he approaches two separate victims, although you never see anything visually horrific.

Whether Nintendo is just being overly cautious with the 18-rating or not is impossible to tell at this point but while it’s going to be fascinating to see exactly how far Emio goes, in terms of plot and horror atmosphere, it’s also quite possible it won’t be nearly as far as the initial teaser suggested.

Formats: Nintendo Switch
Price: £39.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo and Mages
Release Date: 29th August
Age Rating: 18

Will it become a truly horror game or not? (Nintendo)

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