A third installment of the thriller series dating all the way back to the Famicom days is making its way to Nintendo’s handheld next month.
Recently Nintendo took everyone by surprise by releaseing a short teaser of a horror game. And everyone was like “This doesn’t seem like Nintendo. What is this?”. Not gonna lie, I had to do my research on this one.
Famicom Detective Club is a thriller series of visual novels, which released back in the 1988 and 1989 on the Famicom Disk System (an add-on for Famicom, a Japanese counterpart of the NES) as a duology. The first two games, The Missing Heir and The Girls Who Stands Behind follow a young man in the quest of solving murder mysteries in the Japanese countryside.
In 2021 Nintendo released remakes of both games on the Nintendo Switch. The games are considered to be pretty good thriller novels, each gathering decent scores in reviews. Good enough to make a third one 35 years later, at least. So, what can we expect from the third installment in the seires?
In Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club you’ll take the role of an assistant pirivate investigator working for Utsugi Detevcite Agency. You’ll be solving a case of a murder of a young student, which was found with a paperbag with a smiling face on his head. This case resembles a similar one from 18 years ago, and you’ll need to find out if the murderer from the past returned or is it a copycat.
Producer Yoshio Sakamoto, who made the first two games is back working closely with the developers of the third game. He provided the story foundation and plot details for Emio.
Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club Is coming to the Nintendo Switch on August 29, 2024. Remakes of the first two games are available in the Switch eShop.
