A week on from posting a mysterious teaser revealing a creepy man wearing a smiling paper bag mask, Nintendo has officially unveiled Emio – The Smiling Man, the first new Famicom Detective Club game in decades.
In 2021, Nintendo remastered and re-released classic games in the series, The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind, and it appears these may have paved the way for Emio – The Smiling Man. Like its predecessors, this game will be a horror-tinged detective adventure, where players must solve a strange and haunting mystery.
Per the game’s official description, it will begin with the death of a school student, who is found with a paper bag over his head. This clue links back to historic murders that took players nearly two decades earlier – and it’s up to players to work out the connection, and how the urban legend of a killer who gives his victims “a smile that will last forever” relates.
“Has a serial killer returned, or is this the work of a copycat? Are these crimes inspired by the Smiling Man story, or the origin of it? These answers and more will be discovered as you investigate in Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club.”
Read: Nintendo appears to be teasing a new horror game
For those unfamiliar with the Famicom Detective Club games, it’s worth noting they helped to pioneer detective visual novels. Each entry focusses on a core mystery, typically with elements of seeming supernatural horror, and this is unravelled as players investigate.
To gather clues, you’ll travel from place to place, interviewing suspects, analysing crime scenes, and drawing connections based on intuition. You’ll need to keep your wits with you as you explore, as the series tends to ask tough questions, and force you to think through the clues presented before approaching the next stage of your investigation.
As announced, this new entry in the series is set to launch for Nintendo Switch on 29 August 2024 – so there’s not long to go before release. In the meantime, you can learn more about the upcoming game on the Nintendo website.
