Emio - The Smiling Man (Nintendo, Switch)
AFTER a decades-long sugar high, gaming’s equivalent to Disney is finally cutting through the treacle. The first ever 18-rated game Nintendo has made, Emio was teased in July with a creepy teaser that had fans believing the House of Mario was finally dipping its toe in horror.
However, while it is dark, Emio turned out to be the resurrection of Famicom Detective Club - a series of murder mystery adventures released in the late 80s.
One of Nintendo’s older properties (and one that never received an original release outside of Japan), the latest involves a series of murdered teenagers found with grinning brown paper bags over their heads. Yet Emio isn’t the survival horror fans were hoping for. Essentially a visual novel (a genre that takes up around 70 per cent of Japan’s PC gaming market), it offers all the fun of reading a book peppered with the interactivity of videogames.
With a plot involving the resurgence of an urban legend where a serial killer offers crying girls the chance to smile forever by strangling them, then covers their head with a grinning paper bag, players fill the shoes of a private investigator at the Utsugi Detective Agency contacted by police to assist with a fresh case 18 years later.
Japan loves a good detective show (its obsession with Columbo led Emperor Hirohito to request a meeting with Peter Falk during his tour of America), and Emio invites players to sleuth their way out of a brown paper bag.
Read more:
Rather than simply scrolling through text, you’ll interact with environments and analyse clues in a game that owes more to the heyday of point-and-click adventures than traditional visual novels.
Told through largely static images with a few animations here and there – mainly mouths flapping and eyes blinking - you’ll investigate places of interest and question locals to gather information before returning to HQ to review information with your partner, Ayumi.
Nintendo may have gone from entertaining kids to strangling them and popping a grocery bag on their lifeless heads, but like the best books, you won’t be able to put Emio down.
Nintendo may have gone from entertaining kids to strangling them and popping a grocery bag on their lifeless heads, but like the best books, you won’t be able to put Emio down
A good yarn well told - wrong-footing players at every turn and with a shocking final act - Emio strikes a fine balance between grisly and fun, with goofy moments that only heighten the gut-punch when things go grim.
Niche doesn’t even begin to describe the darkest game Nintendo has ever produced, though while not for everyone, bookworms will love its halfway house between paperback and videogame.
The biggest mystery of all is why Nintendo made Emio in the first place - but the fact they did has slapped a big smile on my face.
