Nintendo has revealed what’s behind the mysterious Emio trailer that appeared on the studio’s official YouTube channel last week, and it’s actually a new entry in a long-dormant (well, sort of) franchise.
It turns out that Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club, to give it its full name, is the long-awaited third entry in the Famicom Detective Club series, which began all the way back in 1988 with The Missing Heir.
The first two games in the series were remade for the Switch in 2021, but Emio represents the first completely new title in the franchise for 35 years, so it’s a cause for excitement if you’re a fan of detective-themed visual novel adventure games.
Emio‘s identity as a Famicom Detective Club game was revealed in a new teaser released on the Nintendo YouTube channel earlier today, which sees series producer Yoshio Sakamoto (who’s also known as the director of seminal classics like Super Metroid) discussing his latest work.
In the new teaser, Sakamoto says the aforementioned remakes of the first two Famicom Detective Club games were what spurred him on to make this newest installment.
Per the teaser, it’s very much Sakamoto’s work; he says he worked on everything from the game’s visuals through to its script, its cutscenes, and “even all the smaller details”.
He also teases the game’s plot, which revolves around a creepy-sounding urban legend about girls who meet a sinister figure and agree to exchange their lives for a paper bag with a drawn-on smile. You can check out that trailer, in which Sakamoto speaks very endearingly about the project, right here.
Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club launches exclusively for Nintendo Switch on August 29th. You can pre-order the game right here if you think it’s the kind of thing you could lose sleep over. I certainly do.
