As surprising as it was to see Nintendo drop an uncharacteristically creepy teaser earlier this year about a masked man known as “Emio,” few could have expected it would be related to a brand-new entry in the company’s long-dormant Famicom Detective Club series. What’s less surprising is just how riveting the game turned out to be, an expertly paced thriller whose setting, music, and atmosphere masterfully crescendo into one of the most suspenseful denouements Nintendo has ever conjured.
Spoilers for Emio – The Smiling Man follow.
The lead-up to this climax, however, is anything but straightforward. Like the previous two games in the Famicom Detective Club series, Emio – The Smiling Man is a slow-burn detective story–a densely plotted mystery that unravels methodically over the course of roughly a dozen hours. Picking up a few years after the events of The Missing Heir, the Utsugi Detective Agency is enlisted to aid police detectives Junko Kuze and Daisuke Kamihara in investigating the death of a teenage boy, who was discovered wearing a paper bag unsettlingly scrawled with a smiley face.
What’s most shocking about this scene, however, is how it eerily parallels a series of unsolved murders that occurred in town 18 years ago, leading you and the police to suspect the same culprit is responsible. The only other lead to go off of is a disturbing urban legend of a serial killer known as Emio, the “Smiling Man”–a paper-bag wearing individual who approaches crying girls at night and strangles them, placing a smiley face paper bag over their heads afterward to leave them with an everlasting smile.
With this tenuous connection as your starting point, you embark on a winding investigation, navigating a deliberately laid breadcrumb trail of clues, misdirections, and dead ends. But for all the progress you make, the answer always seems just beyond reach. Every new lead you uncover only raises further questions, and it often feels as if you are no closer to discovering the connection between the cases, let alone the culprit’s identity and whereabouts.
That is, until you reach the penultimate chapter. Following a tense car ride with Detective Kamihara, you return to the city center to canvass the locals for any more potential leads you can discover. After a largely fruitless search around town, you eventually meet two unassuming construction workers, who suddenly turn your understanding of the case upside down.
Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club | Producer Overview Trailer
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During the ensuing conversation, you present to the workers two police sketches: one of a man named Minoru Tsuzuki, a person of interest from the serial murders who has been missing for 18 years; and one of Makoto Kuze, Detective Kuze’s missing brother who also disappeared around the time of the serial murders. The construction workers claim to have just recently worked with a man named Minoru Tsuzuki, but they don’t recognize the Minoru depicted in the police sketch. Rather, they both identify the sketch of Makoto as Minoru.
Even more curiously, the construction workers recall driving Minoru home on the last day of their project. The background music suddenly falls silent as the two recount dropping Minoru off in the middle of nowhere at the foot of the mountains, then watching the strange man as he wordlessly waded through the overgrowth and up the mountainside. It’s a confounding twist, made all the more chilling by the ominous track that accompanies their testimony, reinforcing the feeling that you’re on the precipice of some horrible revelation.
The tension is only amplified as you delve into the final chapter, which begins with your arrival at Yamanba Pass, the eerie stretch of road in the middle of the mountains where Minoru was last seen. The atmosphere is immediately unnerving. The overgrown brush and dilapidated pavement make it apparent no one has been through the area in quite some time, and the only audible sound is the faint, haunting murmur of the wind blowing through the trees. With sunset quickly approaching and no other path forward, you have little choice but to enter the woods and continue pursuing your new lead.
The ascent is unbearably foreboding. As dusk gradually creeps in and you steadily make your way up the mountainside, scanning the thick foliage for any clues that may lead you in the right direction, you come upon multiple forks in the trail, most of which either double back to a previous area or lead off to a dead end. It’s tense and disorienting, and the unsettling background music that plays as you negotiate this seemingly endless forest only accentuates the feeling of unease.
But what really lends this scene an overwhelming sense of dread is the way the game deftly manipulates player expectations. Though you as the audience are aware that several characters have had brushes with the Smiling Man at different points in the story, you as the protagonist have yet to meet him yourself–which must mean your inevitable face-to-face encounter with the elusive killer could happen at any given moment while you’re desperately navigating this dark, remote mountain.
It’s a palpably tense experience, and a testament to how masterfully executed the game’s closing chapters are. And that’s to say nothing of the wrenching epilogue that unlocks after the credits roll, which ties up every loose end and lingering question in gutting fashion. Though it may not have garnered as much mainstream attention as some other releases, these climactic moments solidify Emio – The Smiling Man as one of the year’s most poignant titles, a genuinely tender, funny, and heartrending tale that will stay with me for years to come.
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