As delightful as it was to witness Nintendo unveil an unexpectedly eerie teaser earlier this year featuring a masked figure known as “Emio,” few anticipated it would lead to a brand-new installment in the company’s long-abandoned Famicom Detective Club series. However, what is less surprising is how gripping the game turned out to be, a skillfully paced mystery whose ambiance, soundtrack, and setting beautifully build up to one of the most thrilling conclusions Nintendo has ever crafted.
Plot details for Emio – The Smiling Man follow.
The buildup to this climax, however, is anything but straightforward. As with the previous two titles in the Famicom Detective Club series, Emio – The Smiling Man presents a slow-burn detective narrative—a complex mystery that gradually unravels over approximately a dozen hours. Set several years after the events of The Missing Heir, the Utsugi Detective Agency is recruited to assist police officers Junko Kuze and Daisuke Kamihara in examining the death of a teenage boy, discovered with a paper bag unsettlingly marked with a smiley face.
What’s most striking about this scenario is how it strikingly resembles a series of unsolved murders that took place in the city 18 years prior, leading you and the detectives to suspect that the same killer is at large. The only other tale emerging from this is a chilling urban legend of a serial murderer called Emio, the “Smiling Man”—a man who dons a paper bag and targets weeping women at night, strangling them and then placing a smiley face paper bag over their heads afterward, leaving them with a haunting smile.
With this fragile connection serving as your starting point, you embark on a convoluted investigation, tracing a deliberately laid path of clues, red herrings, and grim revelations. Yet, for all the progress you make, the answer always seems just out of reach. Every new lead you discover only prompts further inquiries, making it often feel like you could easily be no closer to linking the events, let alone determining the identity and location of the perpetrator.
That is, until you reach the second-to-last chapter. After a nerve-wracking car ride with Detective Kamihara, you return to the city center to question locals for any possible leads you might uncover. Following a largely unproductive search around the area, you ultimately encounter two unassuming construction workers who dramatically alter your perspective on the case.