One of the titles of 2024 that has attracted the most attention from users, especially in the weeks preceding its launch, is Emio – The Man Who Smiles: Famicom Detective Club. The title developed by Nintendo, was presented to the world with a teaser trailer with an unexpectedly horror aftertaste, and then revealed itself to be an investigative thriller. It is certainly one of the titles that has most piqued the curiosity of players in recent times.
With one of the most ingenious marketing campaigns of recent years, taking into account Nintendo’s target audience, the new chapter of the series of Famicom Detective Club (a saga that has been missing from the market for more than 30 years!) promises to be a different experience from what users Nintendo Switch they have been accustomed.
The developers will have succeeded in meet expectations of the users, intrigued by the clear presence of mature and terrifying themes? Find out by continuing to read our review.
The Legend of the Smiling Man
The title can be considered in all respects a graphic adventure detective thriller: we impersonate our avatar, to whom we will give a name and surname at the beginning of the adventure, personal assistant of a well-known Japanese private detective.
Emio’s story develops around a delicate murder case: a middle school boy is in fact found near a water plant outside the city, strangled with the use of a rope and with a mysterious paper bag on his head that reproduces a disturbing smile.
The young man’s death is soon linked to a series of murders of young female students that occurred, with almost the same modus operandi, as many as 18 years earlier and, as we are told at the beginning of the investigations, also an urban legend note among the boys: that of Emio, the Man Who Smiles.
The mysterious figure of Emio, the strangler of young people to whom the killer promises “an eternal smile”, is joined by a series of mysterious characters of which we will discover more and more as we proceed with the plot, which we will avoid going into further here to avoid spoilers.
Full of details and disturbing images, Emio’s story is full of twists and turns: we travel on a qualitative level – as regards the rhythms, the characters and the narrated facts – rather tallalthough we cannot fail to point out the presence of some logistical gaps which end up shaking up a structure that is otherwise on the edge of narrative perfection.
The title, divided into chapters that allow the narration to be “broken up” between key settings and episodes, can be completed within 10 hours: there are no multiple endings, and trail-and-error can be used without limits to get to the solution you are looking for in moments of blockage, so we must unfortunately report a rather low replayability.
An “old-school” style of play
As we said at the beginning of the review, Emio is in fact an investigative point-and-click game in which we will have to converse with numerous characters, observe the surrounding environment and, through a series of dialogues, continue along the road to the truth.
Getting a “Game Over” in Emio is impossible, because, finding ourselves at a dead end in the conversation, all we will have is an “awkward silence” to be filled by using the right commandbetween “ask/listen”, “call”, “observe” and “think”. In fact, we can say that the gameplay, rather old-fashioned, consists of clicking what is needed to advance, often ending up proceeding by chance rather than by logic.
The contribution that is expected to be provided by the player is in fact one of the aspects of the experience that convinced us the leastexcept for brief bursts of interaction (such as end-of-chapter deductions) that test our ability to listen to previous conversations without, however, definitively marking our progress in the event of an error.
Artistically unexpected
The artistic style that distinguishes Emio is characterized by a rather realistic anime-style graphic setting, featuring a good level of detail regarding the backgrounds, and an interesting use of colors and camera positioning: some screens look like small, terrifying, squares.
The character design is quite simple, but the characters’ facial expressions and their emotions manage to reach the player in an immediate but never excessively blatant way.: the work done around the characterization of feelings more secret than any actor in history is commendableas we can understand something about each character simply from the tone of voice or the expression used.
Speaking of tone of voice: the title is dubbed entirely in Japanese, but the texts are available in English and Italian. The dubbing quality is satisfactory and demonstrates good acting and empathy.
However, we are not very convinced with regards to the soundtrack: finding ourselves in front of an adventure studded with murders and twists, we immediately had to consider the latter so much “downplaying” as to be completely inappropriateexcept for very few exceptions in specific scenes.
In conclusion, we can say that Emio does tiptoe the player into an anxious and disturbing climateproceeding gradually, but presenting “buffer” situations that attempt to calm the atmosphere in a context in which there was absolutely no need for it to be calmed down.
That it was an attempt to don’t go too far towards a dimension that is not typical of the Nintendo world? This is not very clear, also because we have examples of horror titles branded big N that did not require these veiled comical tricks, but that threw us without half measures into the heart of the adventure: we are referring, specifically, to the Fatal Frame series which, this time too, It doesn’t seem to have found a “horror” heir among Nintendo’s ranksdespite the more than tempting premises.
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