EMIO: THE SMILING MAN (2024) Turns That Frown Upside-Down

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When Nintendo remastered the Famicom Detective Club games a couple years back, it was a pleasant surprise, but I didn't have "the series gets a third game after 35 years" on my 2024 bingo card.

Famicom Detective Club wasn't the first mystery adventure game (that would be The Portopia Serial Murder Case in 1983), but you can see its DNA in a lot of subsequent Japanese adventure games such as the Ace Attorney series. Despite being fondly regarded, the series only got two entries before designer and writer Yoshio Sakamoto moved on to some obscure game about a space bounty hunter. Despite some occasional 80s clunk, The Missing Heir (1988) is a solid mystery game that takes a lot of inspiration from Seishi Yokomizo's books (The Village of Eight Graves particularly, IMO). The Girl Who Stands Behind (1989) is a great mystery game, whose oppressive atmosphere of paranoia builds into a memorably creepy finale that lingers long after you beat it.

How does the newest entry, Emio: The Smiling Man, compare? Well... it would have been quite a good mystery novel.

Emio’s mystery, the urban-legend-themed string of serial killings, is eerie and compelling. The first few hours had me unsettled and uncertain. But its pacing and structure missed the mark for me. You spend the game finding breadcrumbs that point to the truth behind the murders, only to hit the epilogue, where Utsugi (the plot device detective who is there to justify why the teen protagonists are allowed to investigate crime scenes) explains the backstory in a 20-minute animated cutscene.

In a passive medium like a book, this would be just fine. As Famicom Detective Club makes no secret of its love for the Kindaichi novels, I’ll point to The Devil’s Flute Murders (quoted above) as an example of a mystery novel with this structure that really works. After 200 pages of the inexplicable, you’re content to have this character’s backstory wash over you with an expression of cringing horror as the nasty details pile on. And to be clear, the backstory of The Smiling Man was sufficiently horrifying. I did indeed cringe. But in a game, you’re trying to solve the case yourself, and having so much of the mystery exposited by a third party is a little disappointing.

The strangest part is, there were a couple sequences that felt like Emio was spinning its wheels to hit the 12-hour mark. For example, there is a drawn-out sequence where your player character has to enter a retirement home, and after prodding around and speaking to the receptionist, you determine that you're not allowed inside, and the PC decides to just leave and call back later... only to realize that he doesn't have the resident's contact information. So you go back inside, and have essentially the same conversation, except this time you are fortuitously saved by a third party. There are many, many sequences like this. They could have easily “padded” the length by including some of the backstory plot stuff in the base game. I’m left wondering why they cordoned off major reveals to an optional epilogue. Was there a consensus that the heavy subject matter wouldn’t fly, even in an M-rated game? Did someone play The Centennial Case during development?

Overall, the mystery was solid (not terribly difficult, but solid). I don’t regret playing it—I just didn’t really enjoy the “playing” part.

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