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.
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