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Nintendo reveals Emio – The Smiling Man as a new Famicom Detective Club game

Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club will launch on Nintendo Switch in late August 2024.

TJ Denzer

July 17, 2024 8:58 AM

Image via Nintendo

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Last week, Nintendo caught attention when, seemingly out of nowhere, it teased what looked like it could be a new horror game coming to Nintendo Switch. That wasn’t quite on the mark, but it was close. Today, Nintendo revealed Emio – The Smiling Man: A new mystery detective game set in the Famicom Detective Club series. It’s going to be one of the first new games in the series in quite a few years and is coming to Nintendo Switch in August.

Nintendo revealed the full details of Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club in a deep dive video with longtime series producer Yoshio Sakamoto. The game is set to release worldwide on August 29, 2024. In this game, players explore the mystery of an urban legend, the titular Smiling Man. He’s said to appear to young women who are miserable and offer them a paper bag with a smile on it for their lives. As rumors and ghost stories bend with reality, it’s up to players to figure out the truth behind the legend.

Emio – The Smiling Man comes a couple years after Nintendo and Sakamoto created remakes of the original Famicom Detective Club games. They were visually and aurally spruced up, revitalizing the 30-year-old classics with a solid glow-up, while remaining faithful to their investigative nature and narrative progress. We enjoyed them in our Shacknews review. In the video, Sakamoto reveals that while they were remaking those games, the desire to create a new game in the series grew, and eventually was realized as they began development of Emio.

“Emio – The Smiling Man is the culmination of everything my most trusted colleagues and I have learned and the ideas we’ve accumulated from working on the previous games and their remakes,” Sakamoto said of the new game, adding that the team is going “all out on the screenplay and animations.”

With an August release date set for Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club, stay tuned for more details and info as they drop, leading up to the game’s launch.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.