Emio – The Smiling Man is a captivating murder mystery with a middling end

There is a degree to which every detective story hinges on its ending. Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicon Detective Club has me wrestling with just how important that degree is.

The first eight or so hours of the Nintendo Switch game pass by at a clip. Taking on the role of a private investigator, you begin to investigate the death of a high school boy whose body was found wearing a paper bag with a crude smiling face creepily scrawled across it. There’s both an older case with the same signature and an urban legend about a killer who wears the paper bag and gives anyone he sees crying a “permanent smile.” Your job is to find out whether these things are related, and how.

This predominantly unfolds through a series of conversations, and like previous entries in the Famicom Detective Club series, there’s a whole menu of verbs to get you through them. “Ask/listen” isn’t enough; you’ll also have to actively “think” of new things to ask, or “look/examine” for hints, like your conversation partner’s body language. The exact action is signposted by the text, which might say “What do you think about that?” — making it a constant dance of paying attention not only to what the person is saying but what the game wants you to choose next. This takes some getting used to, but it does stop the mind from wandering off, and where it gets tricky is there’s only so much trial and error before you’re back on track.

Being conversation-based, a lot of Emio’s success also hinges on its writing, particularly its character writing. For the most part, it pulls this off. No one is so endearing that I feel them sticking in my mind long beyond the game itself, but they’re sketched well enough that they’re enjoyable to talk to and each of them is memorable in their place in the narrative. That includes the protagonist character, meaning it feels a bit odd that they’re nameable — they’re definitely not an audience stand-in.

Having said that, a little of the writing feels tired, mostly when it comes to its female characters. There’s nothing hugely egregious, but it falls into the old trap of women being defined by their relationships to men, while male characters get to be, well, people. You do get to play as Ayumi Tachibana, a fan-favorite investigator from the earlier Detective Club games, but she mostly spends her segments babysitting the feelings of a former upperclassman of hers. (You also have to sit through the protagonist dealing with a tortured 19-year-old’s crush on her, another reason that giving him my name as prompted felt a little weird.)

Other than conversations, there’s a little investigating to be done — that “look/examine” action can also take in your surroundings — but there isn’t much to be found in the way of clues outside of what people will tell you. The player character is constantly reminded that they’re not actually a police officer, which is fair enough, but it means that scouring crime scenes for missed evidence is mostly out.

This impacts the vibe of the game in two ways. Firstly, it’s not super creepy. I’m a baby when it comes to horror, and apart from one scene very close to the end of the game, nothing really made my skin crawl. There is something inherently scary about a scribbled smiling face on a brown paper bag, but if you’ve watched the trailer, you’ve already seen the worst of it.

Secondly, it means that the mystery has to be somewhat unsubtle. When a character is acting suspiciously, you will know about it. The characters will comment on it multiple times in the moment, you’ll have several attempts to talk to them about it, and then in the review section at the end of the day it will come up at least twice.

These reviews are allegedly the heart of the game, with promo material claiming that you’ll have to “actively examine your leads to draw the correct conclusions and bring the killer to justice.” I’m not convinced this is true – if you get something wrong in the review, Ayumi will gently put you back on track. And other than one or two questions with odd wording, it’s hard to go too far wrong, because everything pertinent is recorded in a notebook that’s checkable at any time.

The ease and lack of subtlety was, for most of the game, a positive. It keeps everything moving, and as well as signaling where the characters were in their own deductions, it meant I was able to make guesses of my own about what was going on. Some of these were right and some were wrong, which I think is a great sign for a mystery — not everything is clear, but there is a thread that’s followable.

But once I reached the final chapters, most of the big mysteries remained unsolved. I’m not sure whether Emio fails to explain some parts of what happened, or whether the confusing formatting of the conclusion threw me off enough to miss some details. Either way, I’m still not entirely sure what happened, which is a pretty big ding on any mystery narrative. Some of the parts that are clear feel unsatisfying, too.

Up to that point, I was enjoying Emio. It was weaving things together with a compelling momentum. But then it tripped, and things unraveled. There are specifics here worth talking about, but Nintendo’s review guidelines are explicit that I should not. So all I can give are my overall impressions, and, overall, the last couple of hours of Emio – The Smiling Man felt incredibly disappointing. If that feels abrupt, it perhaps gets at something about the game itself.

Emio – The Smiling Man will be released Aug. 29 on Nintendo Switch. The game was reviewed on Switch using a pre-release download code provided by Nintendo. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.