Why I’m not all smiles for Nintendo’s 'Emio – The Smiling Man'

A middle school boy strangled to death. An urban legend of a serial killer who masks his face with a brown paper bag. Plucky private investigators thawing out a decades-old cold case.

Nintendo’s newest visual novel promises intrigue, thrills and plenty of old-fashioned charm. But beware: The game will test your patience more than it will test your wits.

Old-school sleuthing

“Emio – The Smiling Man,” out Thursday, is a fresh mystery in the storied “Famicom Detective Club” series. Its first games, naturally, came out on the Nintendo Famicom in the late 1980s. Decades passed before they got sleek anime-style remakes for the Nintendo Switch in 2021. Now, the original designer has returned with a sequel taking place shortly after the original period, around the dawn of the 1990s.

“Emio” is thus a throwback in both its setting and design philosophy. More modern visual novels like “Ace Attorney” or “Paranormasight” might require you to puzzle through contradictory testimonies and evidence. “Emio” instead steers you through deceptively linear conversations, quizzing you occasionally to ensure you’ve paid sufficient attention.

That’s not to say “Emio” plays quickly. I can point to the precise moment I realized the game wanted to make me squirm. I had hiked out to a crime scene, clicked at everything remotely suspicious, and then sat down to wait for a bus. Uncertain about how to progress, I spammed the “Think” action to hear my character muse about the case, then fall into a bored silence. I tried “Use Phone” only to find that the doofus had failed to charge his (still-newfangled) cell. I had him call out to the police officers who had also passed by the scene, only for him to shrug and say “Ahahah. Just kidding.” Some combination of desperate actions eventually resulted in a taxi cab coming to my rescue, but I really can’t remember what they were.

Staking out

You could see this as the game’s way of rewarding diligence and experimentation. In practice, it meant that I’d rapidly toggle between dialogue prompts and the “Call,” “Examine,” and “Think” actions to push the plot along. I once held what felt like a 10-minute staring contest with a wary car mechanic, before I realized that I needed to use the “Look” action not just anywhere on his person, but on his face particularly to get him to remark on my “kind eyes” and pronounce me worthy of his help.

I’ve only ever known one real-life P.I., who led me to believe that much of the work is that arbitrary and fatiguing. It’s a hard sell for a game, though — especially when the story isn’t quite worth the pain. “Emio – The Smiling Man” is YA fiction with just enough blood and trauma to justify its “Mature” rating. Sometimes, it could pace a genuinely tense sequence, but just as often its old-fashioned charms turned torpid and tedious. Worst yet, it never made me feel clever like the best adventure and mystery games do. Instead, I felt like a hapless observer who had stumbled into a much bigger story.

So while “Emio – The Smiling Man” has a strong opening and an even stronger conclusion, it’ll make you grimace far more often than it’ll make you grin.