Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club looks just as good as the 2021 remakes, but there wasn’t much to improve on. The art style looks a little more refined though, with the overall result settling into an easygoing aesthetic comparable to the best-looking of modern visual novels. The UI certainly feels like an old visual novel, with its clinical white textbox and text fonts harkening back to old computer systems of the time. Its investigation mechanic feels nostalgically opaque, but so different from the way modern visual novels do things that it circles back around to being new.

If you trace back point-and-click adventure games for a few decades, you’ll find that the one-button “use/interact with/talk to” mouse click expands to about 9 different commands that all sound too similar to each other to be useful. Famicom Detective Club reminds me a bit of that. More modern visual novels have largely eliminated unnecessary button presses, all seeming to adhere to an unspoken rule that says that unless the player’s input is actually required to continue the story, dialogue should continue uninterrupted. It says that characters should continue speaking until they have conveyed all the dialogue the scene has to offer.

This is not so in Famicom Detective Club. To get anything out of your witnesses and police informants, you’ll need to use a combination of vaguely similar actions: “Ask/Listen”, for when you want to choose the topic of the interview, “Call/Engage” for when you need to call the person over first (but also sometimes not?), “Show” for when you want them to comment on some evidence, “Look/Examine” for when you need to notice something about the person first, and “Think” for when you need Ninten Taro to think before he speaks. Much of the dialogue is only offered after you’ve muddled through a combination of the above, which often means trying all options every time until one works.

If all this seems like needless busy work, that’s because it is! Or, so said my first impression. But the more the game progressed, the more I noticed the subtle logic that directs the flow of each interview. The key is not to view the interactions like the usual video game transaction where you press the Talk button and get The Clue, but as a real detective trying to get breadcrumbs out of witnesses. Real conversations don’t follow a set track, after all. They jump from one topic to another, get sidetracked, or are inspired by a new development. When a witness falls silent, you have to prompt them. To ask someone why they look so glum, you must first have looked at them to notice their glumness. And sometimes, before you know what to ask next, you need to stop and think.

If anything, this busy work makes the investigation feel a little more grounded than other mystery games, because it reflects what real detective work must be like: talking to the same people multiple times, digging through old records, and fruitlessly asking around. That doesn’t mean this method is the most elegant way of achieving this effect; it’s actually a bit clunky. Luckily, Emio is a competently written mystery that peppers in enough interesting developments that you’ll probably be too engrossed in the plot developments to mind gameplay that’s a bit opaque. It helps that once in a witness interview, the option to travel elsewhere is locked off until you’ve gotten all the clues, which avoids the possibility of moving on too early by accident.