The latest game from Nintendo is an 18-rated murder mystery and you can try it out for yourself now, as a free demo is released. Nintendo and horror is not an obvious combination, but it’s not one that is completely unknown. Silicon Knights’ Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is the most famous example but around the same time there was also Geist, and not only did Resident Evil 4 debut on the GameCube but so did Resident Evil Zero and the remake of Resident Evil 1.
In fact, by their standards, Nintendo was obsessed by horror games during the GameCube era, which also led to a strange fascination with the Project Zero/Fatal Frame franchise (rumours that they’d bought the IP from Koei Tecmo proved not to be true, but they did seem to have some sort of vested interest in it – that they never explained). That brief interest in survival horror quickly subsided, until the surprise announcement, this July, of an unknown game initially named only Emio . The teaser trailer, of a trenchcoat-wearing man with a paper bag on his head, featuring a crudely drawn smiling face, looked more like something out of Silent Hill than a typical Nintendo game and at first nobody knew what on earth it was.
It was later revealed that Emio is part of the Famicom Detective Club series , which was certainly not what anyone expected. Famicom Detective Club is a short series of games released only for the Japanese version of the NES (the eponymous Famicom) and all but unknown in the West, at least.