With a game like Famicon Detective Club, you expect to feel like a detective. The clue is in the name, right? This remake, following 30 years after its original 1980s Japan-exclusive debut, is more about stumbling across the right answer than making you feel anywhere near like an investigator.
In 1988 and 1989, Nintendo released two murder mystery visual novels in the form of the Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir and The Girl Who Stands Behind. A very notable deviation from the usual bright and cheerful Nintendo that we know, these games followed the path of a young man as he became embroiled in the investigation of various murders. These were some of the very early examples of visual novels and some of a few directly handled by Nintendo itself. A little more than three decades later, Nintendo not only decided to unearth these games and remake them, but offer them worldwide, and having looked at where they came from, the new Famicom Detective Club games might be one of the more interesting and feature-rich visual novels I’ve seen, especially if you’re down for a good mystery.