This Famicom Detective Club game differs from the others in a number of ways. Firstly, for some reason, “Famicom Detective Club” is now the subtitle rather than the title. Secondly, there are a few tweaks to the dialogue system (which I’ll explain in a bit), but the big one is that this isn’t a remake of a 40 year old Famicom title – it’s a completely new game in the series, with the murder mystery story written by the same person as those games were all that time ago.
This time round, you’re needed to investigate the creepy case of a child has seemingly been murdered by a man wearing a paper bag with a face drawn on it, and is actually quite scary. As you uncover more, you find that it would appear to be linked to a series of murders from about 18 years prior (which, coincidentally, your boss investigated at the time) as well as the disappearance of two people, one of whom is the brother of the police officer assigned to the current case. It’s all a bit twisty and it’s really good.
Although it obviously uses the same game engine as the other two games, this one is improved a bit. The biggest change is the (optional) highlighting of words in your conversations that may link to questions or actions you can choose from the menu, and provide new information. This gets rid of most of the press-everything-until-the-right-thing-happens issue from the other games, although it isn’t a complete fix. Still, a massive improvement.
I can’t say much more about the game as it’ll ruin it for anyone who is going to play it, but it is much darker in tone than the first two titles, which weren’t exactly light to start with. If you like murder mysteries, this is an essential play.
