Here’s an unexpected one for the 2024 bingo card – Nintendo has dropped a creepy teaser overnight for what appears to be a horror title of some kind.
The video, simply titled Emio, simply shows an image of a person in a trenchcoat against a dark background, wearing a paper bag over their head with a smiling face drawn on. We get a few camera cuts, a flash of unsettling paper bag teeth and some classic spooky music.
It’s a confounding thing, with almost nothing in the way of a description aside from the repeated phrase of “Who is Emio?” and the fact that in Japanese the video is reportedly titled, “The Smiling Man.”
Could this be the first tease of a Switch 2 launch title? Is this an elaborate tease for a different game? Have they let Yoko Taro and Shinji Mikami co-direct the next Detective Pikachu? Whatever the project is, it’s got age ratings across the globe, so it’s definitely a game/product of some kind. In Australia, it carries an MA15+ rating for “Strong themes, violence and suicide references,” while in the NZ it’s nabbed an R-13 rating for “Violence, cruelty, domestic abuse and suicide themes,” suggesting the subject matter here is going to be well outside of the norm for the company.
? https://t.co/OKJv2qrTse pic.twitter.com/TKwZu8we8b
— Nintendo AU NZ (@NintendoAUNZ) July 11, 2024
Nintendo’s not dabbled a whole lot in horror outside of publishing some exclusive third-party efforts like Eternal Darkness and Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water, so it’d be excellent to see the company return to the idea.
There’s a teaser website for Emio live now via Nintendo Japan, suggesting this is genuinely a new first-party title from its studios, or a third party close by, but it seems we’ll have to wait to find out anything more.
Check out the trailer at this link or just below (age gated, amusingly):
