Summary
Nintendo’s mysterious Emio has received a mature age rating in Australia for “strong themes of violence”, “domestic abuse”, and “themes of suicide”, confirming once and for all that it’s a horror game.
Just a few weeks ago, Nintendo surprised us all with one of the most exciting and jam-packed Nintendo Directs it has ever had, which revealed that it was finallymaking a game where Zelda stars as the main characterand thatMetroid Prime 4 is still alive after all these years. You’d think, then, that it was done surprising fans for a little bit, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Yesterday, on what looked like a quiet Wednesday for gaming, Nintendo decided totease a brand-new project that is completely out of its wheelhouse - a first-party horror game called “Emio”. We don’t know much about the game so far (and it’s not technically confirmed to be first-party yet, although the signs are there),but it’s easily one of the strangest things Nintendo has ever done.
Emio’s Mature Age-Rating Confirms That It’s A Horror Game
Although the short teaser for Emio(also known as the Smiling Man) didn’t give too much away about what the game, if it even is a game, is all about, it did seem to heavily imply that Nintendo was trying its hand at horror, something that it very rarely does. Still, there was always the chance that it was some kind of bait-and-switch and not actually supposed to be scary.
Well, if you were hoping that Emio was just a bizarre way for Nintendo to start teasing the Switch 2 (a theory I’ve actually seen floating around far more than I expected), then you might want to rethink that.As pointed out by Redditor U_Puke over on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit, the trailer for Emio in Australia comes with a mature age rating that reveals more about what it’s all about.
Some theories have suggested that the project is actually being developed by Bloober Team, who said that it was working on an exclusive title for Nintendo. We’ll find out when the full reveal happens, but there is certainly a Bloober twinge to it.
That age rating,which can be spotted in a content warning before the trailer, suggests that Emio will contain themes of “domestic abuse”, “suicide”, and a “strong theme of violence”. That all but confirms that it’s going to be a horror project of sorts, which makes it even more interesting to see Nintendo platform Emio as much as it has been.
We’ll have to wait and see what Nintendo teases about the project next to see if it’s really a Bloober game and just how horror-centric it is, but at least we know for sure now that it’s going to feature some very dark themes.
