Earlier today, Nintendo—the same Nintendo that gave us such delightful, family-friendly franchises like the Super Mario series, the Kirby series, the Pikmin series, and generally the overwhelming majority of gaming’s cutest characters—released a teaser trailer for a title called Emio.
Emio; what an adorable-sounding name, right? Here’s the thing; it belongs to a very-much-not-adorable, and in fact utterly terrifying, figure resembling a man in a dreary trench coat, whose face is covered by a paper bag with a ghastly smile drawn on it. Suffice to say the trailer is 19 seconds of unadulterated “nope.”
So, who is this Emio character?
Who is Emio?
Frankly, our guess is as good as the rest of the world’s; we know that Emio (a Romanized Japanese word) translates to “smiling man” in English, which checks out. He’ll also, of course, play a central role in the game of the same name (it’s not clear if he’s an antagonist or a protagonist; although an educated guess would land most of us on the former), and that game also appears to be a first-party Nintendo title.
Other than that, there’s little else to extrapolate; the best we can further assume about Emio is that he isn’t particularly knowledgeable when it comes to recycling, is not up on all the latest fashion trends, and will probably be the subject of relentless internet thirsting in due time (and really, that thought is far scarier than the implied threat of Nintendo’s newest and spookiest character).
At the time of writing, there is no confirmed release date for Emio, but it will release exclusively on the Nintendo Switch at some point in time.