Famicom Tantei Club Part II: Ushiro ni Tatsu Shoujo

About

This 1998 adventure game mixes mystery and folklore in a story driven by dialogue and deduction. You play a teen runaway who becomes an apprentice to a gruff private detective. After a schoolgirl’s murder, you comb a high school for clues while figuring out a decades-old case tied to a ghost story about a vengeful girl haunting students from behind. Choices shape how you interact with witnesses and suspects, though branching paths are limited. The narrative unfolds through static scenes and text, with puzzles centered around gathering information rather than action. The remake sharpens the original’s grainy 8-bit visuals into crisp pixel art while keeping the moody tone intact. Its slow-burn mystery and eerie atmosphere have earned a cult following, particularly for how it weaves urban legend elements into a grounded detective story. Though the pacing can lag during long investigations, the payoff in later chapters ties multiple threads together in a way that feels satisfying for fans of classic mystery fiction. Available on modern Nintendo platforms, it’s a time capsule of ’90s Japanese adventure design.

Storyline

The prologue scene depicts an autumn night as a 15-year-old boy (the protagonist of the game) is on the run from two police officers. A man, respected by the police, decides to care of the situation by himself. The man takes the boy to a coffeehouse, where the boy explains that he ran away from his orphanage to find his parents' whereabouts. The man introduces himself as a private detective named Shunsuke Utsugi, and convinces the boy to become his assistant. A few months later, Utsugi and the protagonist receive a phone call to check over a crime scene. The murder victim is a freshman schoolgirl named Yoko Kojima. The protagonist begins gathering information from Ushimitsu High School to solve the Yoko case and connect it with the Genjiro Kaneda case along with the help of Yoko's two high school friends; a girl named Ayumi Tachibana and a boy named Hitomi Kawaii. It soon emerges that Yoko was deep into an investigation of "The Tale of the Girl Who Stands Behind," a rumor involving a ghost of a blood-soaked girl that stands behind a student, and the trio set out to discover the truth behind this rumor.