Thinking Rabbit's Meurtre d'un Clown is out now on Switch

D4 Enterprise has released the 1985 PC-8801 adventure game Meurtre d'un Clown on the Nintendo Switch as part of its EGG Console series. The port is available today on the Japanese eShop for 880 yen.

Originally developed by Thinking Rabbit, the studio best known for creating the block-pushing puzzle game Sokoban, the title is a classic text-based mystery. You play as a Scotland Yard detective sent to the coastal town of Brighton in 1932. A circus clown named Charles Dubois has been found stabbed in the back inside a shower wagon, and you have to figure out who did it.

Thinking Rabbit originally marketed the game as their second "Disk Mystery" release after 1983's Keyhole Murder. The studio built a reputation for writing complex narratives with multiple plot twists. Most PC games at the time were simple arcade ports or basic dungeon crawlers, so this approach stood out. The victim is part of a traveling troupe, and the suspect list includes a trapeze artist, a lion tamer, a magician, a knife thrower, and the circus ringmaster. You have to interview all of them, gather evidence, and piece together the timeline of the murder before the circus packs up and leaves town.

Typing on a controller

Because this is a direct port of the PC-8801 version, it relies entirely on text input. Players progress by typing noun and verb combinations to investigate scenes and question suspects. To make this work on a modern console, the EGG Console release includes a specialized virtual keyboard overlay.

The interface maps the old keyboard layout onto the Switch screen. You can use a controller to select characters. It supports both English and kana inputs, though the game itself remains entirely in Japanese. If you have a compatible Japanese USB keyboard plugged into the Switch dock, the console can accept direct physical typing.

The parser system can be notoriously strict. You have to figure out the exact phrasing the game expects to trigger the next piece of dialogue or discover a hidden clue. This was a common hurdle for adventure games in the 1980s, and D4 Enterprise has left the original logic completely intact.

A long history of ports

This is not the first time the game has jumped to new hardware. After its initial PC-8801 and PC-9801 releases in 1985, it saw ports to the Sharp X68000 and the MZ-2500. It even received a full remake in 1997 for the Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and Windows under the title Inspector Minton's Investigation Files: Meurtre d'un Clown.

That 1997 remake modernized the experience. It replaced the text parser with a menu-driven system, redrew all the graphics, and added full voice acting. The EGG Console release ignores that version completely. It sticks to the original 8-bit pixel art and parser interface. The goal is to recreate the exact experience of playing it on a Japanese microcomputer.

The EGG Console project has been steadily bringing obscure Japanese microcomputer games to the Switch. D4 Enterprise uses a wrapper to emulate the original hardware. These releases usually add modern conveniences like save states and digital manuals. This specific release does not include a scene select function, so you will need to rely entirely on manual saves.

The end credits include a logo for Nippon Ichi Software. The company appears to hold the rights to the Thinking Rabbit catalog, which explains their involvement in licensing the title for this re-release. Playing a parser-based mystery on a modern gamepad is always a bit clunky, but it beats trying to track down a working PC-8801 and a floppy disk.