Summary
I’m a sucker for mystery games, especially when there’s enough puzzling involved that I come out the other side feeling like a genius. That’s why games likeThe Case of the Golden Idolscratch that itch for me so well – likeReturn of the Obra Dinn, another mystery classic, it offers such a unique and replicable puzzle mechanic that I immediately wanted to see everywhere, on everything.
Golden Idol had you piecing together a wild mystery by filling in blanks with keywords, and Obra Dinn had you filling in a handbook matching clues to create a complete picture of what happened on a ghost ship where all of the crew had met a grisly end. Like those games, No Case Should Remain Unsolved does something I’ve never seen before.
This puzzle game opens with a woman weeping. She was a detective once, and feels a lot of guilt over the number of people she was never able to help and the pain that she turned a blind eye to during her career. A woman she doesn’t recognise asks her about a case from her past, involving a young girl called Seowon who was kidnapped. The former detective is distraught – she says her memory is jumbled, and that she can’t remember what happened, but knows she wasn’t able to save the girl. The stranger asks her to try to remember, and to untangle her memories so she can find out what really happened.
This is where the game’s fascinating puzzle mechanics come into play. Imagine something like Sam Barlow’s Immortality, where you clicked through video clips to find footage with similar objects or characters. Instead of using live-action video, No Case Should Remain Unsolved is completely text-based.
The game takes place on a timeline of sorts. You’ll have multiple columns for different people you speak to, each with an image, name, and title explaining who they are. These things may be redacted and uncovered as your investigation progresses. To learn more, you’ll ask questions, and the questions and subsequent answers will pop into the timeline where they were triggered. You’ll have to figure out who the speaker is, and reassign it to that character’s column, which will help you piece together who said what, and when.
Each answer also has an accompanying pixel art illustration in keeping with the rest of the game’s art style. These illustrations can be helpful in figuring out who the speaker is.
Threaded through each answer to a question are hashtags denoting themes, places, or events. Clicking on that hashtag will highlight other questions you can ask, and new answers with new hashtags to click on, which is important as you can only use each hashtag once. Character names may be mentioned as well, and clicking on those will allow you to un-redact names and figure out who these characters are and how they’re related.
After moving the answers into their appropriate columns, you have to place them in the correct order so you can figure out the sequence of events. When you do this correctly, the disparate blocks will connect, rewarding you with points. When you have enough points, you get a key, which you can use to unlock a locked question and discover a major clue. Other locked questions may not require keys – often, you can unlock these questions by answering a question about the case. To do that, you scour the information you’ve already dug up and select evidence from existing statements.
The game will tell you if you haven’t found the necessary information yet, and it also helpfully highlights specific lines to choose from so you aren’t going through the entire timeline, which does get quite big as you continue playing.
This complex puzzle mechanic would be wasted on a story that’s too simple to piece together, but No Case Should Remain Unsolved pulls the whole endeavour off with a compelling mystery full of twists and turns. Information is revealed at a pace that maintains tension while keeping you appropriately confused, until suddenly everything makes sense.
It’ll require lots of close reading to figure out what’s happening, but once you hit that revelation, it feels like a gut punch. I won’t go into specifics about the story so as not to spoil it – the game is only two hours long, so practically anything I say would be revealing – but it never stretches beyond the bounds of belief, and I finished the game feeling very sorry for everybody involved.
The game is, again, a speedy two hours long, and only $7 on Steam. I’m appalled that it’s slipped under the radar for so long, considering it was released in January, and I need everyone to play it right now. More importantly, I desperately need more games to use this mechanic, because it’s so easy for players to grasp and so unbelievably compelling. The only bad thing I can say about this game is that there isn’t more of it. Please give me a sequel immediately, because I need like, eight more hours of this.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved
WHERE TO PLAY
“I remember how surprised I was when I first saw this case. Everyone involved was lying, for one reason or another."#No_Case_Should_Remain_Unsolvedis a detective game where players uncover and piece together memory fragments to solve a long-forgotten case. Follow former police detective Jeon Gyeong as she acquires clues and testimony relating to the case of a missing girl.#No_Case_Should_Remain_UnsolvedFebruary 5, 2012. A little girl named Seowon is reported missing from a playground. Police launch an investigation and question witnesses and suspects, but Seowon’s case is never solved.Twelve years after Senior Inspector Jeon Gyeong’s retirement, she is visited by a young police officer: a woman who pleads with her to reexamine Seowon’s case.But with each uncovered memory, only one thing becomes clear: everyone in Seowon’s vicinity was lying.Features- Experience an imaginative reasoning system where players connect memories like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.- Uncover passcodes, keys, 54 conversations, and two hidden truths.- Over the course of a 2-3 hour playthrough, players will learn why Seowon’s disappearance is the only case Jeon Gyeong has left unsolved.- Also featuring an original soundtrack by Seongyi Yi, composer of Legal Dungeon and The Wake!
