Review for No Case Should Remain Unsolved
In No Case Should Remain Unsolved, the latest game by Korean developer Somi, the novel The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is quoted: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” This quote lays the foundation for the entire game. You’ll contend with the limits of human memory and incomplete police records to solve an enigmatic and engaging puzzle.
Your goal is to piece together the fragmented memories of Senior Inspector Jeon Gyeong. She’s visited by a young police officer who implores her to revisit a cold case because, as the title suggests, no case should remain unsolved. The rookie is there to help and prompt Jeon, but the information she has is insubstantial, and Jeon’s memories are hazy. Sorting through all of it is a daunting task.
After a brief dialogue scene with Jeon and the young officer, you’re presented with a large board filled with snippets of testimonies from different characters. These snippets are placed haphazardly, meant to represent the chaotic nature of human memory as well as the incompetencies of police work. You’ll need to assign each piece to the right character, arrange them chronologically, and connect them to unlock new pieces that reveal important details about the case.
The enigma in question involves a little girl who has gone missing from a playground. The various persons of interest who were interviewed at the time of the disappearance include the child’s parents, brother, babysitter, and teacher, among others – represented by delicate pixel art visuals. Each interview is divided into blocks of individual statements. Some of these statements are supplied to you from the outset, but you’ll have to unlock most of them in order to make sense of the whole situation.
There are three different types of statement blocks that you can unlock by accomplishing different tasks. Blue blocks are the most plentiful and also the easiest. They require you to find keywords that correlate to the hashtags shown within the block. Purple blocks are a little more challenging, as they involve finding the appropriate date or piece of evidence based on context clues. Lastly, yellow blocks direct you to arrange statements in the correct timeline and pair them with the correct person, which gets you closer to the final truth.
As you unlock more statements and inch closer to the conclusion, the screen becomes more and more cluttered, to the point where it can feel a bit like information overload. Thankfully, one of the game’s features is a mini-display in the bottom-right corner of the screen, which allows you to jump to any block on the board. Certain blocks will flash when you’ve found a corresponding keyword or the information you need to unlock them, so you know exactly which ones to click on. I found this mini-map of sorts quite helpful when navigating the convoluted dialogue branches. It’s a thoughtful feature in an overall thoughtful game.
According to an interview with Somi by Minimap, there are a total of 54 conversations in the game. Somi did quite a lot of writing, and the result is a well-developed story told completely through dialogue. It’s an interesting concept that’s eloquently executed. The case may be a little hard to follow at first, as everything is out of order, but once you arrange all of the blocks correctly, you’re given the opportunity to read over the transcripts again and declare whether or not you understand the case as a whole. There is no voice acting, so it does require quite a lot of reading, which may be something to keep in mind.
The game is short but sweet; I finished it in about three hours. The “true” ending is a twist on top of a twist, but Somi lays the groundwork for both twists during the gameplay, so they don’t come out of left field, and the story builds up to its conclusion quite deftly. It’s an emotional narrative that had me thinking about my own shaky memory, unfinished business, and how our perception alters situations. Sometimes we have to completely change the way we view something in order to truly understand it, and not everything is as it initially seems.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved tells a compelling story through non-traditional text-based mechanics, and it truly is unlike anything else I’ve played. While it may feel overwhelming at first, I urge anyone who gives it a try to stick with it, because it’s amazing how each piece falls into place not only on the interface but also in your mind, leaving you with full comprehension of what happened and plenty to contemplate.
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