This year has been relatively quiet on the detective genre front. I’ve got my eye on a handful of upcoming titles - fill-in-the-blank sequel The Rise of the Golden Idol and comedy point and click Loco Motive come immediately to mind. I loved the mystery aspects of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, but I had a detective game itch for the past couple of months that needed a satisfying scratch.
That was until I played No Case Should Remain Unsolved, a detective visual novel that has properly knocked my socks off. From the screenshots, you wouldn’t think this was a very think-adjacent game, but I’ve had a great time wracking my brain around its fragmented story.
The set-up is pretty peculiar. You play as Senior Inspector Jeon Gyeong, a retired detective who is visited by a police officer. The young woman asks Jeon to recall a certain case from her past, one about a little girl called Seowon who went missing twelve years ago. The way that Jeon recalls the events of the case is structured testimonies of those who were involved in the case - the girl’s parents, her brother, her grandmother, her school teacher, and others. Jeon’s memories are in fragments, so it’s up to you to figure out not only a timeline of events but also who said what and when.
Each testimony is structured into columns and a portrait of each character sits at the top. You can move snippets of dialogue around columns - trying to piece together a conversation between Jeon and each character to make a completed transcript. You can assign a speaker to each snippet and then move the pieces into each character’s dialogue column. It’s a little overwhelming at the beginning, trying to work out who said what with the little info you’re given. A piece of dialogue might mention taking Seowon to school the morning she went missing so presumably it’s a member of her family who said that. But which one?
This deductive reasoning is at the game's core. You need to use snippets of information to construct a timeline. After an hour this will feel more intuitive, learning little tricks to help you with this messy game of who's who. But just as you’re settling the game will find subtle ways of keeping you on the backfoot. One of the first snippets you read is someone admitting to kidnapping Seowon, but that line of thinking quickly unravels as you work out who said that and why they admitted it. Another snippet describes someone pleading with the detective: “Please don’t look for my daughter anymore…Keep her completely out of her mother’s reach.” So surely that’s the father? And why does he not want Seowon’s mother involved? Is there some context I'm missing?
These hooks get in you early and last for the game's four-hour playtime. You’re given a handful of snippets at the beginning of the game to kick off your investigation, but as you correctly assign them more will unlock. Some dialogue is often locked with a question, and you’ll have to connect it with another dialogue piece as your answer. Playing felt like I had a detective pinboard in front of me, moving snippets around to try and visualise a timeline of events.
I love this vertical system as it structures the game in a way that it feels like the story and case are developing in front of you in real time, instead of an old woman recounting it. It feels like you’re going through the same thought process that the detective was going through at the time - making wrong assumptions, reevaluating someone's testimony, and working out who’s lying as you slowly build a timeline of events. It takes the phrase “piecing the puzzle together” pretty literally. Occasionally evocative pixel art will pop up at certain dramatic moments, reminding you that these events happened to people and not just disembodied paragraphs of text.
I did run into some moments where I had a pretty good guess of some story beats but had no idea how to trigger them in the game, but these were few and far between. More often than not I was excited about how often the game would pull a switcheroo on me, a neat little twist to make me second-guess my assumptions. Nothing felt more satisfying than when I had assigned someone’s testimony to a character, only to realise that, actually, I had their entire identity wrong. A few lines of text have the power to make you rethink everything - pure galaxy-brain moments. The ending is satisfying too and not one that I’ll spoil here. Just feel safe in the knowledge that you’ll get a satisfying ending.
I am super impressed with No Case Should Remain Unsolved. It’s a brilliant bite-sized detective game that feels concise and satisfying. It’s testimonial ‘he said, she said’ system is totally original and executed perfectly. It's definitely a Thinky gem of 2024.
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