Pretty good detective game, great even for being so short. A girl named Seowon went missing and was never found leaving the case unsolved, until years later the retired detective who handled the investigation is urged to reexamine the details and try to figure out what happened to her
Searching through a mess of past conversations with the people relevant to the case, the goal of the game is to make sense of the detective’s distorted memories by reordering these conversations and assigning them to the right person, initially being confusingly jumbled until they gradually fit in proper order and you start to get an understanding of what was really going on. It’s only about 3 hours but found its mystery pretty compelling, and I liked the game’s simple pixel style and music which fit its moody tone really well
Searching through a mess of past conversations with the people relevant to the case, the goal of the game is to make sense of the detective’s distorted memories by reordering these conversations and assigning them to the right person, initially being confusingly jumbled until they gradually fit in proper order and you start to get an understanding of what was really going on. It’s only about 3 hours but found its mystery pretty compelling, and I liked the game’s simple pixel style and music which fit its moody tone really well
Another interesting new take on the ever-growing sub-genre of Detective Games.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved (NCSRU) revolves around unpicking information based on quotes and memories.
Predominantly you are reading text, sometimes accompanied by small bits of art, taking these short conversations and rearranging them like a jigsaw puzzle.
Much like a jigsaw puzzle you are identifying where things go based off of your own logic and previous information you have gathered.
With a jigsaw you’ll put specific colours close together, with the assumption that they will create a piece of the wider picture.
In NCSRU, if you are reading a conversation where someone refers to their child, you may gather these with the assumption it was a mother speaking.
However as the greater picture reveals itself, in a jigsaw, perhaps the colours you grouped together are from two distinct places, a red apple and a red t-shirt?
With NCSRU maybe their child isn’t a child anymore, maybe they’re not a parent and it ties to their profession?
The genius of NCSRU is how the game plays with your assumptions throughout, and when you stop to look at things from different perspectives, that is when the eureka moments happen.
Like any good puzzler, this game is full of them and also gives a great endorphin release when a domino effect occurs, as one conclusion leads to another and more doors become unlocked.
The locks themselves have some variety. Firstly you gain actual keys within the game for not just assigning who said what correctly, but the chronology of it.
Other locks will be behind specific information such as confirming important dates and times or pointing out key contradictions.
NCSRU’s visual information mostly revolves around quotes, but each will get assigned hashtags that allow you to connect the dots a little easier.
At times I wished there was a search function, but I appreciate the challenge would be vastly different and in this case probably easier. However when you get deeper and are looking for that one thing you know someone said to progress, the search can be tiring and made a little more difficult for me personally by some similar and unfamiliar names due to the Korean origins of the game.
Sadly even though the small amount of art this game has is wonderful, you are spending the majority of your time looking at a screen full of columns of text, this is not a complete turn-off for me, but I imagine it would be for many others.
As I say, the art there is, is simple and nice. The music too, is not mind-blowing but brilliantly implemented to change alongside your progress and when you notice it, it fills your heart with joy.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved is a compact game, taking a little over three hours to complete, but this felt like just the right amount of time for it to tell the story it wanted to.
One where not only are you unpicking lies but one where it really cleverly conveys the unreliability of memories, how key things can be missed, assumptions can pull things together which are separate and so much more.
At times you are skimming text and it feels a little like busy work, but the rest of it you are piecing together a beautiful puzzle and feeling like a genius while doing so.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved (NCSRU) revolves around unpicking information based on quotes and memories.
Predominantly you are reading text, sometimes accompanied by small bits of art, taking these short conversations and rearranging them like a jigsaw puzzle.
Much like a jigsaw puzzle you are identifying where things go based off of your own logic and previous information you have gathered.
With a jigsaw you’ll put specific colours close together, with the assumption that they will create a piece of the wider picture.
In NCSRU, if you are reading a conversation where someone refers to their child, you may gather these with the assumption it was a mother speaking.
However as the greater picture reveals itself, in a jigsaw, perhaps the colours you grouped together are from two distinct places, a red apple and a red t-shirt?
With NCSRU maybe their child isn’t a child anymore, maybe they’re not a parent and it ties to their profession?
The genius of NCSRU is how the game plays with your assumptions throughout, and when you stop to look at things from different perspectives, that is when the eureka moments happen.
Like any good puzzler, this game is full of them and also gives a great endorphin release when a domino effect occurs, as one conclusion leads to another and more doors become unlocked.
The locks themselves have some variety. Firstly you gain actual keys within the game for not just assigning who said what correctly, but the chronology of it.
Other locks will be behind specific information such as confirming important dates and times or pointing out key contradictions.
NCSRU’s visual information mostly revolves around quotes, but each will get assigned hashtags that allow you to connect the dots a little easier.
At times I wished there was a search function, but I appreciate the challenge would be vastly different and in this case probably easier. However when you get deeper and are looking for that one thing you know someone said to progress, the search can be tiring and made a little more difficult for me personally by some similar and unfamiliar names due to the Korean origins of the game.
Sadly even though the small amount of art this game has is wonderful, you are spending the majority of your time looking at a screen full of columns of text, this is not a complete turn-off for me, but I imagine it would be for many others.
As I say, the art there is, is simple and nice. The music too, is not mind-blowing but brilliantly implemented to change alongside your progress and when you notice it, it fills your heart with joy.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved is a compact game, taking a little over three hours to complete, but this felt like just the right amount of time for it to tell the story it wanted to.
One where not only are you unpicking lies but one where it really cleverly conveys the unreliability of memories, how key things can be missed, assumptions can pull things together which are separate and so much more.
At times you are skimming text and it feels a little like busy work, but the rest of it you are piecing together a beautiful puzzle and feeling like a genius while doing so.
como olvidar cuando son won gon secuestro a suon wokon hija de wonsugon delante de wansangon pero incrimino a gyonwonwon para cumplir la promesa que le hizo a syonwoson
No Case Should Remain unsolved is a fantastic adventure game that runs at about 3~ hours but never understays its welcome. Abstract, narrative-based indie games have had their time in the sun in the past decade or so but No Case Should Remain Unsolved nonetheless manages to keep things fresh with how it intuitively dispenses its narrative and intertwines it with the gameplay. The protagonist is essentially piecing together memories of a cold case about a child kidnapping that appear in the form of instant messages. The entire game takes place within this screen, more or less, but there's a very satisfying quality of working out the "how" and piecing together related fragments of the messages, while drawing inferences to guide you to the next piece of information that needs to be looked at. It's really something you have to try for yourself but it's immensely enjoyable and hits the sweet spot of "challenging, yet fair".
Hard to go to deep into the writing without spoiling anything (which I don't want to do), but it's excellent and the story wraps up very nicely.
Hard to go to deep into the writing without spoiling anything (which I don't want to do), but it's excellent and the story wraps up very nicely.
How we see people is played with beautifully in 'No Case Should Remain Unsolved'. There's a puzzle to unlock in fitting these characters' interwoven stories together, but what left a greater mark is the message of care placed throughout.
Excited to go back to Somi's other games after this :)
Excited to go back to Somi's other games after this :)
A small visual novel about trauma, mental health, and how families can get intertwined by the events of a few days. Kindness goes a long way.
Another entry in an increasingly long line of satisfying knowledge-based deduction games. This one admittedly features somewhat less work on the player's part, with a lot of memories being accessible just by chaining keywords from one to the next, but unlocking some and putting them all in order still requires some deductions and feels great, with a requisite "big important detail" you have to catch onto to untangle things in the late-game. The game is very short, playable in one session, but it's priced appropriately and that helps you keep all the details in your head. My only real gripe is that you can't zoom out or otherwise easily navigate the game window full of testimonies, things get pretty cluttered pretty fast and it can be hard to take note of things holistically instead of focusing just on the last thing you've seen.
This game reminded me of Iron Lung, in the sense that its central conceit is a simple one if you know what you're doing, but if you go in completely blind then you're gonna have a bad time. And I went in completely blind.
My advice to anyone interested in playing No Case Should Remain Unsolved is to read up on a review or two, so you actually know what it is you as the player are supposed to accomplish. Otherwise you'll be quickly overwhelmed by a string of unexplained deduction mechanics and confusing Korean character names that I initially struggled to remember. It was a big hurdle for me and I was truly lost for the first hour or so, as I haphazardly connected keywords to character statements and spent no small measure of time oblivious to the fact that I was supposed to list those statements chronologically and attribute them to the correct person. Oops!
Once I got over that bump in the road, NCSRU gradually revealed itself to be a relatively gripping low-key mystery. There's not much sense of danger here, but rather a lingering sense of melancholy that attaches itself to everything, from the art to the music to the way everyone behaves. It's very well written, and whoever worked on the English translation did a superlative job. A nice change of pace after recently suffering through the machine-translated dreck that was Mondealy.
In summation, as deduction games go, it's better than Duck Detective and not as good as The Case of the Golden Idol (but what is). Definitely give it a go if you like your detective games. Just make sure you do your homework first.
My advice to anyone interested in playing No Case Should Remain Unsolved is to read up on a review or two, so you actually know what it is you as the player are supposed to accomplish. Otherwise you'll be quickly overwhelmed by a string of unexplained deduction mechanics and confusing Korean character names that I initially struggled to remember. It was a big hurdle for me and I was truly lost for the first hour or so, as I haphazardly connected keywords to character statements and spent no small measure of time oblivious to the fact that I was supposed to list those statements chronologically and attribute them to the correct person. Oops!
Once I got over that bump in the road, NCSRU gradually revealed itself to be a relatively gripping low-key mystery. There's not much sense of danger here, but rather a lingering sense of melancholy that attaches itself to everything, from the art to the music to the way everyone behaves. It's very well written, and whoever worked on the English translation did a superlative job. A nice change of pace after recently suffering through the machine-translated dreck that was Mondealy.
In summation, as deduction games go, it's better than Duck Detective and not as good as The Case of the Golden Idol (but what is). Definitely give it a go if you like your detective games. Just make sure you do your homework first.
I keep messing up the korean names, really good game
This just wasn’t for me. The presentation was an instant turn off and I just couldn’t get into the story as a result. Interesting idea, but a miss for me.
pretty good puzzler, i wish the story and characters were a bit more engaging but the game wasn't long enough for that too effect my enjoyment of it.
a mess of miscontextualisation and a plea for kindness within institutions which deprive us, definitely been feeling a bit fragile lately because it had me in tears a few times.
the game demands a certain degree of attention and a slower pace which had me resetting my save early on once i realised i hadn't been giving what it wanted or deserved. i recommend making some notes on paper as you play and progress as it makes for a really authentic deduction experience.
the game demands a certain degree of attention and a slower pace which had me resetting my save early on once i realised i hadn't been giving what it wanted or deserved. i recommend making some notes on paper as you play and progress as it makes for a really authentic deduction experience.
Très prenant. Bien jauger entre les énigmes pour ne pas se lasser de la mécanique un peu redondante et surtout longue
No spoilers.
Not my type of game, but it was a different experience, it's more like an interactive book than a videogame.
The format is interesting, you read through logs and talk with people, then you find key words that unlock new information and slowly unvail the truth. You have to get through the conversation history many times to get the full picture of what's happening, and I guess was nice, you are investigating the case after all.
But I didn't like the conclusion at all, it didn't pay off after reading through so much nonsense for two hours, it felt like a weird cop out.
Not my type of game, but it was a different experience, it's more like an interactive book than a videogame.
The format is interesting, you read through logs and talk with people, then you find key words that unlock new information and slowly unvail the truth. You have to get through the conversation history many times to get the full picture of what's happening, and I guess was nice, you are investigating the case after all.
But I didn't like the conclusion at all, it didn't pay off after reading through so much nonsense for two hours, it felt like a weird cop out.