No Case Should Remain Unsolved is a mystery visual novel in which you’re exploring the unsolved case of a young girl’s disappearance. The central gimmick, which is revealed almost as soon as the game begins, is that the old detective’s declining memory has resulted in her being unable to remember the order or even the speakers of the quotes you read. The obvious comparison is Her Story, which had you solving a mystery by figuring out the order of short video clips, but I found this game to be the far superior of the two.
The game is presented as a series of columns that resemble either text threads or social media feeds, with each column representing one character. Each quote you unlock will have a couple of words marked with hashtags, which you can click on to unlock a different node with a matching tag. Some nodes also require you to answer a question or point to specific information that another character provided to unlock, and a third kind is unlocked using keys you earn from correctly ordering other quotes. It isn’t as freeform as the search box in Her Story, but it avoids the problem of accidentally discovering something from the endgame you weren’t looking for and the related problem of having no idea what keyword the game wants you to search next. You can always see which keywords are available, so if you don’t have one, it’s time to either look for another or start working on locks.
Another great feature is that you don’t start with all of the character columns available or even the names of most of the characters. All of your quotes start in the columns for three different characters, and you’ll have to figure out over time when a quote really belongs somewhere else and who names are most likely to refer to. It’s a great touch that really leads to some aha moments when you realize one speaker is actually two or that you’ve had identities swapped. It’s a very impressive use of a simple interface to tell and enhance the story.
As for the story itself, it’s well done. There are a lot of twists, but the ultimate answer isn’t anything as contrived as a lot of these games. You end up with a very complicated, but ultimately just about plausible scenario, and you can get there in about two hours. Thankfully, it doesn’t require any crazy leaps of logic like a lot of these games do. Sometimes it’s pickier about exactly which line you need to click than it probably should have been or the order of quotes is a little unintuitive, but it’s nothing that gets to be frustrating. The only issue I had was that exactly one lock is actually looking for an image rather than a quote, and it doesn’t communicate that clearly. I ended up opening that lock last only because I didn’t even realize the images were there for more than flavor.
It does have a couple of other flaws, though. The most obvious is the lack of a search function. You’ll spend a large chunk of your playtime scrolling through all the quotes you have available to find a specific tag you haven’t used yet, and while this does help give you a reason to re-read quotes and possibly find new information, it’s also slow and frustrating when all you want to do is find out if you have that tag somewhere. The interface can also get in the way when a new character column is finally introduced. Since they start unlabeled, it’s pretty likely that you have all the quotes somewhere else even if you’ve identified them all as being related, and there’s no quick way of moving them to the place the game actually wanted. This isn’t a major issue, and but it could’ve been handled better.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved is one of the better mystery games I’ve played in a while. It doesn’t have the runtime or bonkers twists that some games do, but it tells its story in a unique way and it’s nice to have a more grounded story once in a while. It’s short, but it’s also cheap and compelling from start to finish. Aside from a few minor interface and communication issues, this is an almost flawless game that’s well worth your time. I’m also just realizing now that this game is from a developer whose previous games have not landed at all for me, so it’s great to see one that really nailed the execution. Here’s hoping it’s the first of many.
Rating: 90%
Time to beat: Roughly two hours for everything
MSRP: $7
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041