“I have been making indie games on my own for 10 years now” says Somi, a South Korean indie developer, to Excaliber. “I majored in law in college and still work in law enforcement, so my major and profession have nothing to do with games. But I have always had a strong desire to create something beautiful in the midst of my repetitive daily routine. So, I started making games around 2014 when I taught myself Unity. ” This is how Somi’s career as a developer began. A career that, 10 years later, has culminated in his sixth and most recent work: No Case Should Remain Unsolved, a detective video game released earlier this year on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
No Case Should Remain Unsolved is a narrative game that places players in the role of retired police detective Gyeong Jeon, who, after 12 years, must reopen the only case she failed to solve during her career: the disappearance of a young girl named Seowon in February 2012. Using a dynamic deductive system, players must gather clues and recall testimonies collected in the past by Gyeong Jeon. By piecing together all the elements in the correct order, like parts of a grand puzzle, they will uncover the truth behind this mysterious unsolved case. It’s no easy task, as everyone involved in the case and connected to Seowon lied to the police.
“When I sent test builds to a few publishers before the game was released, the response was not good” Somi explains, reflecting on the months leading up to the title’s launch. “They mainly analysed the game’s appearance and systems and found it unattractive. I began to worry about how No Case Should Remain Unsolved would be received, and I thought I was creating a game that no one would play. However, when I sent it to two translators for localization, the response was amazing: on the same day, both sent me an email saying that they were so moved by the game that they cried a lot, as if they had played it together. That gave me a little bit of hope. ” This experience fortunately convinced Somi to stay true to his vision, despite the publishers’ initially unfavourable opinions.
In less than a year since its release, No Case Should Remain Unsolved has garnered over 4,800 overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam, winning over the audience. It has also received numerous prestigious awards, including the Best Game Design Award at the Tokyo Game Show, the Most Amazing Game Award at A Maze. / Berlin, the Excellence in Game Design Award at BitSummit, and the Narrative Award at the IndieCade Festival. A great achievement for a developer like Somi. “ Winning these awards means a lot to me. It is a validation of what I have been working on and the direction I am going in. In 2016, I won the Impact Award at IndieCade for a game titled Replica. And this year, IndieCade gave me the Narrative Award for No Case Should Remain Unsolved. I felt that the things I was trying to express through games, the way I was approaching the medium of games, were recognized, and it motivated me to continue the same path. “
The success of No Case Should Remain Unsolved can be attributed to several factors. One of them is undoubtedly the unique gameplay system, which keeps the player at the centre of the experience and offers the opportunity to solve the case independently through reasoning, even though the story is structured linearly. “My goal was to convey both the joy of deduction and the surprise of discovering plot twists by presenting a fragmented story that initially draws on preconceptions and biases to mislead the player but ultimately reveals something entirely different” Somi explains. It was a challenging task, as it is well known that players often think outside the box in ways that are very difficult for a game designer to anticipate. “I remember asking many developer friends to test the game and share their impressions during the production phase” he recalls.
But how did No Case Should Remain Unsolved come to life? “The idea for the game came to me while reading The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes” Somi explains. In the game, he directly quotes a line from the novel: ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ It was based on this line that Somi created the protagonist, Gyeong Jeon, whose memory of past events is fragmented and unclear. ” I also drew inspiration from other works. Starting with the film The Father, starring Anthony Hopkins, which features an elderly woman suffering from dementia. And the novel N by Shusuke Michiyo, where the reader can have a completely different experience depending on which of the six chapters they read first. But I was also influenced by many detective novels by Japanese authors such as Keigo Higashino and Miyuki Miyabe. ” While playing No Case Should Remain Unsolved, some might notice narrative similarities to the first season of the acclaimed series True Detective, which Somi, however, has yet to watch. “I will definitely watch it!” he promised.
As previously mentioned, No Case Should Remain Unsolved is the sixth video game created by Somi. It all began with a couple of purely experimental titles. The first, Rabbit Hole 3D, is a minimalist puzzle game based on the first chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Retsnom, on the other hand, is a work centred around the concept of reflections in a mirror, presenting a platformer with original mechanics and a deceptive title. After these initial projects came the Guilt Trilogy, a video game trilogy consisting of Replica, Legal Dungeon, and The Wake: Mourning Father, Mourning Mother. “Through the Guilt Trilogy, I wanted to use games as a medium to showcase my own limitless guilt, and hope that it would be able to touch people” Somi reveals. ” Replica was about the guilt of a helpless individual under the control and surveillance of a tyrannical government, Legal Dungeon was about the members of an organization conforming to an unjust system in society, and The Wake is more fundamentally about the guilt that I, the developer, constantly ruminate on through the pain of my childhood. ” These delicate themes laid the groundwork for the creation of No Case Should Remain Unsolved, although the works are not directly connected. “After the release of the Guilt Trilogy, I wanted the game to be perfectly beautiful in its own right, not just as a medium, not just as a tool to convey a message, but as a game. So, beyond the characters and story of No Case Should Remain Unsolved, I sought to create a complete world that could exist independently of its author. “
But how much work is required to create such rich and multifaceted narrative works? “I read a lot of novels, watch a lot of movies, and play a lot of games to get ideas for new games. Once I have decided on a field, I must study the details of it by reading books about it. After that process, I think the direction and content will be decided to some extent. ” It’s no surprise, then, that when asked if he is already working on his next video game, Somi simply and honestly replies: “I don’t have any specific plans yet.“
While waiting for news, there is nothing left to do but enjoy No Case Should Remain Unsolved. Starting today, and thanks to the translation by Excaliber, the game is finally available in Italian on Steam. ” I am glad that Excaliber understood the content and overall atmosphere of the game, as well as the characterization of each individual character, and helped me create an incredible translation. I hope this update makes the game more accessible to everyone who speaks Italian. And I want to thank everyone who has always supported No Case Should Remain Unsolved ” Somi concludes with a warm smile.
