Dry Drowning Reviews

Criminally short, but fascinating. The art direction and the soundtrack are top-notch.

The storytelling is top-notch and captivating, but what really stands out are the countless meaningful interactions. Your choices have a profound impact on the story and how other characters perceive you, making every decision feel significant. This level of consequence adds a ton of replay value. The investigation mechanics are straightforward—not overly complex—but they do the job. However, where the game truly excels is in its presentation. The noir-inspired comic style perfectly complements the dark, moody narrative, while the original soundtrack elevates the atmosphere even further. The music shifts seamlessly between tension-building during pivotal moments and reflective during quieter investigation scenes, creating a deeply immersive experience.

Dry Drowning stands out with its cyberpunk vibe, psychological themes, and atmospheric music, though the lack of full audio is divisive. Its classic point-and-click gameplay feels familiar, but the story is hit-or-miss depending on your taste. Great for visual novel and light mystery fans, but perfectionists might find its flaws frustrating.

**This Review Contains Spoilers** (but don't worry, you aren't missing much) Another day, another style-over-substance cyberpunk property barely held together by tropes so tired you can hear them snoring in the background, Dry Drowning is a VN so poorly translated that at various points during one of the ending's epilogues it just gives up entirely and reverts back to whatever language it was originally written in (Italian? I'm not sure). Before that, it struggled to keep up the facade, being riddled with Google-tier literal translations such as "I agree with and appreciate these actions!" and "You are upset because of a reason?". Translation issues are the least of its problems though, because this game also insults the player's intelligence by lying to you. At the very beginning of the game, it boldly claims that there are no wrong choices and that you should play how you feel, and then spends the entirety of every single interaction you have moralizing about basically everything. In the case of the boring, overused "Nazi" parallel that is the Black Band political party arc, and which makes up a significant amount of the overall story, it doesn't present any of these characters as people who are acting on reasoning or motivation beyond being "racist" and in fact the game often introduces them with such loaded language right from the start. They are nothing more than grinning 80's cartoon villains, cackling on the peak of a stormy mountain at the amusement of their own evil. No attempt is ever made to explain their motivations beyond "immigrants bad" in order to set up a maudlin scene later on in *the best ending of the game*, which sees you and Hera getting fake identities and being deported after being harassed by a "racist" border guard. This was laugh out loud hilarious considering the kind of commentary this game was attempting to make for reasons that should be obvious: The game spends the entirety of its dialogue moralizing about racism and immigration and then presents being deported out into the world as the best possible outcome. I guess the immigrants being thrown out didn't have it so bad, after all! If you don't like it, leave! This confused, politically illiterate narrative, which comes across as a teenager's first attempts at socially conscious thought after seeing an Amnesty International ad, is also evident in its cast of characters: despite finger wagging endlessly about the value of diversity and the plight of the poor, downtrodden "immigrants" (who are never given any identity, descriptors or motivations beyond being "oppressed immigrants" somewhere off in the background where we don't actually have to see them because eww) the entire cast, from top to bottom, are all pretty White people. Like so much media in the 90's, this game wants its ideological cake and to eat it, too. That is to say, it wants to have all of the socially acceptable, "right" ideas that hope to impress the shallow DEI crowd that makes up its discord server, but without any of the realities that accompany it. But wait, there's more! The "good" supporting characters in this game are deranged lunatics who, in the case of the in-game trans ally, KILLS the main character (and revels in it like a psycho-villain from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni) if you don't save her trans friend in the chapter's first ending, despite letting the character die being the objectively correct moral choice in a baby's first trolley problem. This continues with the lawyer David and his sister, a pair of bloodthirsty sociopaths who, in various endings either kill you, kill your friends, or (in the best ending) threaten to kill you on sight if they ever see you again, and are presented as being the insiders who plan to take down the evil "fascists" they for some reason hate despite being indiscriminate killers themselves. With friends like these, who needs "fascists"? Between these characters, the all White cast, and the best ending being a message that amounts to "Love it or leave it, libtard!" I might begin to worry that this game was an elaborate parody that I failed grasp, if it weren't for the obvious messaging by the developer on social media and elsewhere signalling sincerity. It's a shame, too, because this would make the game far more interesting if that were the case! SIDE NOTES: -The other overarching story element about a serial-killer (that leads to the aforementioned trolley problem) boils down to a cult that formed at a retirement home over a living conditions dispute, and which you spend the entire overlong last half of the game flashing back and forth between past and present to justify some silly door opening puzzles that lead to this monumentally dull "revelation". No, I'm not kidding -The game presents "scare facts" about the local government in the bottom left hand of the screen while loading that are at times ideologically contradictory (the ones about unemployment being the highest shame while also declaring that women aren't encouraged to work so they can focus on family life comes to mind. Which is it, are they capitalist worker units being shoved through a meat grinder or is this the Handmaiden's Tale?) or are already long into practice IRL (Can you fathom what it might be like if the MEDIA was owned by the STATE! I mean sure that's already the case, but said media and state take the developer's preferred positions on most issues. But like, what if they DIDN'T! 😱😱😱) or are, quite frankly, good ideas but just don't jive with the developers personal views (sorry not sorry, but I'd personally love it if we had a government whose focus was taking care of the people who built the country it's in control of. China and Singapore are doing just fine, thanks). Like every other political story element, it tries to say everything at once and in doing so says a mish-mash of nothing at all -The most playable part of this game was the minigame Be A Good Citizen which I found myself far more invested in than the story by the time it got added to my menu -As cloying, confused, and loathsome as the narrative and characters are, the concept of seeing "masks" appear over lying characters and the refutation mechanics around that were pretty interesting and would be enjoyable under better circumstances. The same goes for the art, which was perfectly serviceable and had some great monster designs but was unfortunately the candy shell over this mess of a story -Just play Snatcher instead. You get all of the atmosphere but with no hammy moralizing, a better story, voice acting (if you play the Sega CD version) and a killer soundtrack