Dry Drowning Reviews

The visuals and music are good. The gamepad support is well done. It's a professional work in that regard. However, the world building, plot, prose and dialogue are laughable. From the first line of text on screen it's obvious that prose is not going to carry the experience. For a visual novel this is dangerous territory. The world building is mostly established through glossary entries given out to the player. If limited to extra information presented with context this would be fine. Plenty of great games do it. However the way it's done here makes a rookie mistake: Core details about the world are thrown at the player at the start of the game without reason or context. Since players are not yet invested in the characters or world, they're not going to care about the history of your fictional city. Further more, if the information isn't relevant to story and isn't interesting to read, nobody is going to care. Nobody wants homework before reading a story. The plot makes do with recycling old tropes. That's fine but the key to success is making it interesting. You can't lean on them to carry your story. The characters don't have any sort of depth or personality which makes it interesting to watch them navigate the story. The quality of the prose is extremely low. Even forgiving the multiple typos, of which any amount is an embarrassment, the narration is the sort of purple prose you could make an ugly carpet out of. It's thick and clunky. It draws attention to itself and doesn't complement the space it takes up. It speaks too much while saying nothing. It wastes your time. Is there worse out there than Dry Drowning? Sure. There's worse. Is it an engaging story? Maybe, if your love of pseudo-noir stories set in a vaguely cyberpunk city outweighs your need for a good read. The visuals are nice and there is a mystery to unravel but you really should ask yourself: Do I want to play a game that is 90% text when the prose is awful and the plot and characters are paper-thin?