I’m a sucker for a solid noir story. Give me a Maltese Falcon or take me to Sin City any day. Sci-fi noir is even better, with Dark City and Blade Runner slipping easily into the category. But there simply aren’t that many games in the genre. And if you never played Hotel Dusk Room 215 or the sequel, Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, both on the DS, you definitely missed out. But now there’s some new noir on the Switch!
Dry Drowning is a sci-fi noir murder mystery visual novel from Italian indie studio Studio V. Published by VLG Publishing, it tells the story of private detective, scoundrel, and failure Mordred Foley as he tries to recover from the fallout of his last investigation. He’s joined by his assistant Hera as they investigate a series of grisly killings. There have been a few games like this recently, notably the excellent Tokyo Dark -Remembrance- about a year ago. Dry Drowning has a similar overall design but definitely not the same structure or feel.
As Mordred, you’re reluctantly brought in to investigate a particularly nasty murder. Your goal is to exonerate the suspect, an extremist right-wing politician who has led the city of Nova Polemos near to ruin. In examining the scene, you’ll find a variety of clues and have several personal interactions. While the opening cinema for Dry Drowning is incredibly dramatic and interesting, you’ll quickly find that the vast majority of the game is Mordred simply standing and talking to various characters with text boxes at the bottom of the screen. Fortunately, the writing is pretty solid, has some interesting ties to mythology, and is overall fairly well-translated, but as visual novels go, there’s not a lot of flair here.
Once you’ve examined the scene, you’ll head to the police station and various other locations in a search for the killer. Dry Drowning uses a unique system that forces you to make key choices occasionally. While you only get to choose one or the other, both choices are invariably terrible, resulting in much gnashing of teeth and hesitation on the part of the player. Mordred is a terrible person, Hera is damaged as all hell, and most of the other people you’ll interact with are liars, thieves, and cheats. That’s the appeal of the game though. Everyone is flawed, damaged, and somehow manages to shuffle their way through life, justifying their decisions and often making the wrong ones.
Eventually, you’ll stumble across one of the several minigames strewn throughout Dry Drowning. The first one is the Living Nightmare. For reasons unbeknownst to even him, Mordred sees horrific, monstrous visages of people that lie to him. The screen shifts, twists, and suddenly their heads are replaced with that of a monster. At this point, you’ll decide what line of questioning to pursue. Get an answer wrong, and one of the eyes above Mordred’s head goes bloody. Fail all three and its game over, though it doesn’t really matter if you lose as you can just restart at the beginning of the interrogation. There are other minigames as well, requiring puzzle solving and attention to detail. Unfortunately though, the distractions that those games provide don’t really take away from the overall slow pacing of the game.
As you play further through Dry Drowning, you’ll find that not only is Mordred despicable, he’s also stuck, unable to rebuild his life or even recognize his faults. Supporting cast members come and go, but most aren’t particularly interesting. Even the murders start to feel commonplace by the middle of the second chapter. By the fourth, things are getting pretty tedious. It’s ironic that a game that forces you to make some of the hardest bifurcated choices ever in a game is overall quite slow and drawn out, but the simple fact of the matter is that Dry Drowning is not a particularly well-balanced game.
On top of balance issues and a slow story, there are some technical issues that plague Dry Drowning as well. First amongst these is the text. This game has some of the worst font choices imaginable, especially on the Switch in portable mode. Naturally, there is no way to change the font size, and in addition to the occasional moving sentence or wiggly letters, the font is so small on the undocked Switch for virtually everything that it was almost impossible to read. Perhaps if you had the eyes of a hawk or something, but for us average humans, this is a terrible choice. Even docked on a large TV, the text was significantly smaller than it should be, a simple oversight that definitely needs corrected. There were also a few typos, but this is a translated game, and considering some of the simply atrocious Engrish we’ve seen come out of Japan over the years, absolutely forgivable.
What isn’t forgivable though is the terrible GUI (that’s Graphical User Interface) design that is rife throughout Dry Drowning. The controls are some of the least intuitive ever, requiring odd button presses, weird menu options, bad iconography, and a host of other small issues that end up piling up into a pretty rough interface overall. It’s easy to press the wrong button here, resulting in weird responses you didn’t intend to, presenting the wrong evidence, or even getting a game over simply due to bad button layouts. This is unforgivable, especially for a game where you only control your character through menu selections and highlighted text boxes. In fact, sometimes it’s even hard to tell which text boxes are highlighted, a simple design flaw that should never have made it into the finished product.
But for all its flaws, Dry Drowning looks pretty good. The character designs are solid, the monsters and backgrounds are creative, 2066 Nova Polemos and its denizens are interesting and even the background politics of the Black Bands are creative and captivating. Character backstory is solid, and the dark, gritty feel that permeates everything in the game is almost palpable. There’s no question that this is a firmly noir title with some seriously dark content and from a graphic design standpoint, excluding the interface, it’s awesome. The game has subtle music too, but it works, as do the minimalist sound effects that pop up from time to time. You won’t be going out looking for the soundtrack, but it’s definitely noticed.
Ultimately, you’re getting pretty much what’s advertised with Dry Drowning. A dark, adult noir murder mystery that forces you to make unpleasant and memorable decisions, slowly dragging you down along with Mordred and company. Sure, it’s rough around the edges. Yes, the characters are unlikable (they’re supposed to be!). But it’s overall an interesting story, and certainly a good effort, even if it won’t end up being the next bestseller. That being said, the price point is a bit high for what you’re getting at $25, especially since there are a lot of really solid visual novels out there these days, and you can often grab them on sale much cheaper. At only around 6 or 7 hours, depending on how fast you read, chances are you might want to wait for a sale on this one. It’ll certainly be worth your time, but perhaps not on day one.
This review was based on a digital copy of Dry Drowning provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes. Dry Drowning is also available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on Steam.