Posted on: December 17, 2022
arcanum0
Games: 463 Reviews: 12
Political mystery games are hard
Dry Drowning is attractive and the music is beautiful, and the gameplay is reasonably compelling. However, the plot, while good intentioned, doesn't always click into place the way the writer expects. The tone is dreadfully grim, but then it is a noir game. The pacing of the mystery solving segments is such that you're not really figuring things out so much as following the main character's crystal clear instructions to use a particular item, whereupon he does a (pretty good) Hercule Poirot impression and cracks the case. Insofar as it is still a fun read, there is value here, although the English text is also a bleak example of why it is important to hire a native speaker of the language in which you are producing your game to handle final localization. It's fine, but it's not good. Still, the game is far from bad, and it deserves credit for having so many decision points and branching paths. There is a lot of replay value here, and it is entertaining enough to warrant a long look. However, in the end, Dry Drowning commits one of the cardinal sins of visual novels, in that it oversimplifies some very important choices in order to make them morally challenging and create drama. You can't arrest the suspect AND destroy the dangerous weapon; you must CHOOSE, and the reason these things are unavoidably linked is tenuous at best. In the end, it has a very 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' feel, and again, this is a noir game, so some of that is forgivable. But on the other hand, the designer could've just written a novel.
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