Dry Drowning

Dry drowning is halfway between a visual novel and a point and click game. Based on the Steam tags I expected the former, but there was no hint for the later. Still, there will be investigation parts where you will have to hunt for highlightable objects, and interact with them. Also you will have to use the correct inventory / person elements a lot of times during the game. Thankfully there won’t be a need to combine elements in the inventory.
The graphics of the game are adequate. There will be several environments / rooms as the backgrounds. The black and white avatars of the NPCs will be put in these environments. They are reasonably detailed, with a few facial setups to show emotional responses.
The background music is generally OK, the piano parts being perhaps the most memorable ones. There is no voice acting, apart from the intro before the main menu.
There will be a few puzzles in the game, generally speaking each one will be something completely different. But the bulk of the game will be the detective parts. It will have discussion parts and investigation parts where you gather evidence / information. Eventually a confrontation phases will happen, where you must use the correct evidence, or nudge the discussion onward with a correctly selected dialog. A few times there won’t be repercussions for selecting the wrong item, but most of the times you will be allowed only 3 mistakes during the whole confrontation phase. It you select the wrong items/dialog, it is game over, and you will begin right from the beginning of the confrontation. It can get quite lengthy, especially when I had no idea which person should I correctly select out of 10+. Repeating these confrontations several times from the beginning was a bit grating, there should have been internal checkpoints after every 2-3 selection, to skip repeating the exact same initial discussion. Sure, the lines of a person could be fast forwarded, but that had to be repeated for every speaker change, and then the already known correct evidence had to be selected again and again.
The writing of the game is good. Thankfully this game has a fully grown up cast, opposed to the typical Japanese visual novels. The story will be heavily influenced by the presence of an oppressive government, with anti-freedom and anti-immigrant stance. While the writing is good, some text feels a bit weird, especially the description of some inventory items in the first chapter.
The save system isn’t good. You cannot always save, but even when manual save is available, there is no telling how much earlier state it will save. The game autosaves at given points, it just doesn’t give any feedback about that. Perhaps when the diary objective changes? I lost progress when entering a new surroundings I assumed it autosaved the change.
The current objectives will be listed in the diary. There can be several places that can be visited. If I got to a seemingly dead end, I just started to travel to some other location, that usually solved the impasse. It can get a bit confusing, like being in the police office and I want to speak with an officer – I had to go to a park to initiate that conversation.
Eventually a minigame will be unlocked, with a pipe flow puzzle. You must solve it once to progress the story, but later on can return to it when out of dialogs, and advance through some randomly generated levels. Completing 10 levels will give an achievement, completing 30 levels another one. Since the levels are randomly generated, their difficulty will be random, not increasing.
The first playthrough took me a little over 9 hours, and I got the tragic ending. Trying new game+ catapulted me to unleash my “hidden power”, gaining an achievement (completing the Be a good citizen 10 times in a previous playthrough is required to unlock the hidden power).
During the 3 detective chapters, there will be tracked choices. They are marked as such. Not every one of them seemed to me to have important effect, but some of them will have grave consequence immediately, some will have grave consequence down the line. Based on your choices you will get one of the 3 versions of chapter 4. Once you reach chapter 4, the outcome is already set in stone, you just have to progress through it. Finishing the game once will offer a new game+, where you can start right before the final choice in chapter 1. Also this is the first chance to select the hidden power easter egg. I wasn’t that interested in replaying the chapters repeatedly to reach a possibly different ending, so I just watched the other two endings on Youtube.
The game switches seamlessly between keyboard&mouse and controller. I played it with a controller, using it felt natural.
Since I liked the game, I checked out the Italian developer for other products. They mostly finished the base of a medieval game during the Italian renaissance, but for whatever reason that game never reached distribution.
The game was stable, it didn’t crash for me.

Steam User 1

Reviewed last year

An amazing story that really woke me up:) The plot is profoundly and logical.
I'm afraid I won't be able to finish this narrative since it has more parallels to my own life than I thought. Every decision is a tough trial...But whether we choose the front or reverse of a coin, we may just be pulling ourselves further into a bottomless chasm. Similar like the story's detective: insane or lonely. Which would you prefer—going through those difficult times with the precious love or ending up a successful, bloody murderer with scars from your wounds?
Steam User 1

Reviewed last year

Dry drowning is halfway between a visual novel and a point and click game. Based on the Steam tags I expected the former, but there was no hint for the later. Still, there will be investigation parts where you will have to hunt for highlightable objects, and interact with them. Also you will have to use the correct inventory / person elements a lot of times during the game. Thankfully there won’t be a need to combine elements in the inventory.
The graphics of the game are adequate. There will be several environments / rooms as the backgrounds. The black and white avatars of the NPCs will be put in these environments. They are reasonably detailed, with a few facial setups to show emotional responses.
The background music is generally OK, the piano parts being perhaps the most memorable ones. There is no voice acting, apart from the intro before the main menu.
There will be a few puzzles in the game, generally speaking each one will be something completely different. But the bulk of the game will be the detective parts. It will have discussion parts and investigation parts where you gather evidence / information. Eventually a confrontation phases will happen, where you must use the correct evidence, or nudge the discussion onward with a correctly selected dialog. A few times there won’t be repercussions for selecting the wrong item, but most of the times you will be allowed only 3 mistakes during the whole confrontation phase. It you select the wrong items/dialog, it is game over, and you will begin right from the beginning of the confrontation. It can get quite lengthy, especially when I had no idea which person should I correctly select out of 10+. Repeating these confrontations several times from the beginning was a bit grating, there should have been internal checkpoints after every 2-3 selection, to skip repeating the exact same initial discussion. Sure, the lines of a person could be fast forwarded, but that had to be repeated for every speaker change, and then the already known correct evidence had to be selected again and again.
The writing of the game is good. Thankfully this game has a fully grown up cast, opposed to the typical Japanese visual novels. The story will be heavily influenced by the presence of an oppressive government, with anti-freedom and anti-immigrant stance. While the writing is good, some text feels a bit weird, especially the description of some inventory items in the first chapter.
The save system isn’t good. You cannot always save, but even when manual save is available, there is no telling how much earlier state it will save. The game autosaves at given points, it just doesn’t give any feedback about that. Perhaps when the diary objective changes? I lost progress when entering a new surroundings I assumed it autosaved the change.
The current objectives will be listed in the diary. There can be several places that can be visited. If I got to a seemingly dead end, I just started to travel to some other location, that usually solved the impasse. It can get a bit confusing, like being in the police office and I want to speak with an officer – I had to go to a park to initiate that conversation.
Eventually a minigame will be unlocked, with a pipe flow puzzle. You must solve it once to progress the story, but later on can return to it when out of dialogs, and advance through some randomly generated levels. Completing 10 levels will give an achievement, completing 30 levels another one. Since the levels are randomly generated, their difficulty will be random, not increasing.
The first playthrough took me a little over 9 hours, and I got the tragic ending. Trying new game+ catapulted me to unleash my “hidden power”, gaining an achievement (completing the Be a good citizen 10 times in a previous playthrough is required to unlock the hidden power).
During the 3 detective chapters, there will be tracked choices. They are marked as such. Not every one of them seemed to me to have important effect, but some of them will have grave consequence immediately, some will have grave consequence down the line. Based on your choices you will get one of the 3 versions of chapter 4. Once you reach chapter 4, the outcome is already set in stone, you just have to progress through it. Finishing the game once will offer a new game+, where you can start right before the final choice in chapter 1. Also this is the first chance to select the hidden power easter egg. I wasn’t that interested in replaying the chapters repeatedly to reach a possibly different ending, so I just watched the other two endings on Youtube.
The game switches seamlessly between keyboard&mouse and controller. I played it with a controller, using it felt natural.
Since I liked the game, I checked out the Italian developer for other products. They mostly finished the base of a medieval game during the Italian renaissance, but for whatever reason that game never reached distribution.
The game was stable, it didn’t crash for me.
Steam User 2

Reviewed 04.2023

Loved it. The art is stunning and really enhances the setting. I liked the dark story a lot, and I thought the writing was really well done.

Dry Drowning

Game Discussion

Anonymous

Steam User 1

Steam User 1

Steam User 2