Dry Drowning

Stylish noir thriller with an interesting story, but mechanical limitations – despite a variety of possible interactions.

Dry Drowning is not a perfect game but successfully presents itself as a typical, but intriguing cyberpunk noir visual novel that will provide you with at least some fun time, despite its cliché tropes and translation issues.

And even though it’s throwing a pack of quite disparate elements into one weird cocktail, the result doesn’t taste half bad.

Based on dialogues and branching storyline, Dry Drowning offers a very limited but consistent gaming experience.

While Dry Drowning’s conclusion may be overly complicated, the visual novel-styled journey of tracking down a serial killer in a future dystopian city more than makes up for it.

Dry Drowning is an intriguing, engaging, if flawed visual novel. While it's more expansive than traditional visual novels, it still lives and dies on the story, character and writing, which are strong and interesting, though let down by a rough localisation. However, even with this, it's well worth checking out, looking and sounding both fantastic, with an outstanding soundtrack that really adds to the game.

Dry Drowning may be a fair bit messy, but there's charm here. Players who are willing to embrace the cheesier elements will find some joy in its well-crafted setting and a decent murder mystery plot. The game is constrictive and lacks the genuine shock and engagement of top tier visual novels like Doki Doki Literature Club, but there are some moments of clever world building and a strong enough mystery propelling it.

Dry Drowning’s premise of chasing a serial killer holds a certain morbid allure, but odd choices just make it frustrating to play at times.

Unfortunately, for as aesthetically and stylistically pleasant as the visual novel is, its script leaves quite a bit to be desired. It isn't so much that the story is bad - there's a very intriguing layer of horror that permeates over the narrative - but that dialogue is especially weak. Mordred is not a particularly compelling protagonist, and most of the character writing comes off distinctly voiceless and surface level. The story revolving around serial killing inspired by Greek Mythology is enough to keep the plot engaging, but it's hard to ignore a visual novel whose greatest flaw is its writing.