Take a grumpy but damned capable detective, take a strong woman who he will always and always want to protect, and take a brutal and Machiavellian serial killer. Add to all this a futuristic setting, a dystopian city subjugated by politics and censorship, and an intriguing narrative development that gradually becomes more and more dense. Dry Drowning, is a very particular investigative adventure, with colors - between atmosphere and designs - decidedly noir, but with a setting that is anything but 30 '. The game of Studio V e VLG Publishing proposed by Leonardo Interactive is a production, which after its debut on digital platforms for PC such as Steam and GOG is ready today to make its debut also on the Nintendo hybrid console. Given the nature of the product, it is easy to think that it goes well with the convenience of a console - even - portable, but the prediction, as you will link below, seems to have been respected only in part.
Holograms and cigarettes
Dry Drowning, as already mentioned, is a narrative adventure with strong noir hues, but which uses decidedly different characteristics compared to those usually adopted in the reference genre: the game in fact makes us live the events of Mordred Foley, a talented detective with a very particular "ability", inside a futuristic city characterized by almost total closure of contacts with foreign countries, by strong policies against immigrants and the unemployed, and by censorship. The dystopian city of Nova Polemos it is in a certain sense a slave to technology, but above all it possesses laboratories and brilliant minds. Are you useful enough to society? What role could you play in it? A test it will give you the answer, an answer that will decide your future. Without going further into the socio-political landscape that the game will be able to describe in detail, know that the events that will intertwine will be different, and some in particular will involve Mordred and his assistant Hera personally. A present crushed by the suffocating weight of the past, tied in a triple knot to the events linked to a serial killer: Pandora. Also in this case we prefer not to go into details, describing the modus operandi of the latter and what characterizes his "works", but we can tell you that the script for some details - mainly related to the figure of the killer - also winks to big names in cinema, first of all Seven by David Fincher.
Unexpected twists
Despite the fact that it is actually a fairly linear visual novel, Dry Drowning has several characteristics and mechanics that they do interact the player both with the various game backgrounds and with the objects available in the inventory. The gameplay is quite guided in its various steps, so there are very few moments in which the player will find himself "blocked". The sections where we will have to prove our membership deductive or judgmental skills are of two types: in the first case, the game will put us ready to choices to make "Belly", crossroads placed in front of us that can change the continuation of the story and the fate of some characters, for better or for worse (attention, there are no right or wrong answers in this case, but they will help create your personal history with all the consequences of your actions); in the second case instead we are faced with real exchanges of jokes and deductions against some characters, and it will be up to us present the right evidence to "unmask" the truth (but after three mistakes in total, in each debate, you will get a game over).
If you are wondering if the game will do you read a lot, the answer is yes: let's be clear, we are not talking about infinite walltext, but being a title where all the dialogues and documents are in textual form and without dubbing, it goes without saying that you will have to prepare yourself to analyze every single detail. To reassure our users we want to point out that the game is completely localized (it could not have been otherwise given the nationality of the production), and therefore there are no problems whatsoever as regards the understanding of the texts.
Dry Drowning on Switch
As we mentioned at the beginning, it is very easy to combine Dry Drowning with convenience of a portable console, and at the actual level on this level we have nothing to complain about: the game of Studio V is strongly narrative, it does not have crazy rhythms and, although we will have to make choices, we will never have time limits or haste to make them; that's why the ability to follow the game comfortably while out, or on the road, or even in the few minutes off work, fits perfectly with the rest mode of the Nintendo Switch. However, the ability to control the game via tactile controls is no longer possible of the screen, which would have justified the purchase of the game on the hybrid console more: this being an adventure with backdrops and pointing objects on the screen, being able to use the fingers instead of the levers would have been a plus not bad. Another lack, but totally irrelevant, is that of the vibration of the joy-con. The biggest flaw of the portable mode, however, remains the size of the writings in the menus: both the font used and the actual smallness of the letters make reading very heavy, which is no small feat given that as we said there is a lot to read, and that could easily be solved with a section in the game options dedicated to their size. Thankfully, dialogue lines don't suffer from the same problem. In docked mode there are no problems to report, but rather you can enjoy the most inspired art - animated or not - of the game.
