Dry Drowning

I have a soft spot for the small Italian studio that nobody asked to make a cyberpunk detective thriller and simply went ahead and did it anyway. Dry Drowning, Studio V's debut, is exactly that kind of stubborn, handcrafted thing - and it earns more goodwill than its Metacritic score suggests. The structure sits closest to Ace Attorney crossed with a moodier, grittier Blade Runner. You play as Mordred Foley, a disgraced private investigator carrying genuine moral baggage - he and his partner Hera Kairis previously falsified evidence that sent two innocent people to their deaths. That backstory is not window dressing. It presses on every interrogation and choice you make throughout the game. The city of Nova Polemos in 2066 is a far-right-controlled, surveillance-saturated nation-state where immigration is outlawed and a serial killer called Pandora is staging murders drawn from Greek mythology. The political texture is blunt at times, but the intention is earnest and the world-building is detailed in ways that reward players who click through every corner of the AquaOS evidence interface. Mechanically, the game mixes classic point-and-click crime scene investigation, where you scan environments for clues and holographic crime scene reconstructions, with a lie-detection system built around Foley's psychological condition. When a character lies, a grotesque animal or demonic mask flickers across their face. You then have three chances - the Living Nightmares system - to confront the lie using collected evidence. This is simultaneously the game's most memorable mechanic and its sharpest point of frustration. The three-life interrogation structure can feel punishing when the English localization, translated from Italian, leaves the correct answer genuinely ambiguous. The roughness in the text is the game's single biggest real-world obstacle. Typos and clunky grammar do not kill the atmosphere but they do chip at it, and for a visual novel where writing carries almost all the weight, that matters. What more than compensates is the presentation. Characters are rendered in stark black and white against vividly colored watercolor cityscapes, a deliberate visual contrast that critics and players consistently praised. The soundtrack, composed and performed by Giorgio Maioli with piano pieces by Alessandro Masi, is the real standout - over two hours of original music ranging from sparse piano to tense electronic underscore. It is the kind of score you come back to outside the game. More than 150 branching story paths and three meaningfully different endings give the whole thing genuine replay weight, and choices do land with real consequences on character fates and the city's political direction. The game is not without its genre limitations. Side characters can feel like expository functions rather than people, some moral dilemmas are introduced and then dropped before they fully resolve, and players who need moment-to-moment action will find the pacing slow going for the first chapter. But this is a debut from a small team that cited L.A. Noire, Ace Attorney, Heavy Rain, and Blade Runner as touchstones - and while it does not reach any of those heights, it clearly understood what it was reaching for. Steam users sitting at 81% positive across nearly 400 reviews is a quiet but telling signal that the game found its crowd.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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