The visual novel is a fairly natural form for the detective game – certainly a more natural one than Rockstar’s LA Noire, which was a lovely experiment, but spent seven years creating an open world that was basically unnecessary. Dry Drowning has the same kind of grit about it as LA Noire, but does away with all the extraneous stuff.
I’ve talked before about the evolution of gaming into ever-more distinct strands, one of which is, for want of a better word, the visual novel. In this kind of setup, interactivity is only sporadic, and the bulk of the time, you’re sitting back consuming predetermined content – think the one-off Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch. Indeed, when the story branches in Dry Drowning, you’re presented with two options over a pulsing heartbeat that gives the illusion of urgency, a format that will be very familiar to you if you tried out Bandersnatch.
This zero-challenge gameplay is reflected in the interrogation sections, when, at particularly tense moments, you have three goes to pick the right bit of evidence (most of the time you get all the tries you want). This isn’t about to become one of those interminable editorials about game difficulty, although I personally prefer this approach, especially by comparison to LA Noire, where, like your suspects, you often found yourself wildly stabbing in the dark. “Hmm, this person kind of seems to be lying – should I press DOUBT or LIE? Oh no, it’s playing the bad music, I’ve just let a murderer walk free. Oopsie doopsie.”
Dry Drowning doesn’t end up in this kind of cul-de-sac. Instead it presents you with a series of Sophie’s Choice-style dilemmas, where either route has clear disadvantages, and dear God, does it let you know it, immediately pointing out just what a monster you’ve been. This isn’t gaming’s usual approach of surface-level choices that don’t make much difference to the story, either – this provides real impetus to replay the game, and, further, lots more ways things can go wrong.
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The hostile world this creates is just right for the noirish atmosphere, but the crucial thing is that it’s all, on some level, your fault. I hate to rag on LA Noire further, but that relied on a cutscene to bring its protagonist down into the gutter – here, even though it’s a less interactive experience, you’re firmly in the driving seat.
It is slightly unfair to keep comparing and contrasting with LA Noire, since the two games don’t share much other than being hard-edged detective stories. After all, one’s a period piece, while the other’s set in a cyberpunky speculative future. And this setting isn’t just backdrop, it’s put to good use. In a touch right out of cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson’s Virtual Light, or possibly the maniacal fever-dreams of the Oculus Rift’s marketing department, most of the murder scenes are only witnessed as holographic recreations.
Most of the game’s more fanciful touches are down to this futuristic setting. The one major exception is the protagonist seeing people wearing grotesque masks when they lie, a feature which screws with the interface in a genuinely unsettling way. You might think that having a built-in lie detector would make the game too easy, but this is sidestepped neatly – knowing someone’s lying is rarely a silver bullet, rather it tends to simply muddy the waters further.
In the classic cyberpunk style, Dry Drowning uses some fairly broad strokes to sketch out an effective portrait of a dystopia. It’s a series of little details that all add up to Nova Polemos a place you probably wouldn’t want to visit, not that they’d let you, given their strict immigration laws. It reveals itself in little sidebar titbits as you collect more documents and through exposition on the loading screens, with asides about police surveillance and rigidly stratified neighbourhoods all coming together to create a seriously unprepossessing picture.
It’s drawing on contemporary socio-political issues, but not to the point where it’s beating you over the head with an analogy and screaming ‘do you get it?’. The anti-immigration rhetoric will ring a few bells for any European or North American, but Nova Polemos folds this into wider categorisation of people into being either worthy or unworthy. The term ‘parasite’ comes up a lot, much as it did in the ultra-objectivist rhetoric that was thrown around in that old classic Bioshock.
Indeed, Nova Polemos’s setup as a city-state isn’t too dissimilar from Bioshock’s Rapture, apart from not being underwater. It’s explicitly noted to be somewhere in Europe, but being a technocratic city state ruled with an iron fist it can’t help but have shades of Singapore. And it having a test in place to divvy people up into castes is worryingly reminiscent of the People’s Republic of China’s ‘social credit’ system, an idea I’m pretty sure they lifted from dystopian science fiction.
Even in Dry Drowning’s neon-splashed cyberpunk backdrop, you expect certain tropes of the detective genre, and plenty are present and correct – the protagonist has a shady past, they’ve got a standoffish relationship with the police even though they’re ostensibly on the same side, all politicians are corrupt, you know the sort of thing. But despite this, the writing isn’t the hardboiled Chandleresque stuff you’d expect – rather, it’s florid verging on purple, and heavy on the references to Greek mythology.
Part of this is down to the main antagonist, known only as Pandora in what must have been a self-Christening given their obsession with all things Grecian. It’s not exclusive to them, though – in fact it seems to be built into the interface. Every piece of evidence you pick up and every dossier on the people you meet comes with its own little pseudo-koan, which range from on-the-nose to oblique. Sometimes it’s in danger of coming off as pretentious, but it fits very well with the kind of overly-personal technology that the game world’s established.
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As hard-boiled as some of the plot points might be, there’s a distinct shade of whimsy in play. This is probably most prominent in the character names, against which ‘Pandora’ doesn’t particularly stand out. For every Mike or Sue, there’s a couple of Mordreds and Freyas. This could be distracting, but does also mirror the art style, much like the more realistic end of comic books but with a distinctly stylised edge. A little lighter on the technology, and a little heavier on the visions, and I’d be calling it magical realism instead.
What lets the storytelling down slightly is the occasional language SNAFU. Granted, I’ve been playing a preview version of a game made by an Italian studio, but there’s enough typos, odd-feeling sentences, and obviously translated dialogue in there that anyone would pick up on it. One would hope that this is addressed for the release version – likewise the slightly loose click detection. Counter-intuitively, this deficiency in the controls actually matters a lot less in a point-and-click game like this than it would in, say, a fast-twitch FPS, but can still get annoying if you’re constantly referring back to some piece of evidence or vital note.
Nonetheless, these points, stuff which will probably be cleaned up before the official release, are the biggest points of criticism I can make. Fans of visual novels or detective-style puzzlers would do well to check this out – think of it like Ace Attorney for slightly older boys and girls.
Dry Drowning is scheduled for release in August 2019. Preview code supplied by publisher.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO59n6bJerg
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