I'm not sure what it is about the grim dystopias and bright neon lights of cyberpunk fiction, since I'm certainly not computer literate enough to follow half of the hacking nonsense that accompanies the genre, but I find myself drawn to that aesthetic again and again. Clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way, if there's a robust industry of narratives - video game and otherwise - spun within that same milieu. I guess it's due to our countenancing an ever more likely future run by invasive technologies spearheaded by unscrupulous corporations happy to eliminate privacy and personal liberties for the sake of revenue and an illusion of stability, or maybe because that cyborgs are cool and do sick shit like throw dudes through buildings with their biomechanical arms.

Studio V's Dry Drowning has more of the former than the latter, admittedly, but it's still very much beholden to the mores and tropes of the cyberpunk narrative genre as we've all come to perceive it. Set in the fictional European city-state of Nova Polemos in 2066, which has a fully state-controlled media blackout regarding the rest of the world like North Korea and extremely oppressive rules for population control and immigration, the story follows a reviled private detective with a ridiculous name, Mordred Foley, and his partner and associate Hera Kairis as they are offered a lifeline after a few dry years of clients. The duo had become personae non grata with the press and police alike after Mordred's dogged (and somewhat vainglorious) pursuit to put a notorious serial killer behind bars led to falsifying evidence that eventually sentenced two probably innocent suspects to death. However, this lifeline is from the country's proto-fascist, populist political party: clear its would-be presidential candidate of a scandal-laden murder and the rewards will be plentiful. Just in case Mordred had second thoughts about this deal with the devil, the killer's twisted M.O. turns out to be all too familiar to the biggest expert on the worst serial killer the country had ever seen...

Dry Drowning is a conventional deductive adventure game, albeit one that has less focus on inventory puzzles and more on paying attention to crime scenes and interrogations for the sake of tense denouement sequences where you're expected to figure out the sequence of events (and the probable killer) with the evidence you've acquired. Mordred has this uncanny ability to see "masks of lies" on suspects and witnesses: a macabre twisted vision of their own falsehoods distorting their faces and stories. The sequences where you break through these masks are not too dissimilar to the "psyche locks" of the Ace Attorney series: only by forcing the other party to confront the facts you present can you hope to wring the truth out of them, though you can only make so many errors in the process. In addition, Dry Drowning absolutely loves its difficult decisions: the type of no-win dilemmas that made Telltale Games a force to be reckoned with once upon a time. This game has more Morton's forks than the Koopalings' cutlery drawer and loves to call back to decisions the player has made, either to remind them of how much greener the grass may have otherwise been or to otherwise twist the knife as the dire consequences of these choices come to light. Many choices are actually immaterial - they'll produce a few lines of alternative dialogue, perhaps, but won't affect the story in a major way - while some will send the game off on a totally different vector, with the lives of major characters on the line.

The way the game handles its decision matrix is by smartly compartmentalizing the events of the game into discrete chapters, each of which is relevant to the overarching story but otherwise present separate cases with potentially separate culprits. Each is invariably a murder committed in the serial killer's traditional style - the killer, known as Pandora, always recreates the scene to match one of the Greek myths, such as Prometheus giving humanity the gift of fire and being punished for his insolence against the gods - and each involves gathering clues at the crime scene, talking to suspects, breaking down the masks of lies, and cornering the mastermind. A big decision then concludes the chapter, dragging you closer to one of three finales.

For the most part, Dry Drowning looks slick and revels in its cyberpunk noir themes by accompanying each of the dazzling neon backdrops with comparatively restrained monochrome character portraits. The UI goes for an elaborate future hexagon aesthetic even if its buttons can be a bit small and awkward to navigate, and the art and sound design is uniformly excellent. Where it falls down is in the English localization, despite having four credited names attached to it (the game was developed in Italy, with Italian being its default language). It starts small, with errors that would be the natural result of a non-native speaker (like calling drawers "draws"; a relatively simple mistake if English isn't your first language, but an inexplicable one if it is - and the game calls them "draws" several times so it's not a single isolated typo) and later becoming so egregious that it frequently misinterprets what characters are trying to say, sometimes suggesting the exact opposite. There's also ableist slurs casually thrown around, another case of either fan-translation-level insensitivity or another non-native speaker error, and syntax in particular is more often the casualty of any given scene than the game's creatively massacred victims. Normally, I don't come down too hard on so-so localizations, but this is an adventure game where narrative and dialogue play much more important, focal roles than in other game genres. It also has this real melodramatic, cheesy noir angle it's aiming for - think Max Payne's metaphorically overwrought monologues - that can't help tripping over these mistakes.

As for the whole decision matrix thing, it's never been an approach I've cared for due to the amount of FOMO anxiety it generates and I like it even less in detective fiction where there's only ever one solution and one circuitous breadcrumb trail that leads to it. If I have to play the game several times over to see variations in the characters and political upheaval appearing in the periphery of these cases, it's not going to change the fact that the cases themselves - where sussing them out constitutes the entirety of the gameplay - are going to play out the same each time. If you definitively know who all the movers and shakers (and killers, most importantly) are after the first playthrough, there's no longevity to be found in subsequent runs. It's why even the Ace Attorney games, which I adore, are always one-and-done affairs. It's perhaps better - and maybe even intended - to approach Dry Drowning's format by carving out a single route through all the decisions proffered and accepting whatever fate awaits at the conclusion as "your story."

Otherwise, the game is one of those stylistic exercises that clearly understands the genre and doesn't shy away from its heavier themes, though is in turn scuppered by some fundamental issues relating to its structure and localization.

(I hear the more recent Switch port is better though, and probably its localization too, so use that information as you will. For the record I played the version available on Itch.io, since it was part of that bundle.)

Rating: 3 out of 5.