VN Talk: Your Dry Delight

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Windows (also on Mac, Linux, and Android)
Release: 2018

I stumbled on Your Dry Delight while doing a search on The Visual Novel Database for visual novels set during the 1920s. Given that most visual novels come out of Japan I was mostly expecting stuff set during Japan's Taisho era, but was pleasantly surprised to see The Blind Griffon (an English language favorite of mine) and then I found Your Dry Delight, which looked to be up my alley with one exception.

It was boys' love, or M/M as it's often referred to by western romance readers. I'm acutely aware of the fact that a lot of BL media is aimed at heterosexual women. There's not much in the way of own voices and I do not know if either one of the duo that forms Argent Games is a gay man. But Your Dry Delight was well reviewed and rated in Itch.io, and the game can also be found on Steam where it is rated Overwhelmingly Positive so I figured I'd give it a chance.

It's not that I dislike having a gay romance in a story, but BL (though it's getting better) still has a lot of protagonists who "aren't really gay" but "gay for their particular love interest." Being from a western developer, I figured this was going to be less likely with Your Dry Delight. And in any case it had a short playthrough time, so I knew whatever happened, would happen quickly.

So that's the mindset I went in to enjoy a story set in Prohibition America.

Your Dry Delight is a small, self-contained game. Though there are two romance routes, they tie together into a single ending, which you can only see after playing both paths, which is very unusual in romance visual novels. Though finale or true endings sometimes get unlocked after reaching happy endings, there is no ending when you finish a route in Your Dry Delight. Instead the player is directed to play the other path and the game takes you back to the scene before the route split, leaving the player free to make the other selection.

You play as August Richter, a detective cooperating with the FBI on an investigation of a bootlegging operation. It's clear his boss doesn't mind flirting with him, and when he goes to a speakeasy early on, he attracts the attention of a man who is probably a gangster (who is also flirting with him).

Richter isn't put off by this, but neither does he really react beyond realizing that it happened, when I'd like to think (given the time period) that he would enjoy being around or meeting other men who may be interested in another man. Well, maybe not in the gangster's case since, well, he's doing a sting operation, but Richter's interaction with his boss is strangely neutered for somebody who gets his hair tousled by his boss every morning. That seems a behavior that is either welcome or completely intolerable.

(At this point I should mention that it's implied Richter is bi- or pansexual since on Leslie's route he considers the possibility of starting up a long term relationship with a woman and he doesn't dismiss it because he's not attracted to women so much as he thinks it wouldn't work out given his job.)

I feel this inattention Richter feels towards being hit on (at least until things turn serious) extends to other parts of the game as well. For instance, it's not really clear whether Richter is a private detective as his office being inside the Cleveland Detective Agency would suggest from the background art, or part of a larger police force since he also refers to being in law enforcement and being in a "department." At one point he sends "another agent" in his place, which is not terminology someone would use in the private sector. Also, Leslie is usually referred to as his boss, but also his senior partner. So are they in a superior/subordinate relationship or are they partners with one having been on the job longer than the other?

It's these sorts of details that Your Dry Delight is constantly tripping over. The game seems to want to show that it's done its research, like the fact the story takes place specifically in Cleveland, Ohio rather than a more generic New York stand-in, and there is a cake in the story that the in-game glossary cites as a regional specialty from the 1920s, but despite having done some specific legwork and having some excellent music track selections, I don't feel like the writer really loved the time period for itself so much as they thought it would be fun to knock out a 20,000 word game set in it.

So we have things like the FBI, which didn't yet exist (it was the Bureau of Investigation at the time) and the dialogue doesn't "pop" with 1920s flavor. It felt like it was written by someone who was very careful not to let slip any indication that the actual writer was from 2018 rather than 1928, who then added occasional period slang just to make sure that there were nods to the time period.

The result is that the dialogue doesn't consistently feel like something someone from the 1920s would have spoken. For instance, slang terms are rarely brought up after initial use, making them a series of odd one-offs rather than words that are a staple of our characters' vocabulary. (For good 1920s dialogue flavor in a VN, I would recommend The Blind Griffin. Its slang is the cat's pajamas.)

That isn't to say the dialogue didn't work, but it only got the basics of the job done rather than elevating it to something that would be really attractive to someone specifically looking for a 1920s period piece.

Since this is a short game, it doesn't take long before the flirting turns serious, and it's interesting watching Richter who gets a fair bit more agency than most otome heroines in making his interest in his potential lover apparent, though this may also be because of the western development team.

Richter himself is not a very complicated guy. He's a bit of a good-hearted doofus, wanting to help the general public that's counting on him, but also willing to see the considerate side of a mafia boss. He doesn't really have a personal stake in anything that's happening in this story other than it's part of his job and he's attracted to the other men he's around. But that's fine for the video game equivalent of a short-short.

The more interesting characters are Leslie Chase and Meyer Eastman. I ended up doing Meyer's route just because the first choice I made pushed me away from Leslie. (His boss's opening portrayal is as a bit of a ditz, and while I don't mind that visually he has longer hair than would be socially acceptable for the time period, since I could just chalk it up to the art style, the fact the narration calls attention to that without also pointing out that it's really weird and non-standard, threw me out of the story.)

I liked Meyer for the most part. He comes off as mysterious and charismatic, so it's no surprise that we eventually learn he's the mob boss who controls the city. And I like that he's Jewish, since there were mobsters of Jewish heritage, but they rarely get featured in fiction.

Unfortunately, I got a strong feeling that the writer was not Jewish themselves. I could be wrong, but the weird way Meyer slips into Yiddish as if Richter should know what he's talking about doesn't feel natural. (And the fact the phrasing/wording is then added to the glossary because the player otherwise can't figure out what is being said via context, is pretty telling.) It's not like how someone can say "This is kaput" and the listener will instantly understand that something is broken even if "kaput" is not English in origin.

Also, the fact that two historical mobsters from Jewish gangs were Meyer Lansky and Monk Eastman (the latter of whom probably wasn't actually Jewish) seems a little convenient on the naming front for someone looking to quickly put together a name without being a part of the right ethnic group.

I guess what I'm saying is, I would have liked Meyer better if not for the slippery attention to detail that seems to be the hallmark of this game. The detective-mobster romance was otherwise a nice angle to take!

Despite being booted out of Leslie's route at the start, I thought his flowed more naturally as a romance. His route makes it abundantly clear that Richter and Leslie are close, and constantly taking care of each other in a way that goes beyond being friends before either of them draws close enough for a kiss.

Leslie, despite his early portrayal as being both flighty and lazy, is actually pretty shrewd when he wants to be, which made him a more interesting character on his route. We got shades of this towards the end of Meyer's route, but there's a little more of that on Leslie's own route.

As for why there's only one ending, well, it's because the game ends with the suggestion that Richter might be coerced into a relationship with both men. Leslie and Meyer negotiate a deal where Meyer will give up locations of rival gangs to law enforcement and in return, Leslie's group will not bother Meyer's men (who will also keep their noses clean). This will allow Meyer to run his bootleg operation where he provides alcohol to speakeasies and Leslie's group will know that the man in charge of this criminal operation is one that would prefer to avoid violence (so long as he can keep the alcohol flowing).

With this deal in place Richter would serve as the liaison between the two of them, and Leslie and Meyer fight a bit over how they're going to share him as everyone shares wine glasses in the final scene.

I liked the general sentiment of the ending, with everyone agreeing Prohibition was a mistake, and it was funny with Leslie ranting about how he had to sit through fifteen speeches at his sister's wedding while sober, but it just didn't hold together.

Since we never really know who Leslie works for (the government or a private enterprise), it's not apparent that he can even make this kind of agreement with Meyer. And then I didn't really like the ending where they talk about sharing Richter. I can see why the design is to play both routes, because it allows for this threesome ending that can canonically fit at the end of either of the two routes, with Richter having been attracted to both men, but he seems confused and/or uncomfortable with the idea, and that undermines the agency he had earlier in either route where he got to initiate some of the action. He gets none of that in the ending.

Argent Games has released a number of games besides Your Dry Delight, but seems to have had mixed success with their Kickstarters (though they have successfully released all games that funded), so it might be that given that the English language BL market is so small, players are more likely to grab on to whatever they can get just because there isn't much choice to begin with. (I know I played a fair bit of otome and JRPGs I'd probably pass on today but didn't when they were much less common.)

And the thing is, Your Dry Delight isn't bad. The romance is actually pretty good considering the length of the game and the time it has to happen in, but it just didn't have the oomph that I wanted for what drew me to the game in the first place, especially as someone who eats up fiction from the time period. It's not being boys' love that sunk the game for me. It was the game failing to grasp the setting it was supposed to take place in.