"Drowned" is what I would describe as an unnerving horror short story. Like most horror stories, when reading it the first time, not everything is as it seems, and there's going to be twists and turns until you find out what the metaphor for the story was all along. I'm starting to find that it's a matter of preference and taste on whether a visual novel should answer all the questions it presents, or if it's better to allow the reader to do the heavy lifting, and this is a story where I feel it leans more towards the latter. My impression is that this is one of those 'metaphorical mind palaces' that happen right before a character is about to die (or is dead), a way for the character to unpack any thoughts and traumas before either surviving or dying. And unpack traumas is what this main character did. Whether the drama unfolding based around high school teenage gay melodrama was substantial enough to warrant such a plot or conflict, is going to be up to personal taste again. Personally, I felt like the drama and guilt that the main character felt wasn't fully explored enough, though I wonder if that leads back to having the reader fill in the blanks. That being said, that might be on purpose for there to be multiple interpretations. The one room design of the art and the perspective backgrounds/doors are really well made and surprisingly detailed, that's the strongest suit of this visual novel. Overall, very unnerving visual novel, and I think that's what you were going for, so I think you got what you were setting out to do.