Among the creatures you’ll catch from the deepest depths of the dreaded fishing sim game Dredge is the snailfish, an unhappy sea sausage that, as the game’s encyclopedia explains, takes its toll on a twisty low-pressure world began to implode. It’s a fleeting reminder that being transported from the abyss to the surface is always a transformation. Beautiful aquatic creatures become hideous, crushed and deformed by the vicious operating parameters of a reality for which they are not suited.
In Dredge’s case, they formed right angles, and each lush 2D fish represented the core of a stack of blocks that had to be inserted into a hold represented as an expandable mesh. It’s a bloodless shortcut to real-world commercial fish processing, where creatures are hacked into tradable pieces for the deck before they’re done smothering. Small critters like snails (which, despite their description, don’t actually explode here) fill up several blocks and can easily be jammed into the gap between a boat’s engine or headlight and the hull. Thick schools of fish like sharks form awkward, straight fins and jaw Christmas trees: cramming in more than one is always a challenge, but maybe if you tweak your mackerel a little, you’ll magically make room.
This puzzling sense of space adds a difficulty curve to Dredge’s fishing expeditions, much like the menace of the 19th-century archipelago in the night-roaming game. Each voyage is a bit like deliberately filling the board in Tetris, risking game-over when you drop your catch at the market, only to clear multiple lines in one go. It’s a 10-hour fishing and leveling game at its core with a clever mechanic that’s unsettling in many ways, but rarely as positively scary as it might seem at first.
Dredge begins with your character – the saltwater cousin of the Darkest Dungeon’s granite-faced ancestor – driving aimlessly through the fog. After the inevitable shipwreck, you wake up at Greater Marrow’s docks, a neat little wooden pile of shipyards and markets beneath the candy-striped lighthouse. The mayor immediately lends you a new bathtub and recruits you to be an official town fisherman. What happened to the old fisherman? Where did these strange mists come from? Why did the lighthouse keeper give you the bad eye? Oh, and at least not having to worry about all of that for a few hours. Just cast your line!
Fishing spots dot the surrounding ocean, marked by air bubbles and gray silhouettes idling below, easy to glimpse as you steer your initially underpowered boat through all weather conditions. In keeping with virtual fishing, Dredge’s system is a series of reaction-driven mini-games—for example, pressing a button when a spinning cursor hits a green zone to catch fish faster. Many of the fish you’ll catch are familiar species: cuttlefish in the temperate shallows, red snapper in the southern tropics, giant eels beneath the cliffs in the north. But every now and then, you’ll tug on something you don’t quite recognize, like an octopus with a tentacled head.
Some of these sinister mutations occur in more terrifying creatures in the real world, like the infamous anglerfish, which emits bioluminescent lures. Others use Jungian metaphors to describe the aggression and greed of surface dwellers: a flounder full of eyes, a shark with a maw as long as its own body. In the fish markets of every major island, all of these fish command higher prices than their source species. Tell me why you like abyssal perverts, they’re clearly a treat for you.
You can spend the cash you earn from each catch on repairs and upgrades—especially more cargo space and specialized fishing equipment, allowing you to harvest in different ocean regions, from scorching volcanic waters to the deepest “deep” depths “area. You’ll also salvage debris like planks, clockwork shards, and cloth pegs needed for grander upgrades, cryptic bottle messages, and frustrating lost treasures to be thrown at the world’s only non-fish Commodity traders.
While expanding your fishing abilities, you can also take on simple two-step story missions that take you from island to island, usually in search of a special species of fish, as well as odd puzzles like finding dynamite to clear tunnels . There’s just one main questline: a reclusive collector has compiled a list of grisly artifacts to be dug up from each region, no doubt for completely innocent purposes. In return, he offers cursed but practical supernatural powers, such as teleporting to the center of the world map or draining a fishing spot with a single sentence. Capturing these enigmatic objects often means dealing with some local, secondary difficulty – helping a stranded plane pilot escape a mangrove swamp that’s constantly changing its layout, or helping scientists study the giant, ill-tempered cephalopods at the heart of tropical coral reefs .
It’s a simple closed framework made up of bite-sized narrative elements and a market-proven progression system — sleepily simple. Dredge wants to balance chillax loot ’em-up with nautical survival horror, but it leans toward the former. Sunless Sea is an obvious influence, but Failbetter’s game fixes your gaze on the ominous ocean floor (and sometimes back), and this one has you gazing at beautiful curving waves beckoning to be plowed. On a clear day, it’s not as good as the Wind Waker.
However, things get more worrisome after dark. Almost every game action in Dredge, from turning your ship’s wheel to dragging a sad coelacanth from its pristine haven, sends the sun across the sky. After sinking, heavy fog filled the ocean, and the lack of a powerful spotlight made navigation dangerous and various dangers appeared. Not only do you have to worry about your ship – it loses hull points, annoyingly, if the cargo has the slightest friction with a solid object that isn’t a dock dock – but also, your character’s sanity, as indicated by turning on and off Eye. The more the eye twitches, the more menacing and otherworldly the sea becomes, with silhouettes degrading and doubling into stereoscopic 3D-style tones, and rocks revealed inches from the bow.
Creepy at first, these and the more active, free-roaming hazards lose their terror as your ship upgrades grow stronger, and the resource upgrade cycle tires you out of the dangers ahead. Soon, you’ll be braving the sunset to hunt species that only emerge after dark. But the connection of time to movement remains a mild source of suspense, in part because when you stop and look around, you’re effectively paralyzing the universe. Enemies are easy to dodge, even before you gain magical powers that briefly knock them back, but that shouldn’t be taken lightly. They all move according to their own independent concept of time, so they don’t stop in the middle of the chase and grimace from the stern at the behemoth that stops the clock.
Compared to other RPG-style exploration games, Dredge’s main failure is that it doesn’t evolve much. Then came the automated production of crab pots and driftnet shapes, the former attracting crustaceans for you to collect a few days later, and the latter passively scooping up fish behind you (and as a very handy second stock). Other than that , the main differentiating point during gameplay is the increased speed, which gives you the confidence to go on longer voyages without really changing your approach. The plot doesn’t develop much either: if you’re familiar with Lovecraft or gothic sea tales, you’ll be a mile away to discover the mystery of the sinking. There are several endings, depending on a late game revelation and accompanying Big Decision, that can be easily reloaded and reversed.
It’s a shame that Dredge proved such a smooth sail overall, because I think the combination of fishing and horror speaks to a broader imaginative affinity between the ocean and video game code, which can be the basis for some delightfully weird things Base. One of Dredge’s more tantalizing, unrealized ideas is that it presents itself as straddling the fuzzy chasm between the seen and the invisible aspects of simulation – its core mechanics extending from the graphics layer down into the unfathomable game data range. The game’s own loading screen message describes its visible world as “dredging the depths”. In a project more focused on horror than playability or polish, this kind of conceit could be an opportunity for some kind of scary surprise – fish utterly refuse to be included in the progression system, “sanity effects” are actively puzzling rather than just Source of friction – It’s as if the uncharted waters below are eroding the game’s peaceful quest-loot-upgrade Covenant Islands.
But perhaps even more frightening is how the Dredge happily poses with its own eerie exuberance, throwing a thread into another dimension, only to embroil in creatures already locked away for storage and sale that seize the ocean as a The plot theme of the giant mirror’s human appetite is more effective than the plot itself. Judging by their encyclopedia descriptions, the mutated fish may sound hideous, but it’s all just a fixed decoration – they arrive already like their “normal” brethren, transformed into equally terrifying creatures. Satisfied Tetronimoe shape. It’s not their nature that really makes them ugly, but the insatiable mesh inventory.
