Black Salt Games’ Dredge is one of the biggest indie hits of recent years. It was the team’s first game, but thanks to a unique premise framed by simple but solid mechanics, the game gained enough buzz online to become self-sustaining. Since then, the studio has insisted on expanding the game with more content, culminating with Iron Rig, the game’s biggest and possibly final expansion to date.
In principle, Iron Rig can be completed at about the same time as the base game, and the relatively remote corners of the world where you are sent to collect important artifacts that serve to further the game’s story quickly form a perfect symbiosis with the story.
The story, by the way, is relatively simple: a gigantic oil rig is doing the final preliminary drilling before lowering the gigantic drill into the mysterious depths. You show up and offer to help the eager Ironhaven Corporation get the various departments of the platform up and running. You do this primarily by finding remnants of Ironhaven in the game world, and eventually these oil drillings lead to leaks all over the world, attracting unknown species of fish from the depths.
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Narratively, there’s not much new under the sun here, and while the tone, story, and approach are very similar to the pre-existing structures we know from the main game, it’s a little lacking. You deliver materials, you catch new species of fish, you deliver more materials, you upgrade the rig, and finally you make a somewhat arbitrary decision about the future of the rig and that’s it.
On its own, it’s not disappointing, but given that Black Salt pushed Iron Rig from release in Q4 of last year to now, it doesn’t take any significant narrative risks, nor does the expansion add anything to your character or the game’s narrative base. This is “just” DLC, for better or for worse.
There are no new mechanics as such. Yes, you catch new fish and deliver new materials to start developing new housing on the oil rig. It’s the same improvement metaphor that dominated the base game, only there’s more here, and these improvements actually lead to benefits that make the base game itself much easier. So what do we think about that? Wow, I’m not sure.
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Furthermore, Iron Rig presents a very, very annoying obstacle to your progress, especially if you’re playing with a save you’ve already completed. In order to fish in oil, you’ll need to upgrade your fishing rods, which basically means you’ll have to spend time reorganizing the gear you’ve already built up again. It’s a shame that Black Salt couldn’t come up with a more creative way to put obstacles in the player’s way than asking them to do the exact same thing all over again. Instead of making sure you can fish anywhere with the gear you have on board, you now have to make sure all of your fishing rods can fish in oil too. Brilliant.
Dredge is a good game, in fact it’s a really good game. Plus it’s a game that’s well worth your time if you haven’t played it yet, and this more complete edition combining the Iron Rig expansion and The Pale Reach only makes this package more robust. But as a standalone expansion, it’s not quite enough ingenuity to require a reinstall just for that reason.
