Dredge Review
Fishing and Lovecraftian horror combine to create a better treat than you could imagine
Every now and again, a game comes out of nowhere and just mesmerizes me. I’m not talking about games that I have anticipated for years, or the sequels to my favorite franchises; I mean literally coming out of nowhere. Dredge is that game. I knew about Dredge, but I guess I didn’t know about Dredge. Once I booted it up, I started putting in hours like it was my part-time job. This game is both relaxing and exciting in all the best ways. It taps into my completionist tendencies almost like the developers were targeting me personally. Its biggest flaw is that the credits roll too early. So let’s set sail into a discussion about how Black Salt Games put out one of the best indie games of the year.
The starting point for this discussion is easy because under all the polish and pizzazz there is a really solid foundation. The core gameplay loop is unassuming but powerful. The gist of the game is that you’re a fisherman who washes up on a small island town. You’re given a boat upfront, and to pay off the cost you need to take the boat out on the water, collect fish, organize the said fish to maximize your haul, and sell them for profit. You can then use the remaining profit to upgrade your fish to become more proficient at your day job. Overall, it’s a pretty easy challenge, but the main blocker in your way is time. If you are caught out on the water at night, you can risk losing everything to numerous unsettling (I’ll elaborate on that adjective later) hazards.
The controls are fairly straightforward. You drive around your ship and park it when you find an indicator that there’s some fish you want to catch, and then you’ll play a little mini-game that changes depending on what you’re catching to reel in your prize. My only complaint about the controls is that the boat sometimes feels a little too floaty, which I guess makes sense because it’s a boat, but early on even the slightest tap on a rock can send half your hall back to where it came, which is a little annoying when you’re trying to navigate some tight fishing spots in some specific areas of the game. Luckily, you can upgrade everything, from your engines to your lights, to ultimately turn your ship into an impenetrable sea beast by the end of your adventure.
That’s it. That’s the core loop. You spend your time searching for rare fish, upgrading your ship, and conversing with strangers you meet along the way. Feedback is quick. It doesn’t take long to catch a fish. It doesn’t take long to pay off your boat. It doesn’t take long to start upgrading your ship. The carrot on the stick is easy to grab, but there always seems to be another, bigger carrot added to the stick right after you finish with the previous one. It’s that same feeling of “just one more” that multiplayer and roguelikes evoke, except this is a single-player sim. I hate to spoil the ending to this review, but that’s a big part of why Dredge is so great. It doesn’t put up annoying artificial barriers; instead, it constantly makes you believe there is something more exciting than the thing you just did, and it’s not a bluff, it’s the truth.
The base gameplay is good, but it’s not great enough to singlehandedly convince me to invest the twenty-plus hours that I did into this game. That’s where all of the, let’s call it, “video game icing” comes in. This game is wrapped in an incredibly interesting story and setting. It turns out that the location you find yourself in has weird things going on. The fish aren’t all normal, many of the townspeople recount unsettling stories, and there’s something very dangerous lurking in the fog of night. And in the blink of an eye, a casual fishing game is transformed into a nautical Lovecraftian adventure.
Every interaction in the game has an air of eeriness around it. Each location has something that’s not quite right about it, and almost all of the NPCs you come across feel like their hiding something. This means that very early o,n you learn to approach things with caution, many times because of the fear of the unknown, and sometimes because of the fear of what you have already learned. It adds an extra layer of meaning to the experience. You always feel the pressure of outrunning the night and preventing your character from going mad. If you do succumb to the madness, your eyes start playing tricks on you. You see rocks appear out of thin air, you hear whispers, and you have lots and lots of eyes staring at you. If it sounds bad, it’s because it is, but at the same time, there is a slight attraction to the horrors of the world, and one major question: what is the sea hiding?
As I slowly learned the dozens of answers to that question, that’s when I realized this game was something special. Dredge throws surprise after surprise at you. Whether it’s a new fish mutation, one of the many unique side quests, or the living horrors that you encounter as you travel to new locations, there is never a dull moment. That is, unless you want a dull moment. In this case, you can manage your time properly, only fish during the day, and earn an honest wage without progressing the story. I definitely spent some time listening to podcasts and repeatedly fishing as a way to relax, but ultimatel,y duty calls, and you’ll inevitably have to venture back into the unknown if you want to see the end of this story.
Speaking of the end of the story, my only real complaint is that it came a little too early. To be clear, this is not a “too short, not worth the money” type of complaint. I put dozens of hours into this game, but still, it felt like it went by fast. The game doesn’t have many blockers to stop your main form of progression, which is upgrading your ship. About halfway through the game, as I did my casual fishing, I was pretty far into maxing out my ship. This means that one of the most interesting core mechanics has been exhausted. While it’s not the biggest deal, I do wish almost every system were expanded a bit. I would have liked more ship upgrades, more fish species, and more side quests. The loop was just so engaging that I felt like I hadn’t had my fill of the world when I finished. That being said, this game is quite content-rich for an indie game, and I was blown away at the amount of mechanics and side content available in what I originally expected to be a pretty simple fishing game.
Dredge is marketed as a fun and mysterious fishing sim, and it does so much more. It has an incredibly interesting world to explore. It has a really satisfying core gameplay loop. It has tons of surprises and change-ups to always keep you on your toes, and it ended up leaving me begging for more content. I think that pretty much everyone willing to give this game a chance could find some enjoyment in it. Dredge is an incredibly polished and unassuming title that absolutely caught me off guard. It’s hard for me to think of any major flaws, and for that, I’m giving it a 9. Black Salt Games put themselves together a hit, and I can’t wait to see what they do next
