Dredge Review: Stuck in the Shallow End

With its opening shot of a tiny boat dwarfed by an unnatural tangle of inky black clouds, Dredge makes its intentions clear. This is a fishing game, sure, but it comes with a dark twist. While most of your time will be spent doing normal fishing stuff—sailing around catching fish before returning to port to sell them for a tidy profit—you’ll soon be pulled into ever darker waters filled with secrets too terrifying to behold. Or, at least, some weird fish.

In part because Dredge is the debut title from Black Salt Games, a small four-person team based out of New Zealand, it makes a strong first impression. The game’s first port town, Greater Marrow, with its towering lighthouse and foggy surroundings, is downright cozy in its dreary way. And when you leave the safety of the harbor, motoring off in your humble fishing boat while the sun rises and music swells is a treat every single time. The fishing and dredging minigames provide mildly challenging stopping points. Add in the occasional texture of meeting a few off-kilter characters along the way, and you have a bit of good, meditative fun.

There’s also a raft of boat upgrades, many of which give you an edge, like brighter lights or faster engines, while others unlock entirely new ways to fish, like crab pots you drop off and return to later or nets that allow you to trawl passively. And because those upgrades come in the form of physical components that you need to slot into a cramped inventory filled with fish and detritus, the whole system does a lovely job of deepening your connection to your vessel.

With such a solid mechanical foundation, it doesn’t take long before Dredge gets into a finely tuned rhythm of fishing, selling, and upgrading that elicits a low-frequency hum of pleasure you’d expect to get from a farming sim like Stardew Valley. It also puts a twist on the day/night cycle, in which time advances quickly, but only when you’re actively moving, fishing, or dredging. This means that while the days feel long, the night has a way of sneaking up on you. Unfortunately, though, this system doesn’t really hold up under closer scrutiny.

To stick with the same comparison, Stardew Valley uses its real-time clock to add tension to the game. There’s a risk to packing your day full of activities, but the fair is next week and you really need to win the grange competition. So, naturally, you’re going to stay out too late and faint. That risk-and-reward factor is what Dredge would seem to have in mind, except it’s missing the deadlines that give Stardew Valley’s clock its weight. No long-term goal in Dredge is ever time sensitive, meaning that you’re incentivized to play it safe, only taking on a task or two each day before heading back to port in the afternoon—by far the dullest and most tedious way to play.

Despite its status as a horror game, Dredge isn’t particularly scary either. There are jump scares, but these quickly feel like nuisances. Staying out all night slowly applies a disorienting visual filter over the game and places some new hazards in your way, but this rarely does anything other than remind you to get a good night’s sleep tomorrow. While this isn’t a fatal flaw, it does raise the question of what, exactly, Dredge needs its Lovecraftian trappings for anyway.

At first, when you find aberrant specimens bearing ominous names like “All-Seeing Cod” or “Brood Squid,” the game gestures at a deeper mystery that you might be peeling away layer by layer. But around the time you haul up your dozenth fish with too many eyes—or not enough of them, or weird skin, and so on—any momentum that the story had feels lost, replaced with the certainty that the game only seeks to provide the player with an endless, however pleasant, cycle of chores. This lack of any rising tension means that even the eldritch punch-up that concludes the story feels strangely disconnected from the preceeding 10 hours of game.

It’s indicative of just how important a game’s moment-to-moment hooks are that even with its shortcomings, Dredge is by and large an enjoyable experience. There are games with bigger problems, but for Dredge, a few missteps and an eldritch twist that never goes anywhere make a solid foundation feel a little like a wasted opportunity.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Team17.