Dredge Review – Fishing with Lovecraft

Like Darkest Dungeon, Dredge also atmospherically combines whimsical visual styling with extremely dark horror inspiration from Howard Phillips Lovecraft. If you like straight-forward space horror filled with nameless horrors from the deep, you’ll love this low-key indie game from a brand new three-man team from New Zealand. In addition to the surprisingly suffocating atmosphere and rather mysterious story, the game also offers thoughtful and polished game mechanics that make it fun to navigate through these dangerous waters and take care of your barge’s equipment and cargo. You’ll also likely want to play the cult horror movie The Lighthouse again.

• Platform: PS5 (review) PS4, X1, XSX|S, Switch, PC
• Publication date: 03/30/2023
• Manufacturer: Black Salt Games (New Zealand)
• Genre: fishing horror
• Czech localization: No
• Multiplayer: No
• Data to download: 2 GB
• Game time: 10+ hours
• Price: 588 CZK (couples)

Nameless horror from the depths

As a lone captain who forms a one-man crew on a small motorized barge, you decide to try your luck fishing around five cursed archipelagos. Your task is seemingly simple – leave the port at dawn, catch some fish and bring it to the local butcher before dark to sell. With the funds you receive, you can then buy equipment to speed up or enlarge your boat, or to fish deeper so you can also go further into open waters. Just keep an eye on this twilight – strange things happen at night above and below the surface, especially when the damn fog descends.

As befits a Lovecraftian horror, all the inhabitants of the local villages are rather suspiciously sickly, and some of them have a frank predilection for the flesh of strangely ugly fish that live at great depths. But if you bring them your catch and a random trinket found on your expeditions, they will gradually open up to you and tell you a disturbing story about the night when the mysterious fog first descended on the area. It is no coincidence that several fanatical sects and followers of creatures from the depths appeared here on the islands. The question is whether there is a way to deal with the impending horror.

Strange things happen above and below the surface at night.

Although the game contains a minimum of animation sequences and all dialogue is only text, it tells its minimalist story very well – individual inhabitants of the archipelago have their own personalities, and as you will gradually discover, some of them also play a very key role in the events that plunged this area into darkness. Although the essence of this game is about exploring and discovering new locations, combined with the frequent adrenaline rush and racing to the dock before dark, it was interesting and enjoyable to explore this world, knowing that each person in it has a story – in the end you can choose “good or bad” ending, depending on how far you have solved the mystery.

fun loop

While the spooky atmosphere is a big draw to the game, the fun part is the gameplay itself, divided into driving a barge through treacherous waters, creative mini-games involving winches and fishing, and the process of upgrading your boat and organizing the limited space on board, which noticeably resembles the organization of your “suitcase” in Resident Evil games: here you have to put on board the engine, lights, winches and, of course, your catch, individual fish, crustaceans or cephalopods in the form of a Tetris puzzle. It’s really fun, and you’ll also love how each upgrade of your ship has a noticeable effect on its speed, handling, or maybe the distance your bow lights shine.

In addition, it is above all the joy of discovering this world. If at first you will carefully embark on only short expeditions to shallow depths, then as you progress through the game, thanks to the experience and improvements of your ship, you will decide on much longer expeditions, including all-night sailings when a mysterious fog descends on the surface, seemingly full of whispers and inhuman eyes. Hallucinations are very dangerous because they make it easy to miss the reef and damage or even sink the ship. Not to mention some gigantic creatures that emerge from the depths at night. Like Subnautica, there are several unique biomes with unique monsters and mechanics. All this is set forth in a reasonable length and variety.