"Dredge" Review

Publisher: Team 17

Developer: Black Salt Games

Available for: Playstation 5, Playstation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux

Reviewed for: Playstation 5

As some of you may know, I finally reached the big 3-0 this year, marking three decades revolving around the sun. By this time, most men my age have had a kid or two, but not me. I like my money, I like my stuff, I like my independence, and I get enough anxiety caring for my dog without her being actual flesh and blood, thank you very much! But despite my lack of official "dad" status, this is the year that I've realized I've reached the point in life that I greatly enjoy what infamous critic Yahtzee Croshaw calls "Dad Games." These are the games in which you mainly have one kind of thing you do, and you doing that thing is all in the service of getting better and better at that thing. Farming simulations are a great example of this. In some farming simulators you'll have other systems like minigames or relationships to foster and grow, but in general you spend most of your time farming. You then sell your produce for money, and as you rinse and repeat this cycle, you're able to afford things like more effective soil, better equipment, larger land plots, etc, all in the service of helping you get even more crops out of a harvest for even more money. So it's a loop that goes exactly as long as you want it to, a loop that is relaxing to get into, and a loop that is just as fun in short bursts as it is in long ones. I've flirted with these kinds of games in the past in titles such as Ooblets or the real estate minigame in Yakuza 0, but as I've already said, this is the year that I've realized these games speak to me. Whether that's been the case all this time and I just haven't realized it, or whether it's actually because I'm at an age now where I enjoy simpler, more easily repeatable enjoyment, I can't really say. What I can say, though? Dredge is one of those "Dad Games," and it's one of this year's single greatest titles thus far!

The concept of Dredge is pretty simple: you're a fisherman responding to an advertisement from a geographically-indistinguishable archipelago whose denizens are in need of someone with your expertise. On your way to this archipelago's main settlement, however, your ship crashes in a storm and you happen to wash ashore in that very settlement. The local mayor, understanding pretty quickly from context clues why you're there, lends you a basic fishing boat so you can get started on your work, get the people fed, and gradually pay off the cost of that loan. Lest this be mistaken for some kind of Animal Crossing situation, you're going to pay off that loan pretty quickly. In other words, paying off what you owe for the boat isn't the point of the game, it's just a way of keeping you from straying too far while you really get the hang of the moment-to-moment gameplay. As you live a simple fisherman's life, going from daily catch to daily catch, you meet a "collector" who tasks you with finding a variety of relics lost to the seas at various points around this massive series of islands. And that, my friends, is where the true story of this game takes shape, though I'll leave it up to you to experience it and find out the details for yourself! Now, I'll say this: some folks have taken to calling this game a "Lovecraftian" experience, and I find myself disagreeing. There is, in fact, some wibbly wobbly vague ocean magic going on in this little world, but there's nothing in the way of alcoholism or animals with racial slurs in their names, so I wouldn't go so far as to say it derives from Lovecraft. However, there's no shortage of eccentric characters to meet that wouldn't feel out of place in such a story. Isolated cultists who ask for fish to perform occult rituals, an enigmatic lighthouse keeper who seems to know far more than she lets on, a plane crash survivor who has clearly seen some things, this world is inhabited with all sorts of interesting characters! This provides plenty of incentive to explore the world and experience all it has to offer, but we'll touch on that a little bit more later.

For now, let's talk about the gameplay that kept me excited to come back every single evening I played! Outside of towns, island docks, and floating docks that serve as menus, you'll spend the whole game in your boat. As you move your boat and perform tasks like fishing and dredging, you'll progress the time of day. 

In its most basic form, these non-movement time-advancing activities are small minigames that take certain amounts of time depending on how well you perform. At the start, you'll typically start your day at 6am and keep going until it gets dark at 6pm, at which point you'll haul your bounty to a town to sell your catch and earn some money. I say that your day will "typically" range from the aforementioned time windows because some types of fish are only available at night, so depending on your sales plans you'll sometimes have to plan to sleep during the day and return to the seas when the sun goes down. This is where that aforementioned wibbly-wobbly vague ocean magic thing comes in. 

After it gets dark, a fog settles over the ocean, and the pitch black of it all causes you to start losing your sanity. At the very start of the evening, you're likely to see whisps of red on the surface of the water that will chase you down and whisper madness into your ears, or more immediately, rocks that weren't there before will suddenly appear in front of you, causing your ship to take damage if you aren't careful. As your sanity starts to drain more and more, the strangeness only increases. As you stay out later and later, you may hear a ship in the distance, only to be greeted by a large anglerfish-like being who takes a bite out of your hull. Flocks of evil-looking birds might start to pick fish off of your ship, or an unknown entity might slip into your cargo, both of which causes you to lose some of your hard-won bounty. When the night is at its darkest and your mind is at its most far-gone, you may witness columns of giant tentacles emerge from the water, threatening to destroy your entire vessel. And that's just an overview of the potential things that can happen after the sun goes down. The negative consequences of staying out too long can be mitigated with better lights on your boat or by making sure you're well-rested before you head out, but these things can only keep you safe for so long. So while you're going to have to venture out after dark from time-to-time, you'll need to be careful about it. 

To review what we've covered so far, you only have so much time in the day to handle your business before it starts to get dark, at which point you can keep going if you'd wish, but at a risk. With that in mind, are there any ways of increasing the time you can spend working during the daytime, or at least ways of making the nighttime more mitigable? Well, this wouldn't be a dad game if there weren't! 

I've already alluded to one option, which is better lighting on your boat to help with the nighttime consequences, but there are actually several options available to you to make your life easier. In all major ports, there are shipwrights available who can upgrade your boat, but before we get into that, we should talk about the boat itself. Your boat essentially serves as a Resident Evil/Deus Ex square-based inventory management system. You have a certain amount of squares forming the shape of the boat, and any item in your inventory takes up a certain amount of squares in a certain pattern. Certain sets of squares are meant for things like engines/fishing lines/nets/lights, etc (but can still be used as general inventory space if you prefer). It's a little difficult to describe without just showing you a picture, but I have a hard time imagining me not using a picture of the inventory screen for this blurb, so I suppose I don't have to (see the right side of the image I ended up using)! 

Now that we've covered that, you have options to upgrade your general storage size in addition to the amount of squares that can be used for engines/lights/etc. The general storage space is self-explanatory, but let me go into a bit more detail about the more specialized upgrades. If you'll remember, before I went on to describe how storage works, we were discussing ways of making the gameplay loop quicker and easier. Well, by increasing the amount of squares that can be used for specific bits of equipment, you have more options to customize this. The more space you have for engines, the more engines you can put on your boat. The more engines you have, the faster your ship moves, which reduces the rate that time increases as you move the boat. The more space you have for fishing poles, the more fishing poles you can equip, which increases your fishing rate, which decreases the amount of time it takes to successfully reel in a catch. There's even more depth to it than that, but I think that gives a pretty good overall idea about how this game works. 

In order to obtain these upgrades, you must dredge the depths of the ocean at certain spots after you talk to the aforementioned collector to get the relevant equipment. These upgrade materials are a little bit hard to come by, which brings me to a note that I have to make: at first, the game's pacing is going to be unbearable for some people. If you're like me and you fully embrace the dad game grind, it won't be a problem, but it's worth noting that it's going to take you quite a bit to buy even one upgrade. Once you get your first upgrade, the rest fall into place a lot faster, but you're going to be doing the daily grind for quite a while before you're able to extend your journey beyond the bay you start out in. Once you're able to venture further into the archipelago, however, you're going to find yourself running into plenty of content that will make those early game hours worth the grind. 

In addition to the main quest, you'll also find several side quests, things to discover, and even puzzles to solve. Some side quests are as simple as transporting an islander to another port or bringing an islander a specific kind of fish in a specific quantity, some are campaign-spanning quests that see you looking for legendary one-of-a-kind marine life. In general, most of these quests tend to be pretty simple, but they always provide decent rewards to make your job easier. You'll also find plenty of little discoveries that add to the lore, provide unexpected rewards, or even lead to the promise of treasure in some location you need to piece together! Finally, there are little puzzle shrines to be found across the archipelago. These puzzles will present you with a certain number of inventory squares arranged in a specific pattern, alongside a brief description of some shapes carved into the shrine. These descriptions will generally be a brief description of a fish or a general family of fish and some kind of hint about the number of specimens required. From there, it's up to you to analyze the look of the inventory spaces and decide what fish to catch based on your knowledge of the local marine life and the kinds of space they take up in your inventory. You then need to return to these shrines with the correct bounty, and you'll be presented with an incredibly niche reward that provides excellent base stats for your boat if you choose to equip it, but which doesn't come with any of the other beneficial side effects that, say, a second fishing rod might add. In addition to all of these intentionally-crafted bits of content, this is the kind of game that also provides plenty of opportunity for whatever little goals you'd like to set for yourself, if any. 

For instance, you get a large encyclopedia at the start of the game. Think of it as a Pokedex for fish. You don't have to catch each type of fish in order to complete the game, but if you'd like to be the best fisherman, you can make an effort to do so. You'd need to spend a long time fishing at all hours of the day, leaving plenty of crab pots on every major part of the archipelago, and letting a trawl trail behind your in order to achieve this goal and get the associated trophy, but you can do it! In addition, every kind of fish out there (save for those aforementioned one-of-a-kind fish) has one, two, or three "variants," meaning horrifying mutations. I've already covered what you'd want to do if you want to be the best fisherman, but if you wanna be the very best fisherman, you could also try your hand at catching every single variant of every single fish in the game. Remember everything I said you'd need to do just to fill out the basic fish encyclopedia? Well, all of that time and effort could be doubled or tripled in pursuit of this particular goal. Variants are caught when, instead of a reeling in on a green indicator in a fishing minigame, you reel in on a rare yellow indicator. Unless you're counting species only caught in the trawl or in crab pots, in which case you have to rely on blind luck. Achieving this goal once again results in both bragging rights and an official trophy on whatever platform you play the game on....buuuut....it just so happens that for every fish in the encyclopedia, there's a "trophy" size. Any given fish you catch has a size range, and if you're lucky enough to catch the biggest size, you get a little gold trophy icon next to its entry in the encyclopedia. Remember everything I said about the effort needed to get that trophy for the "variants"? Well, literally all of that applies here (including the blind luck on crab pots and trawls) but with the time and effort doubled or tripled from even that. See, the aforementioned yellow indicator isn't necessarily a variant....it could also be a trophy sized specimen. So if you want to be the very best fisherman like no-one ever was and go for getting trophy size for all the basic fish types, it's all the more time and effort plus that added degree of randomness from the yellow indicator either being a variant or a trophy size. And that's all I have to sa....oh, nevermind. See, each variant of each fish type also has a trophy size! So just keep adding up the time, effort, and randomness. That yellow indicator? It doesn't necessarily mean trophy size of a regular fish or variant of a fish....it can also mean a trophy size variant of a fish. So...if you wanna be the very best fisherman like no-one ever was AND go down in history like Ash, you could aim to get trophy sized variants as well! Beyond even that, there are plenty of little goals you could set for yourself if you'd like. For example, maybe you'd like to become a millionaire from selling fish? Maybe a billionaire? Perhaps you'd like to catch at least 100 of every fish and every variant? Perhaps you'd even like to try your hand at catching 100 of every trophy sized fish or variant? The possibilities for making gameplay your own are endless! 

Oh, and if you're curious about my experience, specifically, I did everything starting from the beginning of that tangent all the way through maybe 75% of the trophy-sized *variants* part. The rest of those possibilities I listed are ideas I had for things I fantasized about trying to do after I finished with those trophy-sized variants. All of this, from the discussion about the most basic side content to the discussion about extra milestones I set for myself but didn't achieve, is to say that the gameplay here is so fun and relaxing that you can take it exactly as far as your imagination can take you! Again, while the early-game grind might be detrimental to some, I have exactly no complaints about the gameplay in Dredge.

And do you know what else I have no complaints about? The technical state of the game! Now, with as simple as the game is, it's not like it has a massive technical weight to carry, but a polished game is a polished game! The art style is pretty simplistic and the only textures the game has to render are for the ocean, little details on islands, and probably one or two other small things I'm leaving out, but nonetheless the framerate never drops and textures never fail to load in. Furthermore, I never experienced any hard or soft crashes, nor did I experience any animation or audio glitches. And on the subject of audio, I have to give special props for the sound design team. Everything from the slow rush of the waves to the slight sounds of tension as you reel a rod in is memorable and effective. Let's see, what else is there to cover? I think that just about covers it! If I experienced any technical issues at all, they clearly weren't major enough to stick with me, so as far as I can tell, this game is flawless from a technical perspective!

Folks, let me speak plainly in case you aren't the brightest bunny in the bush: Dredge fully, unequivocally gets my seal of approval. For the price of an indie game, if you're like me, you'll be getting a gaming experience you'll keep wanting to come back to again and again not for any specific trophies or laid-out milestones, but just for the experience of sailing the seas catching fish and being a pillar of the community that keeps the denizens of an archipelago happy and with full bellies! This game has become something of an indie darling this year for good reason, so whether you've heard of the game and are on the fence about it or this is the first you're hearing about it, let me either be the first or the umpteenth person to tell you to spend your hard-earned money on it!

With no complaints from either objective or subjective standpoints, it's my pleasure to award Dredge 2023's first...

10/10 - Masterpiece

Bravo, Black Salt Games, Bravo!!!!!