Horror Games aren’t typically my jam. A game has to be pretty special or bring something else to the table beyond jump scares and limited inventory to get me over that. Dredge is an incredibly unique game that does a bunch of interesting and compelling stuff, and was more than enough to get me over my usual horror aversion.

Dredge basically isn’t “just” a horror game. The narrative hook and general plot/mechanical conceit is Eldritch Horror. While I never encountered any literal actual fish people, there’s all manner of horrors from the deep, aberrant fish, spooky wrecks, ancient basalt shrines, creepy townsfolk, etc. Mechanically it’s fishing, you’ve got a little ship and you outfit it with various motors, lights, rods and nets, and then you go fish. Fishing is handled via a couple really simple dial/meter-based mini-games, which is fine because the fishing itself isn’t intended to be where the challenge comes from, it’s supposed to be a time sink.

The basic gameplay loop is very tight and wonderfully designed. You undock in the morning, take your ship out somewhere, do some fishing til you run out of time or space, and rush home to port before creepy stuff starts going on as the fog rolls in at night. Sell your fish to upgrade your ship, rinse & repeat.

The tension of the game comes from all the complications that arise while you’re trying to do all that. First off, your inventory is limited and different varieties of fish are different sizes and shapes, so you’re doing Resident-Evil-style inventory Tetris. You’re also juggling fish valuation (do I bring back more of easier-to-pack fish or one giant-but-unruly shark?) and generally figuring out if you should bring back fish at all vs materials for upgrading your ship, or valuables you’ve dredged up.

Then there’s general timing. The clock only moves in Dredge while you’re moving, fishing, or sleeping in port. It is VERY easy to find a well-stocked fishing spot, lose track of what you’re doing, and then whoops you’re out in open waters with a hull full of goopy mutant fish and it’s 2300 and you’ve got problems. This also compliments the upgrade process and the fishing games. Better reels mean faster fishing times, and simply getting better at the fishing games mean catching fish faster, which means less actual time is burning while you’re doing it. Screw up in a mini-game and you won’t lose a fish, but you will lose time which is arguably more valuable.

As with most games based around emergent systems, the vast majority of the fun to be had here is figuring out how to deal with the problems when stuff goes wrong. Simply bumping in to stuff will cause damage to your hull, and you can only bonk things a couple times before a game over. Each crash also randomly takes out one slot in your inventory: if it hits a ship part it disables it, if it hits something you’ve hauled up it goes overboard. So that’s hard enough as-is and you’ve got limited opportunities to screw up . . . but it goes completely sideways at night.

As the fog rolls in your vision is immediately limited to only what your tiny little lighting rig can cover. You start taking sanity damage which gets worse as the night drags on. “Sanity” damage manifests as randomly generated hallucinatory rocks that pop up near land, blurry vision, randomly spawning malevolent red forces that will chase you across the sea, random control impairments, and several other risks along those lines. You will constantly end up stuck out far from port at night, and sometimes you’ll want or need to be out at night because aberrant fish spawn primarily at night, and they fetch higher sale prices and are needed often for plot reasons, so you’re frequently left having to fend for yourself out there.

Personally, the most rough (but recoverable) experience I had was dredging too greedily and too deep in an area full of creepy fish that slowed me down. While I was mid-dredge for some very specific supplies I needed I noticed a bunch of those fish had shown up and they had a Very Large Friend. I got the supplies, but got bonked by that enormous angry fish. In my attempt to escape I ran into some half-submerged ruins, and the damage had taken out one of my secondary engines. So I start hauling ass away from there, and a spoopy red force blinked my lights out. Nearly ran into some hallucinatory rocks due to that, which would have taken me out, but I got the lights back on and started using an overdrive ability to get me to port faster as it was already dusk and getting later and later . . and I lost track of that and overheated and broke my primary engine. So now with no engines I limped to a port the remaining way, but couldn’t repair my ship there . . . so I had to sleep til just before dawn and then again crawl across rough and open sea to a port where I could fix my engines, only to just barely make it to port before the sun set again.

(And then after I was all patched up I had to go right back to finish the objective I needed and do what I should have been doing in the first place.)

Dredge isn’t just an open-world / sandbox game. You’ve got five themed zones to explore, plus the open sea, plus a bunch of little islands in between. Each main zone has its own fish, primary mission, sidequests, secrets, dangers, etc. It’s not incredibly long if you just focus on the plotline, but there’s a ton of sidequest stuff to chase down, little islands to explore, and a ludicrous amount of fish to find. I found about 75% of them over my playthrough, and I just don’t have it in me to 100%. I got both endings, and that’s enough for me.

Overall, this was a fun little indie game! It’s unique, well designed, no significant bugs, tons of variety, neat systems, and tons of opportunities for emergent gameplay. Highly Recommended, even without being on Game Pass.