Saturday Morning Gaming: Dredge

Back in May, Brother Reformed Republican told us about Dredge:

I played through Dredge over the weekend. It is a Lovecraftian fishing game. You are a fisherman wth amnesia who washes up on the shore of a village. You are given a boat and sent out to catch fish (but not at night when the sinister fog comes in). Eventually you catch a fish that is a grotesque horror, and you are approached by The Collector who sends you out to explore shipwrecks for relics and who uses a book to grant you mysterious powers.
As you play, you uncover the secrets of the area. You find messages in bottles that give hints of the background. You improve your boat and catch a wide variety of normal and not-so-normal fish.
Overall, it was a fun little diversion, but given the short length it might be better to wait for a sale.

Well, I waited until the Steam Summer Sale and then picked it up. AND I AM SO GLAD I DID.

I’ll digress for a moment and complain about Hogwarts Legacy. There was so much that was good in that game. Wandering around, exploring Hogwarts, interesting combat, interesting characters, dolly-dress-up… but, dang, that game started to drag and drag and drag. “Holy cow. It’s still going.”, I found myself saying more than once as I did yet another Merlin trial that was identical to the last two Merlin trials.

Well, Dredge does not have that problem.

This is a game that does not overstay its welcome by one minute. You are given a handful of concrete goals, achievements to shoot for, and fish to catch and then the game gives you an ending and you put it down saying “Holy cow, that was good”.

The game has about 15 hours in it, all told. Maybe 20 if you’re a completionist. And, you know what? Every single one of those minutes is charming.

The game kicks off and you’re this guy:

Take a good look because that’s the last time you see him. The rest of the game, you are going to be looking at your boat:

Your boat gets caught in an evil fog and you break your boat on the rocks and you’re given a *NEW* boat and a debt and a job: Go out and catch fish. But not after dark. Get back before dark.

So you go out and you start fishing to pay off your debt.

Catch fish, pay off your debt, and you eventually catch a fish that kicks off a new mission. “Come visit me at the furthest distance your boat can travel during daylight hours.”

And then you get new missions, new fish to catch, and new items to dredge up. And you sail your boat and sell your fish and buy upgrades to your lights, and your engines, and your fishing equipment. These let you go out to parts of the map you couldn’t imagine going out to at the start and learning about new fish you can catch, new missions, and new items to dredge up. You can sell them and buy even better upgrades.

There’s some peril in the game. There are evil fish at one of the regions you explore and a delightful lovecraftian horror at another. (“Wait, is that?” I asked *RIGHT* before being forced to reload my most recent save.)

It gives you a bunch of different goals that you will be able to achieve at different rates of progress so you’ll always feel like you’re *THIS* close to getting to your next plateau. There’s an added bonus of the game giving you beautiful things to look at during the stretches of long travel that might get boring:

And right when the game threatens to wear thin, you get the opportunity to resolve the storyline of the various things you’ve been dredging up.

I bought the game for 20% off which means that I paid $20 and, you know what? This game was worth every penny. I was delighted and charmed. And the second I put it down after resolving the main story, I never needed to pick it up again.

It is a perfect little $20 indy game. And surprisingly relaxing for a game in which there is a threat of the end of the world.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is the Dredge menu page. All screenshots taken by the author.)