Schlocktober '24: Dredge has a fantastic set up but mostly ends up idling in shallow waters.

Schlocktober '24: When spooky season comes around I start looking for (mostly) mediocre games to satisfy my urge for gore and chills. Some are horror, some are just horror influenced, most are deeply flawed and a little obscure, but as long as they've got spooks and shivers, games of all shapes and sizes can be part of Schlocktober. Games were played, or at least started in October.

I’m not sure I’d call Dredge schlock, exactly. Of course I’ve never been strict about what I include in Schlocktober, up to and including playing a genuine classic like Bioschlock, I mean Bioshock, but I have a difficult time defining what I think about Dredge. It has a fantastic set up and there’s nothing about it that’s bad, exactly, but it can be tedious to play and it is ultimately very insubstantial. It feels like a game that’s built around a central hook that…doesn’t exist. It’s a bunch of quasi-filler that you play in between other kinds of quasi-filler. It’s not bad, per se, but it does end up feeling a little hollow.

Dredge starts with a very strong premise. You play a fisherman who arrives at a small New England-like island town after your ship is destroyed. You’re given a new ship and tasked with supplying the town with fish, although you’re warned that there’s something…off about some of the creatures being pulled from the sea. There’s something off about the town residents too. From there you plunge into a Lovecraftian world of darkness and slipping sanity. During the days the seas of Dredge are mostly placid and safe, though there are a few minor threats lurking about, like waterspouts and falling rocks and even some deadly denizens of the deep. But at night madness starts to creep in, and the fog blankets the ocean, bringing with it strange apparitions and additional dangers. Rocks appear in front of your ship out of nowhere. Strange tentacles burst upwards from the water and seek to smash your small boat to bits. These phenomena can persist until you sleep, with your ship pursued by everything from seemingly ill-intentioned versions of the waterspouts to things much darker than that. There are also some area specific hazards, like a predatory fish that pursues a specific labyrinth of canals between cliffs, or a creature lurking in a trench that will destroy you if you approach it.

Playing a fisherman in a Lovecraft story trying to ply your trade while stalked by terrors of the deep is a great gameplay conceit, and Dredge also nails the aesthetic, with a low poly but clean 3D presentation enhanced by disturbing 2D illustrations of characters you speak to and the creatures you pull from the ocean. All the inhabitants of this world look somewhere between haunted and insane, with good writing that shows that they are either skirting the edges of madness or have wholeheartedly embraced it. The fish range from normal illustrations you might find in any game to twisted horrors that fuse mammalian bodily functions with aquatic flesh to produce disturbing results. Audio is sparse but appropriate with gloomy music and sounds. The world feels cohesive and like it follows a certain set of grim rules that lead inevitably to ruination.

The problem with Dredge is that the gameplay never really evolves. It starts out entertaining enough. The fishing is done through basic QTEs, which is a bummer when you consider that there are fishing minigames in RPGs that are more fun, but this isn’t so much a fishing game as an exploration/adventure/resource management game with a fishing gloss, so that’s okay. The loop of going out to fish at day, then reaching nightfall and either risking it for greater rewards (since some fish are night only) or heading back to the safety of harbor creates a decent tension. You upgrade your boat, complete quests, explore, advance the narrative, and it’s fun to dig into this twisted world. But what you soon find is that the stories being told are simple, repetitive, and unsatisfying, the upgrades don’t really change the gameplay in substantial ways, and the game doesn’t go anywhere. Meanwhile the loop becomes tedious, especially in the way the game handles damage where you lose something from your inventory and often have a critical system crippled, which needs to be repaired in port (other things like trawling nets and crab pots need routine maintenance too.) This is annoying enough if it’s a fishing rod you needed for a fish you’re trying to catch for some quest, but it seems that more often than not it’s your engines, and slowly limping back into port from the middle of the ocean is incredibly boring and frustrating. The game never feels dangerous it just starts to feel like a hassle. You will eventually get supernatural powers that help this a little, but by that time the whole loop has started to feel like a repetitive chore.

And yet it’s hard to criticize Dredge too much because it’s clear that the developers made the game they wanted to make. Everything feels intentional and while I thought that there were elements that could have been pushed further, like a more involved fishing mechanic, a deeper story, or some more quality of life and convenience options, there are plausible explanations as to why these decisions made sense. I just felt like some of them contradicted each other and didn’t mesh well. If a game isn’t going to be challenging or feel dangerous then not including convenience like fast travel or the ability to heal while out at sea (which is added in The Iron Rig) creates a situation where instead of hazards feeling dangerous or scary they feel like a big hassle, inducing the same kind of bad fear you feel when you get on to the highway and see a bumper to bumper traffic jam in front of you. If a story is going to be minimalistic and understated that’s okay, but then there doesn’t need to be this much of it. It starts to feel like set dressing for a play that never takes the stage.

The ending itself is cool in a way, but very understated, and doesn’t feel like a big culmination so much as a soft sinking beneath the waves. That’s perhaps thematically appropriate, but it represents how the whole thing feels kind of flat. Playing Dredge is like a gray, drizzly, day out on the sea where you catch fewer fish than you expected and feel a little damp and uncomfortable the whole time. It’s not horrible but it is disappointing. It’s not what you were hoping for when you decided to get on the boat.

I bought the DLC for Dredge and played the Iron Rig episode, which is lengthy enough but is still mostly more of the same. The Iron Rig itself adds a large new location to the map where you can do a few new things, including upgrading the rig itself, but it amounts to a place where you can trade resources, upgrade your ship, and find the same kinds of fishing quests that the rest of the game provides. It also adds sludge to the world, which changes some of the fish spawns and allows you to collect the sludge itself in an effect that looks nice but doesn’t change the gameplay in any significant way.

You might be asking why I’d expect DLC to change the game instead of just adding more of it, with a few new wrinkles (which the Iron Rig absolutely does; there are even some different takes on the fishing QTE mechanic), and that’s fair, but I guess it’s not so much that I was expecting big changes as I was hoping for something that felt different. Some kind of meaningful evolution that felt like it pushed the game forward instead of providing yet more of the same things to do in an ocean that had already, for me, grown stale.

The foundations of Dredge are solid, it just doesn’t build quite enough on them. If it had a more compelling story, that might work. If it were a little bit less irritating with the amount of commuting you have to do (there’s some very limited fast travel but you spend a lot of time just puttering across the map), that might help. If the action were more intense or the sense of danger more palpable, that might help. But none of that is the case. So you’re left with an experience that provides a lot of kind of monotonous, repetitive, very low key horror. I understand why some people might like it, and I certainly enjoyed the opening hours, it just didn’t do enough to evolve for my tastes. Others might appreciate the laid-back spooky vibes.

Schlocktober Rating: Slightly boring schlock: As I said I'm not sure I'd call Dredge schlock, exactly. It's a very solid game in a lot of ways. But it's not a great game either. If I were to compare it to a candy it would be an expensive plain dark chocolate bar that doesn't have quite the quality or subtlety to be truly tasty. It's high quality but ultimately somewhat flavorless, and while some people might prefer it to the cheaper, sweeter, stuff for many it's going to end up kind of unsatisfying.