Dredge (+The Pale Reach) Review | A Great Catch

Of all the smaller games attempting to grab the scraps of attention not gobbled up by the AAA releases of 2023, Dredge seemed to be the game that broke through all the excitement. Earlier in the year, it seemed like everyone was talking about the fishing game with the horrific underbelly, and it seems it really struck a chord with people as it went on to be nominated in a handful of categories at The Game Awards. After spending some time with Dredge and its recently released expansion The Pale Reach, I can see what all the excitement was about. Dredge is a well-designed game with an intoxicating sea-faring world to unravel. 

At its most basic level, Dredge is a fishing adventure game set on an openly explorable sea, at least during the day. Once night falls, the islands and seas are suffocated by a gloomy fog, and all manner of unsettling phenomena begin to appear. You play as a fisherman who washes up in the fishing town of Greater Marrow. You are given a boat and sent off to fish and pull up various items the sea has claimed. As you play, you explore various islands and get involved in several different side stories while attempting to learn more about the madness-inducing fog and an enigmatic collector of rare artifacts. Experiencing the many mysteries of Dredge is one of its greatest strengths so I won’t be going into many narrative details here. But what I will say is that the game is quite subtle in its approach to storytelling and the story does culminate into some great payoffs for players who are paying attention. 

I think the aspect of Dredge that hit me from the start is its unique and strong vibes, established through fantastic art direction, atmospheric music, and genuinely interesting writing. Some games, particularly from smaller studios, can oftentimes focus on one of these areas and it’s enough to get by in many cases. But Dredge excels in each of these elements and it results in a strong sense of style that feels incredibly unique. 

The overall visual presentation in Dredge is pleasing and clean. During gameplay, Dredge looks like a painting in motion thanks to vibrant colors and a simple yet breathtaking use of lighting. The game has a day night cycle, and the sunrises and sunsets will have you halting your boat to soak in their brilliance. The way the sky and the ocean waves animate had me recounting my time sailing the seas in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, the game isn’t cel-shaded mind you, but the overall image creates a similar sensation. When talking to NPC’s, a painted portrait of the specific character is placed on screen. Each of these character portraits are finely detailed and visually convey the type of person you are interacting with in such a strong way, that even with the absence of full voice acting you completely understand these characters lives. Everything from the look of the world to how the menus are designed resonates with me quite a bit. 

The music in Dredge does such a fantastic job of establishing the tone of the game. Tonally, Dredge contrasts its bright and cheery daytime sailing with gut-sinking dread that appears in the fog of the night. The music overall has a somewhat melancholic feel to it, with a few sea-shanty-esque tunes, like the traveling merchant’s tune, that stray away from that style with a more upbeat tone. Different times of day and different locations play unique music tracks and it really adds to the overall experience Dredge is providing. If I had to make another favorable comparison, listening to the music in Dredge felt similar to the incredible soundtrack of Hollow Knight which plays with similar instruments and themes. 

I don’t normally discuss writing in games when it comes to narrative, but the writing in Dredge stood out to me for how intriguing and engrossing it is. While I can break down game mechanics, I’m afraid writing is a bit out of my depth. The way the different characters’ speeches were written often featured them recounting tales of family struggles or legends of the deep and I found them all to be deeply engaging. The writing leaves room for a lot of interpretation as well as using vivid descriptions to depict things that happen off-screen with your character. I can’t count the number of games I’ve played where my eyes just start to gloss over seemingly endless written passages that can’t manage to hold my attention, but Dredge wasn’t like that. Part of it might be due to the writing being kept fairly brief, but it’s just more interesting than I feel I’ve seen in other games. 

While story, visuals, music, and writing are all important pieces of the puzzle, the well-designed gameplay is another significant chunk of the Dredge experience. In Dredge, you play essentially the entire game from your boat. I mentioned at the top the game is a fishing adventure game. You set sail on briny waters looking for fish you can sell. Fishing in Dredge plays out as a number of timing-based mini-games. As an example, early on as you begin to fish, a ring gauge will pop up on the screen with a highlighted section. You need to press a button when a cursor falls within this highlighted region in order to reel in the fish, fairly simple stuff. As you continue to play, new mini-games are introduced to spice things up that have you bouncing between different sections of the ring gauge or swapping back and forth on two different tracks of the gauge. Catching a fish pulls up a grid-style inventory system similar to the modern Resident Evil games. Fish come in different shapes and sizes, and you will need to organize your cargo bay accordingly if you want to maximize your haul each time you venture out. You can sell fish to several characters for money, but be mindful because fish can rot if left in the cargo hold too long, to which they will be worthless and will need to be discarded. 

At the start, most of your time will involve going on short fishing trips and returning to Greater Marrow to sell your wares. This loop of going out, gathering materials, and returning to a base of operations is simple yet effective. You always have some sort of goal set out in front of you, whether it’s catching a specific fish for a side quest or looking for a shipwreck. The townsfolk warn of dangers when staying out at night in the fog and this creates this daily feedback loop that survival games often employ where you complete your tasks during the day and return to safety at night. Eventually, once you have made some upgrades to your ship, your quest will push you to explore further away from the comfort of Greater Marrow, and you feel yourself become more daring and risky as the game progresses which is incredibly satisfying. 

Exploration is another key part of the gameplay. Initially, your boat is very slow which restricts you to only really exploring the islands in the surrounding area. But eventually, you set out on further excursions to many of the game’s far-reaching island regions. Each region has its own unique landmasses, music, fish to catch, and people to speak to. Each tells its own sub-story as well, my favorite being the one involving the crashed warplane in a thick jungle known as the Twisted Strand. The Devil’s Spine is located around a series of volcanoes which gives that area an atmospheric orange glow. Each region feels significant when you arrive and are fun to explore. The regions themselves are not that big in the grand scheme of things, but they offer enough winding paths and landmarks to where they don’t feel basic or lacking substance. There are also hidden areas that can be unlocked with specific items that reward you with rare upgrade materials or fishing locations to catch rare fish. Even simply sailing the open ocean is fun when you come across a random island chain and stumble upon a new side quest. The open water does feel a bit lonely as you are typically the only boat out sailing, so it would be nice to maybe run into the traveling merchant out on the seas or other fishermen from time to time. 

The invisible glue holding everything together is the game’s performance and polish. I played on the PlayStation 5, and I am extremely happy to report that I didn’t encounter a single bug during my playthrough, or if I did it didn’t make itself readily apparent. The game has an extremely solid frame rate as well which makes sailing and exploring that much more of a joy.. The game isn’t going for photorealistic environments or anything, but there are times when there are a lot of different visual effects and actions happening on screen and there is no slowdown. Dredge is certainly a polished experience from a technical perspective. 

I mentioned upgrades above, and that is a major component of the fun in Dredge. If you ignore the story, upgrading the ship is the true goal of the game. The loop is pretty simple to describe. You catch fish, sell the fish for money, and use the money to upgrade the ship, so you can go out and catch more fish. Some upgrades can be purchased with money, while other upgrades will require materials like scrap metal and wood salvaged from shipwrecks. There are also research points, these can be found hidden in the world or rewarded as part of completing certain side quests or bought from merchants. These research points are used to research upgrades for things like fishing rods or engines, and once these items are fully researched, they can then be purchased at a shop and installed on your ship. Some quests will also reward you with a book, and when selected in the menu, books will idly fill a progress bar as you sail, as they take time to read. Once a book is finished you gain a permanent advantage of some kind, such as engine speeds being increased by 10 percent. 

While it might seem overwhelming when written out like that, in actuality it feels like there are the perfect amount of things to upgrade in Dredge to always keep that carrot dangling on the stick. There is always something you are working towards, and all of the various upgrades feel impactful when you unlock them. Anything from being able to catch a new class of fish with a new rod or getting access to more grid spaces in the cargo hold feels worthwhile and has a noticeable impact on the gameplay. The rate at which you unlock these upgrades feels perfectly tuned as well, never feeling like they require extensive grinding to acquire, and conversely, you won’t have a fully upgraded ship right at the start. The gameplay loop of exploration, completing quests, and gathering materials all feed into the various ways you upgrade your gear which then enables you to explore new areas. I said it before but it truly is a satisfying and well-tuned gameplay loop that ends up being quite addictive. Dredge is one of those games where I sat down to play and 4 hours disappeared in the blink of an eye. 

There is a pretty important part of the game I have neglected to dive into, what happens when night falls. When the sun sets, a thick fog appears covering the entire map. This not only obscures your field of vision but there are also bad things that materialize in the fog. Night time I feel is the primary antagonist of Dredge. There are these whispering red swirls that appear and should they come in contact with your ship, they increase your “madness”, denoted by a manic-looking eye at the top of the screen. The higher your madness becomes, the more weird and creepy things you will encounter from rocks that seemingly appear out of thin air to ghostly ships that start barrelling towards you and overly aggressive fish that surface from the deep. There isn’t any traditional combat in Dredge, but taking damage from fish or by slamming into walls is still a hurdle to overcome, as taking damage can break a portion of your cargo hold which forces you to lose items overboard, or your rods and engines can take damage which completely removes the benefits or abilities they were providing until they are repaired.

While these may look and sound intimidating, the threats in Dredge don’t quite have the teeth they are described to have. By that I mean the game presents the threats you face in a way that makes you concerned before you have interacted with any of them, but once you have interacted with them most of the actual threat of the game comes down to taking damage and losing an item which only really comes off as a minor annoyance. Each region has a specific monster fish that is causing problems for the nearby inhabitants. And again, visually they are pretty cool to witness, but from a gameplay standpoint, they can all be run away from fairly easily, or have some game mechanic of circumventing them entirely. Dredge also isn’t a very challenging game as a result. While I took damage a fair few times, I don’t recall ever fully destroying my ship. The madness mechanic has some interesting implications, but you can get rid of it by going to sleep at a dock of which there are many throughout the world. Overall the presentation of the threats in Dredge is conveyed well through narrative and visual design, but the gameplay needs to be tuned to match how scary everyone says they are. 

For the most part, this gameplay loop remains fun for the 12-15 hour run time. I say “for the most part” because I do have a couple of nitpicks with specific parts of the gameplay. There is one chain of side quests involving some spooky-robed entities that require you to catch specific types of fish. These are not that bad in theory, however, there is a slight degree of randomness that comes with finding specific fish. Fish have a specific region they can be found in, but once in that region, the fish spawn points will be randomly placed. Specifically, as I was playing the DLC The Pale Reach, I was trying to get a specific fish that refused to pop up in a fishing spot or get caught in my trawl net for over an hour in real time. This back-and-forth sailing and searching and hoping to find a spot that had the fish I needed was out of my direct control and likewise wasn’t exactly fun. 

I mentioned earlier that the fishing mini-games were varied and that is true. But even with the variety they have, they unfortunately do fall victim to becoming a bit too repetitive. It kind of comes with the territory when talking about a fishing mini-game, but I wish there were some other parameters that could be brought into play to spice up the fishing in different areas. Modifiers that affect the mini-game speed or other obstacles to try and work around, just something to make the process a bit more engaging once you get into the later hours of the game where you have done the same mini-games a hundred times.

Between all the different supplies and fish you amass, Dredge does have quite a bit of menu management. Mind you there isn’t an excessive amount or anything, but there is a lot of taking items from one grid or box and moving and orienting them in another box. You also do a lot of flipping between a map, encyclopedia, journal entries, and inventory screens. There are some shortcuts in place for some of these menus, but overall moving items around in this way took me a very long time to nail down. Specifically, trying to take an item from one inventory and put it in another felt a bit clunky. Like I said there are some shortcuts to help alleviate some of this, but occasionally I was pressing the wrong shortcuts which just added to all the opening and closing of menus I didn’t need to be looking at at any given time. 

There were a couple of other small things like the ship docking animation taking a little too long, and wishing there was a search function for specific fish in the encyclopedia so I didn’t have to flip through its 80+ pages when I couldn’t remember which region a specific fish was from, but I am really scraping the bottom of the barrel to find stuff. All of the criticisms I just mentioned really don’t take away much enjoyment from playing the game. They are just a couple of loose bolts that if tightened could make an even more sturdy ship of a game. 

Let’s talk about the Dredge’s first expansion, The Pale Reach, which I also played. The Pale Reach is an expansion that is seamlessly integrated into the base game and can be completed at any time. A new region has appeared to the south in the form of a massive glacier. Right off the bat, I should say I have a bit of a bias when it comes to enjoying snow or ice levels in games, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was fond of exploring The Pale Reach. The music yet again is fantastic at conveying the feeling of floating on freezing waters and snow-covered ice is visually distinct from all the other regions in the game. And as you would expect there are new fish to catch and a side story to get involved in surrounding an expedition gone wrong. The writing is once again as intriguing as it was in the base game. 

To go off of that, seeing as The Pale Reach is so seamlessly integrated into the game, a lot of the same pros and cons I have with the base game are carried into the DLC. I love the vibes and the storytelling, the great gameplay is carried over as well, and the new upgrades you unlock do still manage to feel impactful and rewarding like the ice breaker that attaches to your hull and allows you to smash through ice without taking any damage. However, as with the base game, there are no new fishing mini-game templates which was a little underwhelming. I mentioned my issues with the random fish spawns for that one sidequest I took issue with above. The evil narwhal creature in The Pale Reach again doesn’t feel as threatening from a gameplay standpoint as it is built up to be by the story. To summarize my thoughts, I enjoyed The Pale Reach as a pure expansion of the base game, but I hope in future expansions (there’s more suspiciously blank space on the map screen for additional regions) Black Salt Games are able to find some creative ways to address some of the base games shortcomings. 

All in all, both Dredge and its expansion The Pale Reach are great fun. It’s a unique and engrossing fishing adventure whose game loops will have you hooked and whose narrative will keep you asking questions until the credits roll. It has a few loose screws that could be tightened up but as it stands I have no problem recommending Dredge. Dredge is available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S, and Microsoft Windows. A code was provided by the publisher for review.