Go for a quiet fishing trip. Meet Cthulhu.
One of my favorite games ever created is Sunless Sea. Set in the world of Fallen London, the game Sunless Sea involved you sailing from one port to another in a great underground ocean located in a cave called The Neath. The gameplay was largely you sailing around and exploring. Occasionally, you got into combat with underwater beasts, some of unfathomable dimensions, but the game was largely focused on finding exotic new locales and going through the story beats. It was one of the best written games I ever played.
It also created a gaming niche I didn’t even realize I needed to have filled – Lovecraftian inspired sailing. There just aren’t a lot of games where the focus is on being a sailor and encountering bizarre forces inspired by Lovecraft’s canon. In fact, the only other game I played that remotely scratched that itch was Sunless Skies, the space-based sequel in which you piloted a train rather than a boat.
So, when I heard about Dredge, I was fascinated. Here was a game in which you were going to be sailing around the map and mostly just fishing. You would get into some interesting side quests with quirky characters. And, along the way, you would also run afoul of the Cthulhu inspired monstrosities that filled the world. The developers of Dredge described Sunless Sea as a “spooky boat” game. That same title can be applied to Dredge.
Because from the moment that you load up the game, it’s made very clear that something is amiss in the islands in which you will be doing your fishing. People warn you not to be out too late at night. It’s good advice – just as in Sunless Sea, the game Dredge has a panic meter that rises as you sail the unknown. Your panic increases the later it gets, and can be made higher by random encounters on your map, such as piloting through red clouds of mist or getting attacked by sea beasts. The more your panic rises, the more you are more likely to encounter enemies that are single mindedly set on destroying you. Of course, you have no way to fight back. You’re just a fisherman, after all.
So, fishing is actually going to be the core of the gameplay loop. Some parts of the map are more dangerous than others, but you need to explore them to complete quests. You can upgrade your boat to take more damage and even acquire abilities that will make it easier to avoid taking hits. But upgrading a boat takes money, and you can only make money by going fishing. And there’s a lot of fishing you can do. While you only start with a simple fishing line, you can upgrade the line to fish in ever more exotic environments. You also get access to crab pots and trawling nets that can add even more fish to your hauls, meaning more money for upgrades.
But while the fishing is the core gameplay loop, it wouldn’t mean much without an interesting world to fish in. Dredge provides you with an island chain that contains five main sections, each unique in their own way. While the peaceful islands of The Marrows provide you with a hospitable start from which to fish, the volcanic and ruin strewn islands of The Devil’s Spine are much more difficult to navigate and survive in.
What really moves the story forward, though, are the quests. There is one central, overarching questline that takes you through the entirety of the islands. Yet every island chain has its own unique questline to work through. Each questline also reveals a little more about the threats the world is facing and the consequences there might be if the Cthulhu like being beneath the islands were to ever wake up. Messages in bottles reveal bits of story as well and help the player understand the motivations of the sea captain they are playing as. In fact, there’s a lot of story packed away in those messages-in-bottles and they really shouldn’t be missed.
If I were to criticize Dredge in an real significant way, it would be to say that the game never went far enough with exploring its own world. Again, the best comparison is Sunless Sea. In Sunless Sea, multi part quests reaped what were sometimes terrifying revelations. Hours would go into completing those quest chains and personal relationships between characters fleshed out. Even exploration was more in-depth when you pulled into port. As a great example, in Sunless Sea, you have to stock up on items to explore a cathedral at one juncture in the game. It’s a long series of you basically reading descriptions of the cathedral and then making decisions, such as whether to use the stairs or try and use ropes to climb upward. Each decision was a gamble and based on your stats, and at each stage in your ascent, you would read sometimes chilling descriptions of what happened there. Dredge has a lighthouse you have to explore at one stage and while you do need a specific item to get inside, there is no sense of exploration. You simply go upstairs and come back down.
So, my one wish would be that Dredge tackle its land based explorations more thoughtfully. It could borrow from the quest structure of Sunless Sea and I think people would be very happy with the outcome. With that said, though, Dredge remains a fantastic game and one of the few examples of a spooky boat simulator that exists. It’s also unexpectedly relaxing to simply go out fishing – even if that relaxation turns to terror once the night descends.
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