I’ve never been much of a fan of horror, but occasionally I can be tempted by content with a Lovecraftian vibe. Boardgames like Arkham Horror, or stories where the entities from the Dungeon Dimensions lurk just beneath the surface. Dredge, a videogame about fishing with a demonic undercurrent, fitted very neatly into this mould. It sets the familiar mechanics of a resource gathering and adventure game in a world of quaint fishing villages that are clearly haunted by a dreadful event from their past. It is up you, an amnesiac fisherman, to piece the puzzle together and uncover what dreaded horror plagues this world. At about 10 hours of gameplay Dredge is a neat little game built on a solid gameplay loop and an intriguing setting. Nonetheless, as I progressed, I found it became more tedious than I had expected given its setup, the charm of its mystery rather diminished by its unwillingness to let me engage with the central mystery in any meaningful way.

The core gameplay loop of Dredge is that of a typical gathering game: you collect resources to survive and improve, so that you can collect more resources to get even better at collecting resources, so you can… well, you get the picture. For a game of this type, and a horror themed one at that, Dredge is actually fairly forgiving. While you have to fish to earn the money to upgrade and repair your boat, you don’t need it to simply survive. There is no timed mechanic that means that it’s game over once you run out of money. This means that if you are in a tight spot, you can always return to safer grounds, make enough money for the repairs or upgrades you need, before venturing forth to more treacherous but profitable waters.

As you start the game, you wash up in Greater Marrow, a small fishing village on one of a small cluster of islands. You quickly find out that the village has seen better days, but since a mysterious fog rolled in 20 years ago, things have been going downhill. Your sense that there is something profoundly amiss intensifies when you catch your first aberration: a grotesquely mutated variant of the fish species commonly found around the islands. The villagers are also taciturn or outright strange, and there is much that is hinted at but not spoken of. Not to mention the mysterious guy in the ruined mansion who wants you to collect some obviously occult artefacts for him. In short, it is a veritable parade of Lovecraftian tropes.

Working with the creepy and clearly deeply suspect occult resident of the ruined mansion is however the only way to move the game forward, and he will send you to collect five artefacts from each of the game’s main areas. Each small archipelago is its own biome with its own fish species, and one specific ‘boss’ enemy standing in the way of retrieving your quest item. Dredge does not involve combat, and you will have to avoid or outrun the monsters that might kill you, with each area set up as a small puzzle to deal with the main monster residing in it. In this Dredge is not unlike Subnautica: there is clearly something going on with nautically themed games that eschew violence.

Exploring each area for the first time is interesting and exciting, and creates a useful impetus to purchase the necessary upgrades for your vessel. Yet I found that the more I played, the less Dredge managed to captivate me. The fishing itself becomes increasingly monotonous, and while catching a new type of fish is initially exciting, the novelty wears off rather quickly as the game doesn’t do anything with its piscine variety. Barring some largely irrelevant sidequests, all you do is simply sell the fish to merchants, and nobody is really curious about why your latest flounder has seventeen eyes and a suppurating dorsal fin. In this, like so many other games, Dredge is haunted by the inescapable spectre of capitalism. Yes, there are 150 unique fish to catch, each with a detailed page in your fishing handbook, but in the end all that really matters is how much you can sell them for. The real devourer is the market that converts even eldritch fish into money.

It also didn’t help that for the most part, it becomes trivially easy to avoid fishing at night, allowing you to circumvent the game’s panic mechanic that makes you see things that may or may not be there, but will definitely imperil your vessel. Players with a more completionist bend may well be invested in the hunt for every last species of fish, but for me the interchangeable and repetitive nature of the fishing held little appeal and eventually got in the way of the story.

At the heart of Dredge there is indeed a typical Lovecraftian story about human hubris and the horrors it can bring forth from the Other Side. The game tells you that there is a Mystery with a capital M with about as much subtlety as a Kraken tearing a ship in two. You easily find enough clues to piece together that Something Bad happened twenty years ago because someone made some Poor Life Choices, and this may well have something to do with this creepy occult dude who keeps getting you to dredge up eldritch artefacts for him. But having that insight doesn’t really help you, as the game doesn’t let you do anything with that information except go out and fish some more. I kept expecting that by exploring the world further, I would find some way to avoid Creepy Occult Guy from inviting Cthulhu over, but there are no options but to keep on fishing. The characters you meet in the game aren’t much help either in unravelling the mystery, as most of them only have a handful of dialogue options limited to their specific sidequests, which you quickly exhaust.

Games are not obliged to hand you all the lore or exposition you want, and often a lack of knowledge is what builds the sense that there is something eerily wrong with a place that you cannot put your finger on. In Dredge however you can very quickly put an entire tentacle on the source of the wrongness. The game misunderstands what the appeal of a good mystery is. It is the ability to gradually piece together clues to uncover something that is hidden, and in a horror setting that might involve both the realisation that not all is as it seems and the occasional confrontation with an eldritch entity. Dredge, on the other hand, confuses this lack of information with giving the player a lack of options, turning what could have been an intriguing puzzle into an exercise in futility. Several times I left the game languishing for a while as it really wasn’t clear to me what the point was of proceeding further, given that the only course available to me was to sail straight off the proverbial cliff. There is a superficial similarity here with Universal Paperclips, which also asks the player to continue playing along a very dubious trajectory. But in Universal Paperclips the questionable goal and the gameplay are mutually reinforcing so as to make the game compelling. In Dredge the disconnect between the gameplay and the story diminishes both.

Misgivings notwithstanding, I did complete Dredge in the end. It even offered a reasonably neat ending, though I could not shake the feeling that I only avoided a worse fate because I found a fork in the plot through sheer luck. On reflection, I expect that players who derive more pleasure from the fishing, exploring and upgrading will quite enjoy the game, and not mind so much how they are driven forward by the suspect orders of Creepy Occult Guy. Or maybe there is actually a meta-story here, a self-referential critique about the need to let go rather than persisting in a harmful course of action. For me though, that irony was lost on me, and the lesson I learned from Dredge was that the real horror was drudgery all along.

Notes & Suggestions

• Letting go is also one of the core themes in Citizen Sleeper, but its strong focus on player agency and the greater presence of in-game characters mean it engages it with greater sensitivity and effect. It is not an entirely fair comparison as Citizen Sleeper is not set up as a mystery, but unlike Dredge, making choices is at the heart of the game, which means that by the time you reach any of the possible endings, you are invested both in how you got there, and how you might proceed.

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