izigame.me

DREDGE is a game with a solid start, but ultimately does little to develop its core concepts, and ultimately grows tepid in both gameplay and story.
The core gameplay loop involves fishing, selling your catch, and upgrading your boat with materials you can dredge up. It's quite interesting at the start with limited cargo space and needing to manage your time, but ends up quickly turning flat. Fish are divided into biome and region, but all involve functionally the same minigame of timing button presses within zones. Some are different, but not in any meaningful way. You'd think catching fish out of an ancient volcano or from depths literally described as "Hadal" would be unlike catching mackerel off the coast, but it largely isn't. This also quickly turns moot as money swiftly stops being an issue, meaning you only really catch fish for quests or for completion.
Questing is also a relatively muted affair. The main quest being visit the five regions, get a Macguffin from each and deliver them to the giver, with each one having its own miniquest associated, and a few side quests sprinkled about. There isn't much to really say, as they're all "find fish, give fish" or "trawl thing, give thing", with travel inbetween. A rather sour note is that there are a few side quests that are timed, but aren't said as such -- rather annoying especially since said quests require rather expansive fishing that you might not be able to do at the time you take them.
Oddly, the former complaint is the exception that strengthens the next complaint; nothing really changes. DREDGE sells itself on being a fishing horror, with the rare fish you can catch all being grotesque mutated monstrosities. You lose sanity at night, creatures mimic ships to lure you in to strike... but nothing changes. NPCs remain the same no matter how many lovecraftian horrors you sell to them, and indeed only the first town really has an amount of NPCs worth noting. Later regions are simply the quest giver for the main quest, and the travelling merchant who's rather flat as a character.
It kind of says something that you can rip out all the horror elements and the game wouldn't be that much different for it. The aberrations of fish you catch aren't that functionally different from just having a rare variant, the monstrosities that can damage your vessel could be just about anything else since you can't interact with them in any way except running. Even the main quest rewards you with horrifying eldritch powers of... turbo, fast travel, flares, and fishing explosives. Done up, of course, but the fact I can just replace them with mundane equivalents at a snap should speak for itself.
DREDGE still has a rather nice premise, the fishing is rather relaxing, and the aberrations of fish do have wonderfully rendered art and descriptions. But it doesn't really come to a head, or mesh together well. You end up doing the same thing regardless of how upgraded your boat is, and it arguably becomes even more bland since you no longer have cargo space, engine speed or night light to worry about. The regions do have nice twists, but ultimately are just little twists that don't impact the gameplay much at all. End game ends up largely being a waiting game for research parts and fish respawns.
The biggest disappointment is how little the game touches on its horror aspects. Lovecraftian horror should be about the peeling away at the mundane to reveal the horrifying truth behind it all, facades and masks done away to reveal the true nature of things. Loved ones, familiar faces, turned strange and alien. But, in the end, I found myself bored and annoyed, dashing between fishing spots, doing a lot of waiting, and tossing away catch, both regular and horrifying, because it wasn't the fish I needed.
And you know, if I wanted to do a bunch of waiting only to leave unsatisfied, I'd just go fishing in real life.