Way back in the era of video game magazines and a wide range of online publications, there was a particular writer that managed to gain a bit of fame, this was an Irishman that would later leave the larger side of the video game journalism industry and decide to take his own route: creating crowdfunded video game documentaries that focused more on the development stories of the video game industry rather than directly the video games themselves. This Irishman was Danny O'Dwyer, and his film studio would be called NoClip. I hadn't followed his ventures all that much in recent years until recently I remembered the name and the channel, deciding to take a look at it. Why is this important to this post, you may ask? Well, a few weeks back I watched a documentary NoClip released on a video game called Dredge. It was an interesting insight into the development of the game from the studio Black Salt Games. Interviews on the game development decisions, the struggles of publishing, and the rest. I added the game to my Steam wish list to keep an eye on it for future sales but otherwise forgot about the same since. Though, I noticed a name I recognised pop up in the Amazon Twitch weekly game giveaways that they do, and that was to much surprise a key to Dredge on the GOG platform. I redeemed it and installed the game immediately, with the assumption that I'd be able to run the game on my laptop through Heroic Launcher, which is something else I recently wrote about if you want to take a look at that.
Dredge is a little gem of a game, one that takes a really simplistic idea and does quite a lot of things with it, primarily with little snippets of world-building, player freedom, as well as the generally simplistic idea of being a fisherman in a relatively small region that holds a greater set of mysteries than initially meets the eye. The story to begin with is barely told to us, which is something I found quite fun: you're suddenly in a new small town and the previous fisherman went missing, you've been given a boat and have to pay off the debt to the mayor, but it's not a whole lot of money. You're told then to just throw yourself out there and start exploring and fishing, with a few other characters at the town to talk to and interact with sometimes as well. It's fairly barebones at this point as the game teaches you the process of going fishing, coming back, and then earning a bit of cash to afford upgrades to your fishing boat. The characters at the town sometimes give you a little bit of a challenge in which you have to go somewhere and deliver something, or capture certain fish. These mini challenges aren't timed, but they do offer a bit more reason to explore the outer parts of the environment, and the world feels incredibly big due to this. The initial challenge being that you can't just roam around all day and night, and are advised to not fish out at night unless you have to. There are hints that at night there is something out there, and you're best avoiding it.
Challenges do encourage you to fish at night though, but you're limited for the most part as the more you're out there fishing at night, the more your panic metre begins to increase, alongside various odd events that take place around you that increase the eeriness. Fishing at night is genuinely a bit of a spooky ordeal. The more challenges you do finish, and the more you do explore though, the more you make a bit of money to increase the capabilities of your boat, allowing you to explore beyond and at a faster speed. One thing that I should add regarding the exploration: the more your boat moves, or if you fish, the faster time passes. This means your exploration in the day is somewhat limited, and it gives you this sense of panic that you have to rush back to a port somewhere to dock and sleep the night away, to escape the horrors of the night. I have't encountered anything particularly terrifying at night yet, as I have been trying to avoid it, but I have seen some odd things that I intend to explore a bit more once I've done a few more upgrades to my boat. Primarily focusing on the speed of the engines, allowing my days to be more efficient. The art style of the game is pretty cozy, I'm not sure what the style of it is, but there's no voice acting at all in the game, and you're reading snippets of text from characters at little towns and locations throughout the world. I think it all suits the general theme quite well, it's not meant to be a game that gives you major spooks, it's more meant to be a game that could be considered relaxing while still offering a bit of a challenge here and there.
The gameplay can sometimes feel a bit repetitive as you're constantly battling time, and with some of the little character quests you're given, you can't finish them particularly quickly. Sometimes it takes a bit of time to find the materials required, which requires a lot of exploration and thus more boat upgrades. In such moments the fishing almost becomes secondary, something you mostly overlook when you're handling deliveries for people, or helping them find lost items to solve and uncover deeper mysteries within the world. Much of this struggle also comes from the limited boat space you're given at first, again something you have to upgrade over time, and fish alone take up a lot of space fast. As do materials such as planks of wood or trinkets that you want to sell for some extra cash. I don't think it's a came you sink countless hours into at a time, but one that you return to here and there for bitesized adventures. Either way, it's pretty fun so far and I'm curious to see where it continues to go as more sailing opens up more mysteries in the greater story, and more unique environments,