Dredge invents and perfects the fishing-horror genre

polygon.com:

The coral grouper’s skin erodes like the living reefs it inhabits. Blue spots on vibrant orange skin are bleached white, decay rotting scales down to exposed bone. Dead-eyed and gaping, the fish, among others who’ve not yet festered, lurks in the shallow waters of Dredge’s Stellar Basin. The ocean may as well be an alien world, a place that’s entirely uninhabitable to humans — and yet, it’s covering the majority of our earth, holding more mysteries and horrors than most can imagine.

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In Dredge, the debut video game from developer Black Salt Games, those mysteries are starting to make themselves known. Dredge begins with a fisherman arriving at Greater Marrow, one island in an archipelago that interrupts a vast stretch of wine-dark sea, under peculiar circumstances. His ship was destroyed on the rocks that guard the coastline, so he’s quickly handed a new boat and some fishing line and sent on his way by the mayor; the people must have something to eat.

And so he fishes. Dredge is a fishing game, after all — albeit one that tugs on the idea of fishing rather than the reality of it. Playing as the fisherman, I take to the seas and cast out my line. During the 12 hours of sunlight, you can see where the fish are bubbling to the surface, their shadows dancing under the waves. When you cast off your