Dredge Review
Fishing is inherently boring. It might have once been a necessary part of daily life to hunt for food, but for most people it’s now a pastime in which you spend hours waiting around for a fish that may just not want to be caught. Dredge remedies this by giving you plenty of fish, cargo management, upgrades, side quests, and a good dollop of Lovecraftian spookiness.
The game begins with you, an unnamed fisherman, crashing your boat near the island of Greater Marrow. Upon waking you find the locals are very much in a fisherman and they just happen to have a spare boat you can borrow because, for some reason, they are not keen to go out on the water. How very convenient for you!
As the sun rises you set off, piloting the boat itself, and head out to areas of the sea where the surface churns with fish. One simple mini-game later and you land your first catch and have to stow it in your hold. The fish, and indeed all your equipment, must fit within a grid inventory without any items overlapping. Certain items, such as motors and fishing rods, can only be stored in certain sections of the grid, while fish can be placed anywhere. You know the item management screens from Resident Evil? It’s like that, but will a little bit of Tetris because some fish are oddly shaped.
You will spend a lot of time on this screen optimising your boat’s load, but the video game logic where a fishing rod takes up more space than a Mackerel, is a little annoying.
Fish caught and it’s time to head back to the shore to sell you catch, upgrade, buy new rods, nets, and motors, and sleep. Sleep is important because if you don’t make it back before nightfall, things start to go bump in the night – or splash in the night, to be more specific. All is not what
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