Turning players' worst fears against them in Dredge

gamedeveloper.com:

Dredge is an eldritch fishing adventure that succeeds in feeling both serene and deeply unnerving thanks to some smart design choices by developer Black Salt Games. Taking to the stage at GCAP 2023 to explain how the team achieved that feat, the studio's 3D art director Michael Bastiaens says they intentionally sought to make Dredge "unsettling" rather than leaning into full-blown "jump scare" horror.

"We wanted to leave things to the player's imagination more than anything else, because it felt like people came up with the weirdest conjurations in their own mind before we'd even introduced the monsters or any of the scary events," explains Bastiaens. "Once you actually start seeing the monsters, they almost lose their impact. So we had to do a lot of things to keep those experiences fresh or put a twist on them."

One way the team sought to slowly turn 'cozy' into 'creepy' was to make Dredge's daytime segments incredibly peaceful and disarming, which provides a stark contrast to the title's uneasy moonlit voyages.

"The game is fundamentally broken into juxtapositions as a whole, whether it be in gameplay or visual design," says Bastiaens. "Take the idea of night versus day where we have this idea of open versus closed. So, during the day, you're seeing lots of open vistas, and then at night, everything becomes incredibly claustrophobic once the fog comes in."

Bastiaens notes those vistas are almost always peaceful and vibrant, and says the team ensured that running into "bad things" during the day would be a rarity. That helped create a sense of security, which the team realized could be exploited to encourage players to stay out longer than intended.

"We didn't actually plan on people being drawn into the calm and peaceful