Indie Game of the Week 414: Dredge

The Dredge is soon upon us! That's right, for April '25 I'm bringing back the fan-favorite and world-renowned retro gaming (or close enough) feature The Dredge of Seventeen, wherein I continue to see what other hidden treasures were lost in the hustle and bustle that was 2017. If you recall, 2017 was a year when we were all bracing ourselves for the many economically devastating antics that the newly elected President Donald "Six Bankruptcies" Trump would perform in his first year of office. Man, am I glad that here in the far-flung year of 2025 we don't have to go through anything like that again. Still, if there's anything to be nostalgic for from eight years ago it's from enjoying a shockingly strong year for games. To celebrate the return of that feature, if not much else being announced this month, I've elected to play this nominally apropos fishing RPG about plumbing the depths for fish and salvage, though maybe not so far that we pull up something insanity-inducing from the inky abyss. We're not planning to Still Wakes the Deep here (loving how many recent games are playing on our collective thalassophobia: can't trust 'em oceans, after all).

So, Dredge. Dredge comes to us courtesy of Black Salt Games from New Zealand, a country that might as well be dangling off the end of the known world, and sees its haggard fisherman protagonist limp into the port of Great Marrow, smack dab in the center of an unnamed archipelago of beautiful but insidiously dangerous islands. You've lost the ship you came in on thanks to a chance encounter with some jagged rocks but the local mayor is happy to supply you with a weathered hand-me-down vessel, provided you catch enough fish to pay for it (which thankfully isn't much; this isn't going to be Animal Crossing). From there, it becomes a progress loop of procuring fish for sale and materials for new boat parts, using the former to pay for all these upgrades. With better rods you can catch more expensive fish, with a faster boat you can get more done during the strict day/night cycle, and with a better lamp you can see your way back to port at low-light conditions without panicking too much. The game's dark secret, not that it's particularly subtle about it, is that this particular island group has some very uncanny denizens that only come out at night: not only do they present a threat when the sun goes down but the protagonist is also prone to hallucinating with all the eldritch energies floating around and that can create problems when a rock materializes directly in front of your speeding trawler. By carefully judging the duration needed to get back to a safe port in time, ideally one that has a fishmonger if you've fresh catches aboard since they don't tend to age well overnight, you can mitigate most of the dangers you'll face. Most. Some of these leviathans aren't night owls, alas.

The loop is very compelling, as I'm sure was the primary goal of the developers when figuring out the nuts and bolts of how this game would function outside of "what if we just had a colossal hermit crab pop out of the shipwreck they're investigating?" staged spooks. You have a classic Tetris-style cargo inventory system with which to fit in your necessary ship parts—the aforementioned rods, engines, lights, and later trawling nets and winches—along with materials, treasures, future seafood, anything that found its way into your crab pots that might also be edible, quest items, and whatever else is out there waiting to be fished up. Once your boat has a full tummy, you can drop it all off in a settlement either at the appropriate vendors or in your generous storage cache for later. Materials can also be placed, pre-emptively, in the dry dock ship upgrade area ready for when you have everything you need to expand your cargo space or dedicate more of it to larger ship parts. It's a simple enough interface and loop but does the job: when you finally get around to upgrading the engines enough, the amount of freedom you feel in getting from one side of the map to the other before the sun sets rather than having to quickly chug your way home from a few meters away because that was as far as you could go is a real game-changer. As is acquiring the means to fish new types of sea life: you start with shallow and coastal fish types like cod and mackerel, but eventually find the means to fish the deeper oceanic types including sharks and marlin, those that dwell in the awkwardly dense foliage of the mangroves, the few living in the line-melting heat of the volcano areas, and the deepest fish of all in the abyssal/hadal regions. (Hadal's a new word for me: it's named after Hades, the god of the underworld (and of run-based action games), and specifically refers to underwater areas more than six kilometers deep, which is more abyssal than even "abyssal". That's... going to need a very long fishing cable.)

The fishing alone would be a worthy enough draw—especially when you've a whole encyclopedia to fill out, its number of entries going into the triple figures—but of course Dredge has its darker waters to explore too. The whole region has been touched by the inexplicable, the eerie, and the grotesque. You'll catch glimpses of these creatures whenever the darkness has set in—though how much of it is your own sleep-deprived imagination is left to the player to determine—and you'll occasionally catch "aberrations": strange variants of the usual fish, which have a small percentage chance to appear instead and offer a significant mark-up over the standard fare thanks to the endless coffers of curiosity collectors. I've only just explored the third of the game's five regions—right now, I'm contending with a colossal octopus (or something else...?) over the region's abyssal catches—so I can't really talk definitively about that aspect of the game. Something tells me I'm better off not spilling the beans regardless: the slow creep of this unseen spectral menace has been effective in building the game's suspenseful vibe and lore as well as giving me plenty of incentive to scuttle off back to civilization at the first sign of dusk.

Dredge is, I think it's fair to say, certainly the best fishing RPG I've ever played. Granted there's not much competition outside of the few Legend of the River King games I've checked out (and I'm not including those RPGs where fishing is a mere side-hustle; Dark Cloud 2 would instantly win if that were the case) but kudos where it's due. I'm grateful that, despite the overbearing atmosphere of dread, it's still packed with some really accommodating quality-of-life touches like auto-saving at every safe port so you can just quit and reload if you get broadsided by a 50-foot monster eel and don't feel like repairing your boat at great expense and/or losing whatever useful item was sitting in the spot that got whomped by your playful friend. That there's no hurry for any of the quests, that fish stay fresh if they're sitting in your net or crab pot (since they're still technically in the ocean), or that most material dredging areas eventually respawn given enough time if you're struggling to find one more plank of wood for the next big hull upgrade. For all the bejeezuses this game has pried out of me with its jumpscares I've yet to grow enervated by its foibles—if indeed it had any worthy of note—nor do I find myself tiring of the simple approach of deciding what to do every dawn, whether that's to sit around fishing with a new rod or wander off towards the far reaches of the map while I let the nets do all the work. Do I check out that non-descript rock I see on the world map? It might have an NPC living on it, or a nearby wreck with some useful parts I can salvage, or maybe a new type of fish I haven't caught yet. Maybe I just spend the day doing a circuit with the local vendors since I need capital for the next engine upgrade, or actually getting on with the closest thing the game has to a main narrative thread by helping an elusive collector recover some dubious shipwreck goods that let off an eerie red-purple glow at night. It's the most enamoured I've been with the idea of being a deep sea fisherman since that episode of Deadliest Catch I saw at 3am when they all partied with mermaids and Aquaman. At least, I think that's what happened: the unearthly stillness of the middle of the night does tend to play tricks with one's mind.

Rating: 5 out of 5.