Trawling the appalling

DREDGE
From: Team 17
For: Switch, PS, XB, PC
★★★★

By BEN ALLAN

Probably one of the more hotly anticipated indie games for a while, Dredge comes to us from Black Salt Games, a small games studio operating out of Christchurch that has bagged itself an international publishing deal. Go Kiwi! And there’s incentive aplenty to "buy New Zealand made" here too, as Dredge comes with a great hook. Well, several.

Dredge, you see, puts you in the (boat?) shoes of an angler newly arrived at an archipelago where, conveniently, they have need of a new catcher of fish. What happened to the last angler, you might ask? Oh forget about that, they just vanished one night. Don’t worry about the uneasy attitudes of the villagers either — or talk of the eerie fog that rolls in at night ...

For something is not right in these waters, which you’ll ply from your cute little fishing boat, pootling around between fishing spots, which are marked by rising bubbles. Pop your line over the side, and you’ll see which of the game’s many aquatic species you’re angling for and will be tasked with a minigame, based on timed button presses, to haul them up. Once caught, each fish has to be stowed away in the limited grid space of your boat’s hold. A wee L-shaped cod may be neatly tucked away in a corner. But a great big bronze whaler, while worth more at the fishmonger back in town, is all sticky-outy fins and tail — a lot more of a spatial inconvenience. So think fish-Tetris; an exercise in maximising your profit from the available space each trip.

You’ll want to make sure you have room for the, uh, odd fish you occasionally land. Cthulian variants of the normal fish species with extra heads, putrescent flesh or unnatural abilities emerge from the deep, each imaginatively illustrated and described — and each fetching a premium from the archipelago’s fishmongers.

As you fish, time progresses until inevitably, darkness falls — and Dredge really comes into its own. The cheery blue waves and sky give way to something more sinister. Why did the lights of that other fishing vessel vanish as I drew near? Where did those rocks spring from? Wait, are those ... eyeballs? Fish too long without rest after dark and sanity becomes seriously strained, with consequences that range from inconvenient to fatal. Your boat is easily damaged, and a good day’s fishing can easily become a desperate crawl through the gloom home, fervently hoping that weird glow in the water isn’t going to come any closer. Fiendishly though, some fish can only be caught at night, making for various risk-reward scenarios.

As you continue this cycle of fishing-by-day, terror-by-night, you’ll start to explore further out into other islands to discover new lands (e.g bioluminescent tropics, an active volcano) and fish species, salvage material to improve your vessel, and start to piece together, through quests, exactly what is going on in these cursed isles.

Dredge is a great example of what the indie game scene can do, bringing us a niche concept that triple-A gaming probably wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot (fishing) pole, and then nailing the execution to boot. A delightful wee slice of sickly seafood for your gaming diet.