For many, fishing is a calm and relaxing pastime. It is a playful but often deadly game where usually the one holding the cane has total control. On the high seas, this dynamic is often reversed. Tending to a trawler for days, battling devastating weather conditions and being away from land for weeks can put a strain on the body and mind. It is these types of conditions that Dredge sums up so carefully in a handful of cleverly designed mechanisms, but it is the strange nuance that seeps through every crack that makes his fishing expeditions so treacherous.

You will start dredging and reach a small fishing village on a slightly larger island. The mayor of the city needs Someone to provide fish to the population and lends them a small boat capable of doing so. Fishing is what you will do the most in Dredge, because you will never have the chance to walk on land. So it’s a blessing that it never feels boring. Each action with a creature under the crest of the wave is played as a short mini-game focused on timed catch presses. The Format of each one changes depending on the class of fish you want to catch, but the basic level and the overall difficulty remain the same. Each one is not even necessary for a successful capture. Instead, in any mini-game, your ability will only speed up the process, which can be useful if you are trying to get back to earth before dark.

While the vast sunny ocean is welcoming during the 12 hours of daylight you have every day, it’s a very different view at night. A thick fog spreads over the vast area and the lights of your boat often have difficulty penetrating them effectively for Navigation. When you travel at night, your stress level rises regularly (indicated by a Sauron-like eye that moves more irregularly as you level up) and with it, the Chance of surreal events. Stones that you were sure weren’t in your path before suddenly appearing, damaging your hull and potentially stealing some of your current loot. As you progress through the Stress, your so-called delusions intensify, from jet-black crows with bright red eyes that begin to circle you to ghostly ships that appear on your periphery and embark on a crash course with your ship.

Dredge threads the Needle of secret by never directly explaining these events. Every time they dock after a long night, the citizens of the different islands they explore comment on their fatigue and warn them of the harmful of sailing without sleep. If you want to discuss further with them, you will probably find that everyone knows that something strange is happening on the water, but no one is ready to give an explanation for this. Small notes in bottles scattered across the open oceans suggest a past event that could explain the inexplicable events that you will often experience, but even then there is a glorious total that you can still replenish. Dredge, with his strange horror inspirations, does not give you an easy answer at the end, as you might expect, and also disappointingly records his most grotesque images during the few seconds before the credits. While its themes are pervasive enough to give Dredge a decidedly Lovecraftian feel, there’s no denying that its otherwise suitably vague ending would have been more impressive with a similar level of horror.

It may seem easy to limit all fishing to the Time of day to avoid disturbing experiences and potential inventory losses, but Dredge’s systems are balanced enough to regularly take peril. For example, time does not pass when you are standing still, but passes quickly when you are moving and participating in fishing. It was common for me to try to sneak into another fishing spot before returning to port, just for one or two problem during the timing of the mini-game, plunging the world around me into darkness and making the return trip even more treacherous. Many species of fish can also only be caught at night, and since they are needed in some quests, you often have no choice but to brave the fog in search of the right shapes below the surface to pick and deliver.to city dwellers in need. It is also simply fascinating to see how much you can sometimes push your mind into the dredge and admire how the world around you is twisted under oppressive reds after days without a wink.

It is quite easy to explore the open waters that Dredge has to offer, but it is the adventure that sums up its vague history and gives the greatest impetus to visit its handful of different Island groups. You will go to each place in search of five harmless objects for a shady stranger who will give you and your boat secret powers with each new delivery. With one, you can give your boat’s engines a boost, but it will increase your stress level and peril a complete engine failure the more you use it. Another teleports you directly to the stranger’s apartment at the expense of even more wit, although most of the time it was the most effective method to avoid the hassle of going back. These two, out of a total of four possible ones, were the most useful and rarely seemed as exciting in practice as their strange source suggested. Although it was fun to pull an entire school of fish out of the water with a single force, it rarely became something that seemed crucial in my repertoire of ability and could disappear from memory when I was fishing regularly instead. In this sense, it is a disappointing waste of a reward that makes any required trip abroad more vile than exciting.

Although completing each stage of your adventure is not always mechanically rewarding, each of the tasks you undertake is worth it. This is largely thanks to the variety of places you visit, from a cave labyrinth with a rugged city stretching over the mountains, to boexpired of water loaded with torn scientific equipment (due to a monstrous creature with tentacles from the abyss). to an rejected civilization around a sleeping volcano with only a few fanatics who tell their stories. The world of Dredge is dotted with these exciting biomes to visit, dotted with a variety of different fish to discover and catch with a variety of different Fishing Rods, reels and traps. Although he relies on the same underlying mechanics for each one, he finds inventive ways to make most of his recovery quests exciting, either through regularly mixed objectives that challenge you to rethink your equipment and perform upgrades, or by the way you effectively search the waters around you.