Dredge is a little bit too relaxing

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Hey! Long time no see! I know you're probably expecting an announcement about the next project, but that will have to wait a little longer. In the meantime I want to talk about a few games I played while I was absent, and one of them was Dredge.

I really wanted to play it last year but unfortunately didn't have the time. The "fishing game" slot had already been taken by Dave the Diver, so I had to postpone playing it. I was still really excited because on the first glance Dredge seemed to me like a crossover between Dave the Diver and Sunless Sea, the game I absolutely wanted to love but it turned out to be too difficult for me and I just could not make any progress. I am probably going to give it another try; it still lives in my head rent-free.

So let me tell you what I loved about Dredge and what, in my opinion, could be improved to make the game even better.

Dredge is an adventure game where you play as a fisherman who gets entangled in a mystery. Your boat crushed near one of the small towns and you were picked up by another boat. The mayor of the town agreed to loan you a new (in fact, a very old) boat so you could work as a fisherman for the towns of the archipelago and repay bit by bit by selling whatever you catch. However, it's best not to fish during the night hours...

Dredge has a few simple mechanics that work really well together. You have your fishing minigames that get more challenging as you try to catch a rare fish; you have a dredging minigame to obtain resources from shipwrecks; your inventory management and upgrade management are basically Tetris, and that's about it. As you dredge enough resources and make enough money selling fish, you can upgrade your fishing equipment, your lights, your engines and so on and so forth, trying to strike a delicate balance between outfitting your boat with the most advanced tech available to you and still leaving enough cargo room so that you can fit some fish in there. 

The thing that I probably liked the most, is that Dredge expands dramatically the further you progress. It is still a small game, but once you overcome the limitations that bind you at the start, it honestly seems limitless. You start off by sailing between two small towns opposite each other: Greater Marrow and Little Marrow. Your engine can barely propel you forward; it takes a long time to sail from one town to the other, and if you want to fish in between, it's very likely you'll meet the night in open waters and some scary event will trigger. For a few in-game days that's what you do: you scuttle between these towns praying to dock before the night falls because it's just way too scary out there at night, and the distance seems almost insurmountable.

However, if you return to The Marrows mid-game in broad daylight, you will see that these towns are basically 10 in-game minutes apart with your upgraded engines. You can zip-zap between them all you like, it's no big deal; it's funny to even think about how this laughable distance once was a perilous adventure for a whole day. Dredge is great at showing you your progress, and I love when games do that. It might sound quite contradictory because the more advanced your boat becomes, the smaller the world gets, but the game ends before it shrinks to a dot, so I consider this approach to progression to be quite fitting.

I was very interested in the lore element of the game because I love these eldritch-about-to-meet-Cthulhu settings, but I was in for somewhat of a disappointment. While the plot of the game is fairly obvious if you actually talk to people and pay attention to the main quest, the lore of the world is quite hard to obtain. There are monuments that are most likely inactive when you encounter them for the first time, and you need to fulfil certain conditions to get a vision. Since there are a lot of these monuments, it's quite tedious to boat around them trying your best to catch a glimpse at the world's history, and, quite unexpectedly, it becomes harder as you progress for the reasons I won't spoil. I'd guess that getting all the bits and pieces will cost an average player a decent chunk of the total playtime, so I honestly don't know why the developers would make it so cumbersome.

When it comes to difficulty, surprising even for myself, I found Dredge somewhat lacking. You can turn on the minigame assist in the accessibility menu, which is great, and you can turn off the hostility of the monsters and random scary events. But you can't manage the last two separately, which came as an unpleasant discovery. While monsters only trigger when you get close to them, or you don't fulfil certain conditions, scary events trigger when you get greedy and fish several days without sleeping. Monsters are avoidable, but random events comprise a system of punishments, the only thing keeping you, the player, in check, forcing you to comply with the game's rules or face the consequences. It was very weird to me that these two things were put into the same checkbox; over time monsters became annoying to me and I wanted to just turn them off, but I couldn't do that without also turning off the main structural component of the gameplay loop.

Which leads me to my next point: Dredge is very... relaxing. Way too relaxing, in my opinion, especially considering its dark atmosphere and matching artstyle. Inside, Dredge is a cuddly plush toy, and this contrast, albeit undoubtedly entertaining, left me somewhat perplexed. The thing is that the economy in Dredge is so loose that you are never in a pickle if you don't fish. At all. Days of lower productivity do not impact your overall success; you are not punished by not fishing or not dredging, because you have no imposed deadlines. Stay in the harbor for three days in a row if you feel like it; nothing bad will happen. Nothing good will happen either; the world will just stay still.

You stop caring about money early on and have no incentive to continue fishing. The loan on the boat at the start of the game is a great thought but it's rather small and you pay it off in like 2 days. When pursuing new equipment, it's just a matter of selling a 2-3 days' catch to afford whatever you want on your stage of progression. Never once did I have to think about saving money or balancing my spending. Certainly, a big part of this imbalance is the fact that you have no other way to use your money except for buying new equipment, and consequently you don't really need to balance anything. You just catch a bunch of fish, sell it all, and spend all the money on equipment, and that's it. Often it feels like a post-endgame sandbox that just arrived way too early.

I've been entertaining a few random ideas on how to make the gameplay of Dredge correspond to its overall tone and make it a little bit more balanced. Usually, I am not the one to play on the max difficulty, but I genuinely feel like Dredge could use more challenge for structural purposes. The goal of the game is fishing, and I feel like I didn't have enough incentive to do it — apart from seeing the art for a new fish or its corrupted version.

First of all, I feel like the general numbers are way too forgiving, so maybe making fish cost a little bit less would stop the players from buying everything in the shop after a few days of fishing. Paying off the loan on the boat could also be made more challenging by increasing the amount the player needs to pay, imposing a deadline and maybe adding an interest, or a fine if said deadline is blown. Not to let the player just ignore the loan and freely explore, an engine upgrade might be locked until they've paid off the loan.

The most exciting change, from my point of view, would be charging the player for docking. You can only rest if you are docked, and sometimes, when you're out and about in the sea, and the night falls, you need to find a dock fast, before some scary event triggers. Currently it's just as simple as that: you dock at the closest docking spot and rest. It's doesn't cost anything. Thus, the planning of your fishing trip is basically non-existent: even if you get too carried away and end up in the middle of the sea at night, you'll be able to dock at your nearest docking spot no problem. I'd love to have more challenge to that: make docking cost money that you need to either have on hand or carry the equivalent in catch. It doesn't have to be much; even a tiny sum will already make it a more solid mechanic. Maybe, some docks will be free, others — cost money or a specific fish, or a crab. Maybe you can negotiate a free docking one time or end up in debt.

It might seem like I am trying to make Dredge more exhausting for no reason, but I really wish the economy was tighter to keep me on my toes and to drive exploration. I genuinely believe that Dredge could use some more balancing to better suit its eldritch tone.

Fortunately, all the drawbacks are mitigated by Dredge's modest size. It is a short, well-rounded adventure with a clear-cut main quest and a couple of endings. I quite enjoyed exploring all the main areas of the archipelago and their respective little stories — and I found that, even in the absence of an economic drive, I was driven by something that I always carry with me wherever I go and whatever I do — curiosity. Dredge turned out to be very good at inspiring it; I sailed to every single island, even when it was more like a rock barely sticking out above water. I constantly had that feeling of imminent discovery: it didn't always come true, but very often it did. I also fished a lot, almost every day, and it wasn't for money because I had plenty, but for a chance to catch a new fish or a corrupted version of already known fish and see the artwork. Dredge looks incredible; its art is what keeps the tone of the game consistent throughout. Whether a new character, a new piece of equipment, or a never seen before corrupted crab: it looks fantastic.

While I do think that Dredge would benefit from incorporating a bit of a challenge to better balance the player experience, I still enjoyed it a lot. Let me know in the comments if you've played Dredge and whether or not you agree with me! Keep an eye out for more videos and eventually the announcement. I also stream on Twitch weekly now (maybe even ER DLC) so don't hesitate to come hang out.

As usual, stay tuned here and on the Lair's YouTube channel not to miss out on anything.

Thank you very much for your time. Take care.