Dredge Review | GamesRadar

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Fishing games are supposed to be relaxing, not panic inducing, tension filled seas with H. P. Lovecraft monsters beneath the waves. As you can imagine this makes for an edge of your tiller game.
Transcript
00:00 (dramatic music)
00:02 - Ali, most fishing games are a nice, meditative,
00:10 relaxing kind of affair, sometimes a bit cutesy,
00:13 like when they have mini games in other games.
00:15 Dredge, on the other hand, is a horror-fuelled,
00:19 panic-driven, HP Lovecraft Undertone's manic fishing game.
00:24 - Yeah, so you, a lot of the time it is that first game
00:29 you mentioned, like you'll go out on your boat
00:31 and you'll catch fish and it'll just be like,
00:33 hold in a load of cod and mackerel and have a lovely time
00:35 and when the sun's high and the birds are circling,
00:38 it's lovely.
00:40 And then it gets dark, or like you pull up a weird fish
00:44 and then you go back to the village
00:45 and everyone looks haggard and tired and just done.
00:49 And that's where the Lovecraftian stuff starts to come in.
00:51 It's not like a horrible, tentacle, Cthulhu-driven
00:54 version of Lovecraft, but it's that version
00:57 of that kind of cosmic horror that is unsettling,
01:01 gently worrying, rather than actually
01:06 straight up in your face, deliberate horror.
01:09 But as I say, there is this version of this game
01:11 that is lovely and you're just out there
01:13 having a nice time catching fish.
01:16 And you pull in, you fill up your hold and you pull in
01:19 and you set it all off and you upgrade your boat
01:21 and you do all this stuff.
01:23 The problem is when night sets,
01:26 and that's when the panic starts to really become
01:29 a feature of the game and something you have to learn
01:31 to work around, rather than it just being
01:35 another fishing game.
01:36 It's not like you just go out and have your day of fishing
01:38 and come back and sell your catch.
01:40 You have to learn to work with the day-night cycle
01:43 and how that all kind of fits in.
01:44 - So when you say panic, is that a game mechanic
01:46 or do you just mean like you panicking?
01:48 - Well, there's-- - Ah, no!
01:49 - Because there's definitely times when it'll do
01:52 these very subtle things to just unsettle you.
01:54 Like I say, it's not a game that's trying to jump scare you.
01:58 It's a game that's trying to get you on edge
02:00 and be unhappy to a certain extent.
02:02 But panic is an actual mechanic.
02:05 The interesting thing, I think the thing
02:06 that I find most interesting about Dredge
02:08 is that it's not a game that kind of wants you to contend
02:13 with the traditional ways of measuring success.
02:16 Like money is a factor because you need
02:18 to upgrade your boat, but, and health is.
02:21 It does this really interesting thing
02:22 where your boat is expressed as a grid.
02:24 You've got block by block, like exactly here.
02:27 And as you catch a fish, you have to slot it
02:29 into this grid system.
02:31 So you can see here's a little quick time event.
02:33 You pull in the fish.
02:34 If you hit the green things here,
02:37 you'll pull in the fish faster,
02:38 which I'll come back to in a second.
02:40 And then you have to slot it in.
02:41 And you can only slot in so many features.
02:44 You can only slot in so many rods
02:45 and so many engines and then so many fish.
02:47 - Oh, so your, oh, okay, cool.
02:49 So here, your upgrades will also be here
02:50 in between the fish.
02:52 So then all of a sudden, that management side
02:54 of it is something we, the Tetris effect that we know.
02:57 - Yeah, so there's that.
02:58 And then you can see at the top here,
02:59 this damage thing, which is basically a three strikes
03:01 and you're out at this point.
03:03 But, so if you get hit by something,
03:05 if you slam into a rock, you'll lose
03:06 one of your damage things, but it'll also take out
03:08 one of these points on this grid.
03:10 - Oh, what?
03:11 - So you'll just, you'll open your inventory
03:12 and it'll say, there's just a little X
03:14 over one of the things.
03:15 And you can't use that anymore
03:15 until you go back and you fix it.
03:17 And what that does is an interesting thing
03:18 where like maybe it takes out your engine
03:20 and you're basically just adrift
03:21 because it will be a completely random slot.
03:24 If it hits a slot with a fish in,
03:25 the fish is lost.
03:26 You go down the board.
03:27 - Which is unfortunate, but your engine.
03:28 - It's unfortunate, especially when you catch a big fish,
03:30 a bigger fish sells for more money,
03:33 but it also takes up more slots.
03:34 So then if you take some damage,
03:35 you lose that whole fish.
03:36 - What if one slot can get rid of?
03:37 - One slot can kill an entire fish.
03:39 As you upgrade the boat, it becomes less of a factor.
03:41 But like here, you could just lose one of these fish, right?
03:43 Like if one of these bottom slots gets hit,
03:45 you lose a fish, that's that.
03:47 All the time that you've invested into that is gone.
03:49 - So relatively traditional management mechanics
03:53 that we're kind of used to,
03:54 interesting ways of putting them in,
03:56 but you said the twist on it is the panic and the time.
04:00 - Yeah, so time moves only when you are moving
04:03 and fishing counts as moving.
04:05 - Oh yeah, so up here you can see when you stay still,
04:08 it's not going up,
04:09 but as soon as you fish, it'll move,
04:10 or as soon as you move.
04:11 - As soon as you move the boat, it'll move.
04:12 So that's a really interesting thing
04:14 where you've only got so many hours in a day
04:16 before the sun goes down,
04:17 and when the sun goes down,
04:19 different fish come out.
04:20 So if you're looking for something specific,
04:21 you might not be able to find it.
04:22 But when the sun goes down, you start to panic.
04:25 And it's expressed on the HUD by this like opening,
04:28 all seeing Big Brother style eye
04:30 that kind of, as it gets worse and worse,
04:32 flickers back and forwards.
04:34 But on top of that,
04:35 you start to see things in the dark that aren't there.
04:37 Like one of the spookiest moments I ever had
04:39 was you can see this boat trawling in the darkness,
04:42 like out beyond the reef that you start in,
04:45 and you're going, that's never been mentioned.
04:47 Like what is going on there?
04:49 And that's spooky, and like you hear it's foghorn,
04:51 and you answer it's foghorn, and then it answers back.
04:53 But there's no evidence within the game
04:55 that that is anything.
04:56 And then the bit that gets me the most is that
04:59 by the point at which this happened to me,
05:01 I knew the two, the reefs that you start in
05:04 between these two little islands,
05:05 and it's nicely penned in.
05:07 I knew that inside and out.
05:09 I knew exactly where the rocks were.
05:11 There's this whole lighthouse,
05:13 which is designed to be something
05:14 that kind of pulls you back into this area.
05:17 The whole time, I knew exactly,
05:18 I knew every moment of it.
05:20 But I came back one night panicked
05:21 'cause I was getting back really late.
05:24 And these rocks just start like appearing out of the mist
05:27 where they've never been.
05:28 They're just there to mess with you.
05:29 - Oh, because it's a mist, you're like,
05:29 I know that I'm going towards the lighthouse,
05:31 so I know this is a straight shot.
05:32 And then the rock just appears out of nowhere.
05:33 - Yeah, and you're like, because in the dark,
05:35 you've only got these like, at the start especially,
05:37 you've only got these tiny bulbs
05:38 that throw up a tiny amount of light.
05:39 There's this really small area around you that you can see.
05:43 And so stuff just appears out of nowhere,
05:44 and you feel panicked.
05:45 You're just inventing it in your mind.
05:46 But in the game, it's there.
05:49 You clash into it and you'll damage yourself
05:51 based on something you didn't even think is there.
05:53 And there's a lot of other ways in which the panic sets in.
05:55 Like one thing that's really spooky it does is,
05:58 you'll just hear this little like tinkle of piano keys.
06:01 The sound design is incredible in that regard.
06:04 Its ability to just unsettle, even in those moments,
06:06 like I say, where you're sitting out on the open water
06:08 and it's lovely, you'll pull in this malformed fish,
06:12 this something that's mutated.
06:14 And the artwork on that is fantastic,
06:15 but the sound design is incredible
06:17 'cause it's just this little minor key
06:19 that makes you feel like something's gone wrong.
06:21 But with panic, you're more likely to get an infection
06:24 in your fish, and that tanks the value of them completely.
06:28 And you'll just see this little message that says like,
06:30 you see something slither into your hold.
06:31 Then you open your hold and your fish are horribly corrupted.
06:34 And that's just a mechanic of the panic system.
06:37 So panic is very much driven by being out at night
06:41 and you can sleep to set it off,
06:43 and you can have lights on
06:44 that make it easier to kind of get over the panic
06:48 and it ramps up slower.
06:50 But it means that time then becomes
06:51 a really interesting resource
06:53 because you have to be able to get out,
06:56 get your catch and come home before the panic sets in.
06:59 'Cause otherwise you're not gonna be as effective
07:01 as you go on, because there are all these things
07:03 that are gonna damage you, gonna slow you down,
07:05 gonna ruin your catch.
07:07 And so there was this thing I would do,
07:11 but I would wake myself up like five or 10 minutes early
07:13 just so I had those extra few minutes.
07:14 - Oh, you have control over that.
07:15 - You can wake up, like, the clock runs around,
07:18 'cause like I say, you might wanna go out
07:19 and fish deliberately at night
07:21 to catch a specific fish in this area.
07:23 - So you do have control of when you wake up.
07:25 If you wanna fish at night, you can.
07:26 But you were purposely going,
07:28 oh, I'm gonna get five, 5.30, 5.45.
07:31 - So that you get those extra few minutes
07:32 because any panic you accrue in those 30 minutes
07:34 before 6 a.m. and the sun rises
07:36 is gonna dissipate relatively quickly when the sun's up.
07:38 But those extra 30 minutes of just this area
07:42 immediately around this village,
07:43 it takes a little while to get out of.
07:45 There's no fish until you get to the mouth of this bay.
07:47 And so you wanna be like, well, I'm getting,
07:50 I'm just getting shot of this
07:51 so I can go and fish something more interesting.
07:53 And as you start to push further afield,
07:55 you've got your central island
07:56 and then islands you can travel to around.
07:58 - And if you know you're trying to get over to that one,
08:00 you need to leave early in the morning,
08:02 at least before you start to get the big engine upgrades.
08:04 And so it makes for such a fascinating mechanic
08:06 where time and panic are so wedded to each other
08:09 and things like money and health,
08:11 which are far more traditional,
08:12 they just start to be less important.
08:14 - Do they throw enough into the mix in the mid game
08:17 that kind of keeps it interesting?
08:18 Or like once you've got all these upgrades,
08:20 are you just like king of the sea
08:21 and nothing matters to you?
08:22 Like, is it still interesting and hard?
08:24 - It's still interesting.
08:25 I think it does lose some aspects of the,
08:28 it does become less difficult, obviously.
08:30 As you have your ability to get from island to island
08:34 a lot more easily, that's the first big test, right?
08:37 Is can I get my little boat from the starting island
08:41 to the next island or to this reef over here
08:44 and stuff like that.
08:45 Once you are past that as a meaningful hurdle,
08:50 the game does have to throw other things at you.
08:53 The upgrade mechanic is actually really interesting
08:55 'cause it's almost presented as a tech tree
08:58 and you have to get specific resources
09:03 in order to go through that tech tree.
09:05 It's not really a case of money,
09:06 it's a case of are you gonna put your time aside
09:08 to avoid fish and dredge up like wood and metal and cloth,
09:13 which costs time.
09:14 So dredging is, as the name would suggest,
09:17 like quite a key part of the game,
09:18 but dredging is what you do to find those resources,
09:21 those physical things.
09:21 You're not selling on, you're very deliberately collecting
09:24 so that you can upgrade your boat.
09:25 And they appear in very specific places.
09:28 You have to go looking for shipwrecks in order to find--
09:30 - Which I'm guessing is a certain distance away.
09:32 Again, you're taking your time.
09:32 - And often in odd places, like the shipwrecks traditionally
09:36 are not hidden in the plain sight where the fish are.
09:39 If I, there's a little,
09:41 there's a cool little telescope mechanic
09:42 that you can use and go,
09:44 that's where I'm gonna go
09:44 'cause I want that specific fish.
09:46 Or even just I need to find some fish,
09:48 I'll use the telescope.
09:50 So you can look out for stuff
09:51 and the fish are all kind of dotted around the open sea.
09:53 You get to a certain point,
09:54 you have to learn to adapt around it.
09:55 And particularly--
09:56 - And there are bigger beasties,
09:57 or there are bigger things out there.
09:58 - There are bigger beasties, exactly.
09:59 Island 3 does a particularly good job
10:02 of making you adapt around what its big beastie is.
10:07 You don't become king of the sea.
10:09 - That's reassuring at least.
10:10 - You have a lot more room to get around and experiment
10:14 and find the stuff that you wanna look for.
10:16 And there was one day that I was looking for a specific,
10:20 they're called aberrations, they're like horrid fish.
10:23 - Oh yeah.
10:24 - The weird ones that really throw it up
10:26 and really sell the Lovecraftian stuff.
10:27 I was looking for a specific one of those.
10:29 I was basically just doing donuts
10:31 with a trawler net down looking for it.
10:35 And in that situation, that's not difficult.
10:36 I can manage the panic around that
10:38 and I was in a place that even at night wasn't too scary.
10:41 And then you can just go and sleep during the day
10:43 and you kind of change things up.
10:44 But I was still afraid of the big beastie.
10:48 I was sitting in the shallows, that was fine.
10:50 - And you were doing figures of eight in one area
10:51 'cause you're like, "No, this is safe.
10:52 "I'm not going further anywhere."
10:54 Okay, cool, that's interesting.
10:55 Well, I'm glad that they keep it fresh
10:57 and they do mix it up.
10:59 It'll be interesting 'cause this is just a preview.
11:01 It'd be interesting to see what the later game is like
11:04 to see how that develops as well.
11:06 When's it out?
11:07 - It's out March 29th on all platforms, I think.
11:10 So that's PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X and S,
11:13 Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
11:15 So all the way across the board.
11:17 - I really wanna play this on Switch.
11:18 It seems like a perfect little game.
11:20 - Yeah.
11:21 - So how long did you play for?
11:24 - I played for a long time in the end.
11:26 I don't have a direct account, but easily.
11:28 I think you could bash through the campaign
11:31 in maybe eight to 10 hours if you really put your foot down.
11:33 - This is what I mean,
11:34 it doesn't seem like a 30 to 40 hour game,
11:36 but it's a nice Switch game of just pootling around.
11:39 - And here's the thing, it can be really relaxing.
11:40 There were moments where it is--
11:41 - It's not though, is it?
11:42 It's so, it's so--
11:43 - It has the capacity to be really relaxing.
11:45 It has this, you pootle around in the open sea
11:49 under this massive open sky that's really nice
11:52 and you can just go fishing and it's not,
11:53 and you can push the horror, as it were.
11:57 - As much as you want.
11:58 - Or you can push it out of your mind for a bit.
11:59 - For a bit.
12:00 - It will always come back and get you in some capacity,
12:03 even if that's just getting back
12:05 or racing the sunset to get back,
12:08 'cause you know that it's just gonna be less pleasant.
12:10 You know that you are gonna lose that
12:12 and you're always sitting there,
12:13 even when it's really delightful going.
12:15 I have to bear in mind what time it is
12:18 and I have to like, can I fish for one more thing
12:20 before the sun goes down?
12:22 And it's always there and you're always balancing it,
12:24 but like maybe 11 a.m. on the internal clock.
12:28 - Yeah.
12:28 - That's the best time to be out, but.
12:30 - As if management games weren't,
12:32 like the whole point of management games
12:33 is to like have you juggling stuff
12:35 and that tension and stuff.
12:36 And then this just adds an extra notch on top of it.
12:38 - Yeah.
12:39 - I'm so interested, I really wanna go and play this.
12:40 This could be very good.
12:41 Thanks for playing, letting us know about it.
12:42 And yeah, can't wait to play the full game
12:45 when it finally comes out.
12:47 - Yeah.
12:47 (gentle music)
12:50 (electronic beeping)
12:53 (electronic beeping)
12:57 (whooshing)