From the ever-dear Team-17 comes DREDGE, a single-player fishing adventure lasting about 10 hours with a sinister note inspired by a horror classic that will be easy for you to guess, once you start your gameplay.
In this adventure, developed by the Black Salt Games studio, it will be our task to wander around the islands of an archipelago crowded with secrets and characters who all have something to hide, while with hook and net we will catch the fish to pay for food.
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The Gameplay
The gameplay is quite simple: with our boat we will navigate fishing for various types of fish. The fish will all have different characteristics and it will be necessary to have the appropriate equipment to be able to catch them. The equipment itself will in fact be the main limitation in our exploration, as, even if we move away from "Greater Marrow", the basic island from which we will start, we will not be able to procure other varieties of fish until we install the appropriate equipment for fishing in the various areas of the archipelago. The action of fishing is then characterized by a series of "mini-games" in which we will have to pull up the hook with the right timing, otherwise we will make the fishing longer than necessary and make us lose precious light time.
Another strong limitation will be the power of our outboard motor, given by the unspecified fear of the night, which causes psychological discomfort to our alter-ego to the point of driving him crazy if we exaggerate in being swallowed up by the darkness. For this reason we will always try to go back and forth from the first island, until we develop an engine powerful enough to take us far away to new safe harbors, all before nightfall.
Our boat can be improved to the sound of money and materials to be recovered, such as wood and fabric, which will be kindly donated to us from the wrecks of unfortunate sailors sunk in the surroundings. The improvements, in addition to changing the physical appearance of the ship, will allow us, more importantly, to load more and more fish in the hold, making us less damned for inventory management, which broadly resembles that of the various Resident Evil, in which we will have to juggle in fitting straight fish, L-shaped fish and why not even some other zigzag fish, in a sort of cursed Tetris, capable of making us curse because we are forced to throw other precious fish back into the sea in order to fit the new prey.
This adventure will certainly be appreciated by completionists, who will want to catch all the fish and unlock all the secrets that surround every single island in the archipelago, but for those who want to sail the sea just to complete the main adventure, there will not be much to do. Many elements present in the game are absolutely useless for the purpose of completing it, for example they will be the fish of the "oceanic" category which, although present in different species, you can completely ignore for the purposes of the adventure. Their practical usefulness, outside of providing you with money like other fish, will be nil.
As you may have guessed by now, the passage of time will be one of the main elements of the adventure, always marked at the top of your screen. It will be made to pass according to the movement or fishing actions that we will perform, while it will remain static if we stay quiet where we are to observe around us and decide on what to do. Mechanic chosen by the developers that we personally appreciated, as it will make you play without feeling the need to run all the time. Interesting variations on the theme are then the "powers" that will be given to us as a result of particular missions, which will allow us to face the seas in an even more bold way, such as turbo speed, the most used power by far.
History
At the beginning we will be castaways, like many others, whom misfortune has brought against the rocks of the bay, which have in common with the stairs in Harry Potter the peculiar pleasure of moving every now and then. Rescued by the lighthouse keeper, we will be helped by an easy-going mayor, eager to immediately give us a boat and fishing equipment, so as to supply his village after the last fisherman has disappeared. A haste to push us into the sea all too providential...
The main engine of this adventure will be the sinister aura that surrounds it, between characters with dark personalities and past incidents that few want to talk about or even admit that they exist. If in the early stages DREDGE will seem like a quiet fishing game with cardboard graphics, we will soon be introduced to the sick part of the work, between strange attitudes of those we meet and unnatural lights that paint the night. This sinister development of the work will fill us with interest and curiosity, also making us fear the night and what it could cause us.
Curiosity and fear that will soon vanish at the first light of dawn, when we will discover that the night is not so scary as it will be easily overcome by a series of tricks, such as staying close to the coast, allowing us to move without too many problems even throughout the night and continue to collect resources.
The arcane, on the other hand, that hovers in the places and characters will be almost exclusively a façade: scratching its surface there will not be much else behind it. Examples will be the various mysterious creatures mentioned by the local population, all too easy to find to represent a real legend.
There will be no research, no real adventure in spreading the fog, everything with two dialogues will already be clear to us. The only mystery that will hold up during the game will be what binds our character to that place, which to be honest will also be the usual cliché of mysterious adventures of which we could cite an avalanche of examples.
In Conclusion
DREDGE is a mystery trailer that fails to turn into a movie. The single-player adventure gives us a fan of the occult and then soon we no longer get over it. The horror theme, which could have been a curious nuance in this cardboard fishing game, fails to make its way through the same fog he created. Although in the hours I played it I appreciated the stylistic choices, they, instead of blazing, immediately die out. The hope of immersing ourselves in the mysteries that surround the archipelago will never lead us anywhere, thus remaining a shadow of what could have been. Furthermore, by its very nature, the gameplay will soon be repetitive, always clicking the same button but at different times cannot represent the entirety of its playful component.
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