Your next Indie obsession drops in a few weeks, and it ain’t on Game Pass Leave a comment
Dredge is one of those games that comes along that almost defies conventional description. It’s a trading and exploration sim like Elite, but with a tropical Wind Waker aesthetic, and a page-turning horror story told in the style of a visual novel. It’s all of those things, and yet, nothing you can compare it to really does it justice, because it’s really about the atmosphere.
Each component part of Dredge is highly competent in its own right: the bulk of the minute to minute gameplay is concerned with you operating as a jobbing fisherman. You fish, you earn money for ship upgrades, you fish more. Then there are special contracts and sidequests concerned with obtaining items of note from the depths, which could be a rare type of corrupted or mutated fish (more on that later), or a piece of treasure from a sunken galleon – the titular activity coming into play.
This all feeds into a fascinating main quest concerning the hunting of artefacts, which gives you cause to venture further and further from the tiny vestiges of civilisation that cling to this doomed region, to explore the outer reaches of the five island groups. The more you travel, the more exotic the plunder, and more specialised the equipment needed to harvest it.
