- 21/12/2023
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.
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GamingTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:07 Ali, most fishing games are a nice, meditative, relaxing kind of affair,
00:12 sometimes a bit cutesy, like when they have mini-games in other games.
00:15 Dredge, on the other hand, is a horror-fuelled, panic-driven,
00:20 HP Lovecraft Undertone's manic fishing game.
00:24 Yeah, so a lot of the time it is that first game you mentioned,
00:30 like you'll go out on your boat and you'll catch fish and it'll just be like,
00:33 "We're hauling a load of cod and mackerel and have a lovely time,
00:36 and when the sun's high and the birds are circling, 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 and everyone looks haggard and tired and just done,
00:49 and that's where the Lovecraftian stuff starts to come in.
00:52 It's not like a horrible, tentacle, Cthulhu-driven version of Lovecraft,
00:56 but it's that version of that kind of cosmic horror that is unsettling,
01:01 gently worrying, rather than actually straight up in your face, deliberate horror.
01:09 But as I say, there is this version of this game that is lovely,
01:12 and you're just out there having a nice time catching fish.
01:16 And you pull in, you fill up your hold, and you pull in and you set it all off,
01:20 and you upgrade your boat and you do all of this stuff.
01:23 The problem is when night sets, and that's when the panic starts to really become
01:29 a feature of the game and something you have to learn to work around,
01:33 rather than it just being another fishing game.
01:36 It's not like you just go out and have your day of fishing and come back and sell your catch.
01:40 You have to learn to work with the day/night cycle and how that all fits in.
01:44 So when you say panic, is that a game mechanic, or do you just mean like you panicking?
01:49 - Oh, no! - Because there's definitely times
01:51 when it'll do these very subtle things to just unsettle you.
01:55 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 and be unhappy to a certain extent.
02:03 But panic is an actual mechanic.
02:05 The interesting thing, and I think the thing that I find most interesting about Dredge,
02:09 is that it's not a game that wants you to contend with the traditional ways of measuring success.
02:17 Like money is a factor because you need to upgrade your boat.
02:20 And health is. It does this really interesting thing where your boat is expressed as a grid.
02:25 You've got block by block, like exactly here.
02:28 And as you catch a fish, you have to slot it into this grid system.
02:32 So you can see here's a little quick-time event.
02:34 You pull in the fish. If you hit the green things here, you'll pull in the fish faster,
02:39 which I'll come back to in a second.
02:41 And then you have to slot it in, and you can only slot in so many features.
02:44 You can only slot in so many rods and so many engines and then so many fish.
02:48 Oh, so your upgrades will also be here, in between the fish.
02:52 So then all of a sudden that management side of it is the Tetris effect that we know.
02:58 Yeah, so there's that. And then you can see at the top here this damage thing.
03:01 It's basically a three strikes and you're out at this point.
03:04 So if you get hit by something, if you slam into a rock, you'll lose one of your damage things,
03:08 but it'll also take out one of these points on this grid.
03:11 So you'll open your inventory and it'll say there's just a little X over one of the things.
03:15 You can't use that anymore until you go back and you fix it.
03:18 And what that does is an interesting thing where maybe it takes out your engine
03:21 and you're basically just adrift because it will be a completely random slot.
03:24 If it hits a slot with a fish in, the fish is lost.
03:27 Which is unfortunate, but your engine...
03:29 It's unfortunate, especially when you catch a big fish.
03:31 A bigger fish sells for more money, but it also takes up more slots.
03:35 So then if you take some damage, you lose that whole fish.
03:37 What does one slot can get rid of?
03:38 One slot can kill an entire fish. As you upgrade the boat, it becomes less of a factor.
03:41 But here, you could just lose one of these fish.
03:44 If one of these bottom slots gets hit, you lose a fish, that's that.
03:47 All the time that you've invested into that is gone.
03:50 So relatively traditional management mechanics that we're kind of used to.
03:54 Interesting ways of putting them in, but you said the twist on it is the panic and the time.
04:00 Yeah, so time moves only when you are moving and fishing counts as moving.
04:06 Oh yeah, so up here you can see when you stay still, it's not going up.
04:09 But as soon as you fish, it'll move.
04:11 As soon as you move the boat, it'll move.
04:13 So that's a really interesting thing where you've only got so many hours in a day before the sun goes down.
04:18 And when the sun goes down, different fish come out.
04:20 So if you're looking for something specific, 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 opening, all-seeing, Big Brother-style eye.
04:30 That kind of, as it gets worse and worse, flickers back and forwards.
04:34 But on top of that, you start to see things in the dark that aren't there.
04:38 One of the spookiest moments I ever had was you can see this boat trawling in the darkness,
04:43 out beyond the reef that you start in, and you're going, "That's never been mentioned.
04:48 What is going on there?"
04:50 And that's spooky, and you hear it's foghorn, and you answer it's foghorn, and then it answers back.
04:54 But there's no evidence within the game that that is anything.
04:57 And then the bit that gets me the most is that, by the point at which this happened to me,
05:02 I knew the reefs that you start in between these two little islands, and it's nicely penned in.
05:07 I knew that inside and out. I knew exactly where the rocks were.
05:11 There's this whole lighthouse which is designed to be something that kind of pulls you back into this area the whole time.
05:18 I knew exactly-- I knew every moment of it.
05:20 But I came back one night panicked because I was getting back really late.
05:24 And these rocks just start, like, appearing out of the mist 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, "I know that I'm going towards the lighthouse, so I know this is a straight shot."
05:32 And then the rock just appears out of nowhere.
05:34 Yeah, because in the dark, you've only got these-- at the start especially, you've only got these tiny bulbs
05:39 that throw up a tiny amount of light, this really small area around you that you can see.
05:43 And so stuff just appears out of nowhere, and you feel panicked.
05:45 You're just inventing it in your mind.
05:47 But in the game, it's there. You clash into it, and you'll damage yourself based on something you didn't even think is there.
05:54 And there's a lot of other ways in which the panic sets in.
05:56 Like, one thing that's really spooky it does is you'll just hear this little, like, tinkle of piano keys.
06:02 The sound design is incredible in that regard.
06:04 Its ability to just unsettle, even in those moments, like I say, where you're sitting out on the open water, and it's lovely.
06:10 You'll pull in this malformed fish, this something that's mutated.
06:14 And the artwork on that is fantastic, but the sound design is incredible
06:17 because it's just this little minor key that makes you feel like something's gone wrong.
06:22 But with panic, you're more likely to get an infection in your fish, and that tanks the value of them completely.
06:28 And you'll just see this little message that says, like, you see something slither into your hold.
06:32 And 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, and you can sleep to set it off,
06:43 and you can have lights on that make it more... it makes it easier to kind of get over the panic, and it ramps up slower.
06:50 But it means that time then becomes a really interesting resource,
06:53 because you have to be able to get out, get your catch, and come home before the panic sets in,
06:59 because otherwise you're not going to be as effective as you go on,
07:03 because there are all these things that are going to damage you, going to slow you down, going to ruin your catch.
07:07 And so there was this thing I would do, but I would wake myself up, like, five or ten minutes early, just so I had those extra few minutes.
07:15 Oh, you have control over that?
07:16 You can wake up, like, the clock runs around, because like I say, you might want to go out and fish deliberately at night to catch a specific thing in this area.
07:23 So you do have control of when you wake up, if you want to fish at night you can,
07:27 but you were purposely going, "Oh, I'm going to get five thirty, five forty-five."
07:31 So that you get those extra few minutes, because any panic you accrue in those thirty minutes before 6am and the sun rises
07:37 is going to dissipate relatively quickly when the sun's up.
07:39 But those extra thirty minutes of just this area immediately around this village, it takes a little while to get out of.
07:45 There's no fish until you get to the mouth of this bay, and so you want to be like,
07:49 "Well, I'm just getting shot of this so I can go and fish something more interesting."
07:53 And as you start to push further afield, you've got your central island and then islands you can travel to around.
07:59 And if you know you're trying to get over to that one, you need to leave early in the morning,
08:02 at least before you start to get the big engine upgrades.
08:05 And so it makes for such a fascinating mechanic where time and panic are so wedded to each other,
08:09 and things like money and health, which are far more traditional, they just start to be less important.
08:14 Do they throw enough into the mix in the mid-game that keeps it interesting?
08:19 Or once you've got all these upgrades, are you just king of the sea and nothing matters to you?
08:23 Is it still interesting and hard?
08:25 It's still interesting. I think it does lose some aspects of the...
08:29 It does become less difficult, obviously.
08:31 As you have your ability to get from island to island a lot more easily,
08:36 that's the first big test, right?
08:38 Is can I get my little boat from the starting island to the next island, or to this reef over here, and stuff like that?
08:47 Once you are past that as a meaningful hurdle, the game does have to throw other things at you.
08:53 The upgrade mechanic is actually really interesting because it's almost presented as a tech tree,
08:58 and you have to get specific resources in order to go through that tech tree.
09:06 It's not really a case of money, it's a case of are you going to put your time aside to avoid fish
09:10 and dredge up wood and metal and cloth, which costs time.
09:14 So dredging is, as the name would suggest, quite a key part of the game.
09:19 But dredging is what you do to find those resources, those physical things.
09:22 You're not selling on, you're very deliberately collecting so that you can upgrade your boat.
09:26 They appear in very specific places, you have to go looking for shipwrecks in order to find...
09:31 Which I'm guessing is a certain distance away, again, it's a given time.
09:33 In odd places, like the shipwrecks traditionally are not hidden in the plain sight where the fish are.
09:40 There's a cool little telescope mechanic that you can use and go,
09:44 "That's where I'm going to go because I want that specific fish."
09:46 Or even just, "I need to find some fish, I'll use the telescope."
09:50 So you can look out for stuff, and the fish are all kind of dotted around the open sea.
09:53 You get to a certain point, you have to learn to adapt around it, and particularly...
09:56 And there are bigger beasties, or there are bigger things out there.
09:59 Exactly, Island 3 does a particularly good job 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 and find the stuff that you want to look for.
10:17 And there was one day that I was looking for a specific...
10:21 They're called aberrations, they're like horrid fish.
10:23 Oh yeah.
10:24 The weird ones that really throw it up and really sell the Lovecraftian stuff.
10:28 I was looking for a specific one of those, and I was basically just doing donuts with a trawler net down, looking for it.
10:35 And in that situation, that's not difficult.
10:37 I can manage the panic around that, and I was in a place that even at night wasn't too scary.
10:42 And then you can just go and sleep during the day, and you kind of change things up.
10:45 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, because you're like, "I know this is safe, I'm not going further anyway."
10:54 Yeah, absolutely.
10:55 That's interesting. Well, I'm glad that they keep it fresh and they do mix it up.
10:59 It'll be interesting, because this is just a preview.
11:01 Yeah.
11:02 It'll be interesting to see what the later game is like, 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, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
11:16 So all the way across the board.
11:17 I really want to play this on Switch.
11:19 It seems like a perfect little game.
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 in maybe eight to ten hours if you really put your foot down.
11:33 This is what I mean, it doesn't seem like a 30 to 40 hour game, but it's a nice Switch game of just pootling around.
11:39 And here's the thing, it can be really relaxing.
11:41 There were moments where it is...
11:42 It's not, though, is it?
11:43 It has the capacity to be really relaxing.
11:45 It has this...
11:47 You pootle around in the open sea, under this massive open sky, and it's really nice.
11:52 And you can just go fishing, and you can push the horror, as it were, as much as you want.
11:58 Or you can push it out of your mind for a bit.
12:00 For a bit?
12:01 It will always come back and get you in some capacity, even if that's just getting back or racing the sunset to get back.
12:08 Because you know that it's just going to be less pleasant.
12:11 You know that you are going to lose that, and you're always sitting there, even when it's really delightful going.
12:15 I have to bear in mind what time it is, and I have to...
12:19 Can I fish for one more thing before the sun goes down?
12:23 And it's always there, and you're always balancing it.
12:25 But maybe 11am on the internal clock, the game clock, that's the best time to be out.
12:30 As if management games weren't...
12:32 The whole point of management games is to have you juggling stuff and that tension and stuff.
12:36 And then this just adds an extra notch to it.
12:38 I'm so interested. I really want to play this.
12:40 This is going to be very good.
12:41 Thanks for playing, letting us know about it.
12:43 And yeah, can't wait to play the full game when it finally comes out.
12:47 Yeah.
12:49 [GAME SOUNDS]
12:52 [MUSIC]
12:55 (electronic music)
12:57 (laughs)
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3:10
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