#got jumpscared more by those fucking trees in totk than in this supposed horror game

[wrenseyeview]

Gotta ramble a bit about Dredge because it's got that Good Game Design.

For one thing I saw it classified as a horror game, but it also felt fundamentally at odds with my (very limited) experience of horror as a genre? Primarily, that it kept control very squarely in the player's hands, including control of pacing and encounters. I mean honestly that's rare enough in a lot of games generally, but I'd probably most categorize Dredge as a creepy-themed puzzle game more than anything else, and not just for the cargo/fishing mechanics. The entire game is very deliberately structured so the only time pressure is solving how far you can go in a single day cycle and ideally making sure you end the day on the same square as the fishmonger or merchant (or not having fish in your cargo that day). You get a heads up that the night is when the scary shit happens and your main four zones are where some big bad lives and if you observe their patterns and ask the locals, even those don't tend to jump scare you? Fundamentally the game feels surprisingly and entirely safe, which is not the vibe I would classify as horror.

The fishing/dredging mechanic is a very solid foundation and has some nice little variety to it, just a good timing test to break up the more mystery and exploration sections. Good visual interest, crunchy sound, just very good detail focus on the design.

I think I only looked up two things during the entire game (where the last stone tablet was, and how to find the catfish), which is also astonishingly rare for pretty much any game nowadays that I'm getting at least mostly completionist on. The low-hanging comparisons are pulling up an icon map to find all the damn korok seeds, but even say, Fenyx Rising - I had to look up how to catch and ride a horse because some specific input just wasn't intuitive. Dredge did a very good job at not using text heavy tutorials for game functions and still very clearly and easily getting the point across. In large part by gating progress in a way that allows the player full access to the game's entire core mechanics from very nearly the beginning, and offers clear ways to progress further that don't feel too much like grinding given the available space to explore. To look back at those examples, BOTW/TOTK and Fenyx all lock very basic movement mechanics (among lots of other skills) behind lengthy tutorial areas. It's genuinely difficult to open up the entire core gameplay from the start and not have players feel overwhelmed, and I don't think Dredge accomplished such a thing by just being simpler (I wouldn't necessarily say that it is much simpler either, just... economical about it's constituent parts?)

Good map density too, in terms of fish locations and populating the in-between islands with things to discover and revisit. BOTW (lesser extent in TOTK but still there) and AC Valhalla both suffer from having maps a little too big for their contents in places, just in terms of how far you can run across barren fields between fixed map markers with nothing else to really do except maybe collect a few low-level creature loot bits if you're lucky. Even when I'm crossing the map with purpose in Dredge, there's still nice opportunities to get distracted and find more stuff that's going to be useful, though not at such density that it's no longer interesting to find the specific things I need.