Just two hours into the adventure of Dredge, Black Salt Games’ fishing sim and survival horror RPG, I fell comfortably into a familiar routine. The quaint seaside town of Greater Marrow and its surrounding islands was a breeze to get acquainted with, thanks to the intriguing genre mash-up’s excellent pacing, engaging progression system, and fun and intuitive mini-games.
My fishing business is thriving, as evidenced by the abundance of coins the local fishmongers pay for my daily winnings. In fact, I’ve done very well and have been able to invest in new rods that can plunder both shallow and coastal waters, as well as faster outboard engines for customizable vessels.
Having earned enough research parts from my voyages and even invested in better equipment, the future looks bright.And thanks to my newfound ability to dredge supplies from the ocean depths. So, I started collecting resources.
Life on the beautiful archipelago is literally smooth sailing for me, so I offer to help the less fortunate locals. As a friendly docker seeks a better life on the small island of her Point north of Steele, I have gathered materials for her dwelling before transporting her to her new home. .
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I meet a sad man in Little Marrow next door. He seeks closure from the loss of his son, who seems to have died in a shipwreck years ago.I dredged up the wreckage and found the victim’s carved belt buckle, the heart Returned to his father for peace.
As an extracurricular activity, you may be asked to work by a merchant who is interested in rare sea creatures. However, with the quest log growing as quickly as the game’s open world map, we’ve decided to hold off on catching and cataloging rare fish for now.
I previously took on a more pressing assignment from a rather mysterious man who lives in a rundown mansion on nearby Blackstone Island. I had planned to check with him again, but since I learned that his tiny island has a small workshop and it’s tightly closed, it’s piqued my curiosity.
The man, calling himself a collector, had outfitted my rig with the aforementioned dredging equipment in exchange for an old handkerchief I found in the belly of a fish. The deal was undeniably bizarre, but it offered more work: if I agreed to bring him more relics, he would pay more for my efforts. They will continue to reward me for that.
First on the docket was an old key, supposedly not far from my new home in Greater Marrow. With very little effort, I secured the artifact and delivered it to the collector immediately. But strangely enough, he received the treasure more upset than grateful. Still a stranger, he began to flip through a dusty old book, but a blinding beam of light shot out from the pages.
This man’s unexpected encounter with a seemingly magical book wasn’t his first brush with the strange and inexplicable in Dredge. Chat with quirky locals (many of whom warned us not to leave the boat after dark) and catch some mutated fish, including five-eyed mackerel I was.
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I also saw red-eyed crows swarming, an unidentifiable ‘something’ slipping onto the deck and the hull being damaged by a lighted bulbous fish about the size of the boat. But these encounters ranged from the mildly unsettling to the downright ominous, but they interrupted my peaceful daily routine, and, like this ancient piece a collector now holds in his hand, There was nothing to provide evidence of the supernatural.
He cryptically spoke of a book holding “power from the abyss” and backed up his claim by granting me an ability called “Haste”. Described as “otherworldly speed,” this gift came at a price. It breathed new life into his aging engine while also threatening to burn it out, but this ability not only puts stress on my motor, but also my increasingly fragile psyche. With ominous promises.
Now that my peaceful life has been turned upside down, with a new sense of urgency and dread, I set out to find the four remaining relics on my collector’s list. But it wasn’t long before I died as the clockwork routine was thrown overboard in favor of a frenetic schedule fueled by inconsistent pursuits.
As the coveted music box ran toward Gaelcliff, where it was supposedly on the ocean floor, I began to see the peppy advantage of my haste ability. However, I was also worried that the motor might burn out according to the rising HUD meter.
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Overheating the engine was the least of my concerns, but as promised, my anxieties were beginning to boil over as well. As we pushed through the thick fog, rocks seemed to appear out of nowhere and we had to do our best to avoid them. I barely managed to get around these jagged obstacles, but I couldn’t figure out how to get around the dozens of red eyeballs floating above the surface of the water.
I ignored the menacing peepers, believing them to be figments of my swirling imagination. I prayed that the towering limb was another sign that my character’s mind was playing a prank on me, but it quickly knocked me out of existence, effectively ending the demo. So we have to assume we’ll find more than just relics lurking within the Dredge… Depths when it launches later this month.
