Dredge turns fishing into a slow-burn horror story, and it works. Black Salt Games built a game about hauling cod out of cold water and then made that water hostile. The result is one of 2023’s most distinctive releases, and it holds up on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, Mac, and PC.
Trailer, via IGN.
Greater Marrow and the Five Archipelagos
You start in The Marrows, a remote starting region, as the town of Greater Marrow’s new angler. The job looks ordinary. It stops being ordinary fast.
Four archipelagos surround The Marrows, each with its own fish, quests, and enemies. Four of the five regions are based on geological formations. You sail between them, meeting locals, taking jobs, and dredging the sea floor for wood, metal, and relics.
Fishing, Panic, and the Night Cycle
The core loop is fishing. You play quick-time mini-games and click the mouse to reel faster. Sell your catch, repair the boat, buy crab pots, upgrade the motors.
Time only moves when you act. Sailing and fishing burn the clock. Day is calm. Night brings fog, and with it the panic meter, which tracks the fisherman’s sanity. Stay out too long and things get worse.
That meter is the whole design in miniature. Dredge doesn’t jump-scare you. It wears you down.
Aberrations and the 128 Species
The base game holds up to 128 fish species, each tied to a time of day and an environment. You also pull up aberrations — mutated fish with extra eyes and other wrongness. They sell for more.
What You Catch and What It Pays
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| Regular fish | Common catch, standard pay |
| Aberrations | Mutated fish, higher pay |
| Dredging | Recovers wood, metal, relics |
| Research parts | Unlock skill tree upgrades |
| Books | Improve the fisherman’s abilities |
The inventory is a grid of shaped icons you rearrange by hand to fit more. It sounds fussy. It is fussy, and it is also the best kind of fussy.
The Collector and Julie’s Diary
The story escalates through messages in bottles. They are diary entries from Julie, a newlywed who arrived in the archipelago with her husband. He dredged up a casket, opened it, and released the fog. The Leviathan awoke, destroyed their boat, and killed Julie.
The Fisherman finds himself stalked by the Leviathan. The Collector, a man alone in an island mansion, tasks the Fisherman with exploring the other islands and their ancient ruins to recover relics, and uses the Book of the Deep to grant him supernatural powers. Hand over the relics and the twist lands: he is Julie’s husband, and the relics are her personal items, gathered for a resurrection ritual.
It is a clean piece of structure. Every fetch quest feeds the ending.
Where Dredge Drags
The fishing gets repetitive. Critics said so, and they are right. Reeling in your fortieth cod is not thrilling, and the quick-time mini-game does not grow.
What saves it is everything around the fishing. The upgrade system ties progression to exploration and resource gathering, and the team scrapped an early menu-based upgrade screen because it felt unengaging. That call was correct.
Ranking what Dredge does best:
- The day-night cycle and panic meter
- The art style and the fog
- Exploration across the archipelagos
- The Collector storyline
- The fishing mini-game itself
Two DLCs followed — The Pale Reach in 2023 and The Iron Rig in 2024 — and both were well received.
The Verdict on Dredge
Dredge is a psychological thriller wearing a fishing game’s clothes, and the disguise is the point. Black Salt Games started with a top-down turn-based concept, scrapped it during prototyping, and landed somewhere stranger.
The repetition is real. But the atmosphere, the exploration, and the story carry it. Dredge earns its reputation.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
