By Sebastian, May 12, 2025 (updated May 17, 2025)
Adapted from an article for The Tumbleweed, a student publication at
St. John's College in Santa Fe.
Dredge
(Steam page)
is a videogame released in 2023 by Black Salt Games, where the player is a fisher in an expressionistic
interpretation of the Lovecraftian setting. All the genre staples are here: fish, creepy guys, creepy fish, the night.
Despite the horror elements of the setting, which are executed very well, the game is basically relaxing. You sail, catch fish, navigate five unique biomes with their own mechanical quirks, and follow quest-lines which lead you through these activities. During the nighttime, however, the rules of the game change, and you become the prey.
I am a game designer, so I will dig into what makes the game work. For more of a summary of the aesthetics of the game, a trailer will do a better job than an article ever could.
A concept which I find vital to the analysis of a game's design is game essence (ゲーム性 or gēmu-sei), which was coined by Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Kirby and Super Smash Bros. The core idea of game essence is tension and relaxation, like dissonance and resolution in music. Game essence is not directly fun, but it can be an important part of fun. A game like Animal Crossing has low game essence. The level of tension in a session remains almost constant. Doom has high game essence, as stressors enter and exit awareness frequently.
Dredge, as I said, is a relaxing game to play. It has low game essence. I think one of its masterstrokes, however, is that it has controllable game essence. It achieves this by having several optional risk-and-reward systems in the game.
To speak of risk and reward, we need to determine what is risked and what is rewarded. Because the night is so dangerous, it is vital to keep your forays into the water between 6am-6pm, especially in the early-game. This makes time into a vital resource. There is, generally speaking, no mechanical cost to having to return to a dock: no fuel costs nor anything else which would spell a game-over scenario (this is the paradigm in other games like Sunless Sea). Rather, the only downside is that the player loses time, mostly in travel time between dock and fishing spots. Time is, in traditional videogames, one of two threats which can be held over a player, the other being emotional punishment.
I'll focus on the fish-catching. The game has several minigames for catching fish, but they all have the same core mechanic of timing. Press a button at the right times, and you get a speed boost to catching the fish. If you press a button at the wrong time, you are punished with a delay. If you do not press anything, then the process proceeds at a standard pace. This means that the fish-catching game is effectively optional. It has risk-and-reward wholly determined by player skill and will. The player is in charge of how much game essence they want as part of their experience. Want a perfectly relaxing experience? Sit back and let the fish come in. Otherwise, you have something to do and a reason to do it.
This allows Dredge to avoid the trap held by many relaxing games, which is boredom. Of course, different levels of game essence suit different players, hence the high popularity of “cozy” games among people who have not played many videogames and are not mechanically able to keep up with the demands of higher game essence games. This means that controllable game essence can be a great asset to a game and allow it to reach a wider audience than most games. I think that Dredge very elegantly implements its systems for player control of game essence without forcing the player to feel like they had to ask for help.
Now, I said earlier that game essence is not identical with fun. Indeed, the real fun in Dredge is the discovery of whatever twisted and monstrous fish comes next. Like Pokémon, you always want to find the next amazing monster design. When I played, I spent hours outside of the main quest just to track down all of the different fish. They each have excellent art and writing, such as this description for a fish called a “Voideye:”
“Inside its eye, a perpetual pattern repeats. Red cyclones meld through shimmering green swirls. The abyss burns through you.”
This, fundamentally, is the reward. After all, spending less time doing a task is not a reward; it's just less of a chore. You receive money for selling fish, but it is exploring the monster designs which is the real treat in this game. Money only serves as an intermediate tool to further reduce the time between new fish. Could you go through the wiki and look at the art and descriptions there? Of course. Game essence, however, adds an emotional investment into the process of the discovery of a new fish. A fish is something sought, fought for (or allowed to approach), and won.
Dredge ended up being one of the most memorable games I've played in the last few years, even though it's short. I would fully recommend it to anyone who wants a good way to spend a Saturday afternoon.