Discover the true eldritch horror of fishing with Dredge

1.16.2025
By John Walker, Contributor

There are a fair few fishing games for those interested in pursuing the digital activity, from the ultra-realistic titles like Fishing Planet to cutesy RPGs like Moonglow Bay, but there’s only one fishing sim that contains the words, “The bony blades of this grotesque engine are driven by a pulsing heart. It beats in time with your own.” Welcome to Dredge.

To ignore the inherent eldritch horror of the act of fishing is dishonest, and in this sense, Dredge is the only truly realistic fishing game. After washing up in a remote archipelago, you attempt to buy your way out of debt by fishing the waters for the various island towns, selling your hauls, and completing tasks for the locals. As you go, you’re able to buy better equipment, upgrade your boat, and wade deeper into a storyline that’s…very peculiar.

Don’t fish after dark, you’re warned early on. But you will. Of course you will. When you see the strange purple lights hovering over the water, how can you resist?
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Dredge combines a series of incredibly engaging mechanics into one astoundingly coherent game, especially considering how unhinged it is just beneath the surface. You’ve got, at face value, a recognizable fishing game with some fun twists on fishing mechanics: You drop your line wherever you see swirls on the water's surface, and then complete one of a few mini-games involving pressing a button when a dial, ball, or the like is within the green zones. Once caught, you then have an inventory Tetris situation, trying to store as much as possible in your limited boat space, tessellating the creatures into the oddly shaped tiled grid. Then you have decisions about what to sell to whom and what equipment to buy with your money. But around all of this, you have a light RPG of relationships to manage, quests to complete, strange locations to discover, and, er, shrines to sacrifice cod to?

No matter which of Dredge’s elements you poke at, you’ll find weirdness just underneath. The Lovecraftian influence is very obvious with all the denizens of these Innsmouth-like towns having an odd atmosphere about them, secrets they’re keeping, and a permanent sense that you are—and always will be—an outsider. Then there’s the far less subtle stuff, like catching an All-Seeing Cod, described by the game as something that’s “staring outwards, unblinking. Eyes borrowed from a larger being but not the mind to process what it sees,” or perhaps the Lumpy Mackerel, “a writhing mass of lumps, twisting and pulling their way under the scales of their vessel.”

Fishing during the day might have you haul in all sorts of useful wreckage too, like planks and materials for building new storage on your boat, but fishing at night nets you far more lucrative catches, not only the nocturnal species but the less…understandable types, too. However, night represents a series of dangers. Firstly, there’s the darkness, which you can stave off by buying ever-more powerful lamps for your boat, but for some reason can never be truly combatted, with some large, dangerous rocks just refusing to be appropriately lit until they’re already close enough to tear through your hull. Then there are the horrors that lurk below, enormous beasts that rise after the sun has set, determined to dash your vessel to pieces. And, on top of all this, there’s your own sanity to protect. There’s only so much horror your mind can take without the mercy of sleep.

Throughout all this fishing action, you’re also on the lookout for so-called “relics.” The Collector, a man who lives in an island mansion, would like your help gathering these lost objects in exchange for some less-than-natural abilities to add to your arsenal. But you don’t have to give them to him. Then there are all the other islands to discover, the peculiar residents who live on them, the tasks they have to offer, and an ever-growing menagerie of creatures to both catch and be caught by.
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The combination of this wealth of things to do in tandem with the pile of hooky mechanics makes Dredge so very compelling. There are always new discoveries to find or quests to complete, and underneath it all lurks a deeper, more unearthly mystery you’re trying to solve—all around the basic systems of catching a bunch of fish to swap for money and upgrades. That Dredge delivers all these elements in such a solid, integrated fashion is quite the result, and then doing all that with a storyline that’ll have you fascinated to see what happens next means it’s something truly special.

Since its original release, Dredge has rolled out two expansions that each add a new, elaborate story. There’s The Pale Reach where you explore a frozen biome that only appears in our reality every few years, setting out to try to find an Arctic research crew that disappeared a century earlier. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go as planned. Then there’s The Iron Rig where you help out the crew of an oil rig both with scientific research and mechanical advancements. Because drilling into the solid ground at the bottom of the sea in an eldritch horror game is always a good idea, right?

The whole lot is just splendid, a really special and deeply weird spin on the usually cutesy nature of fishing RPGs in a bleak and creepy setting where hope is in short supply.