Review: "Dredge"

Nadia Thorne (Producer), Joel Mason (Writer/Programmer), Alex Ritchie (Artist), David Mason (Composer), “Dredge”, Black Salt Games/Team17, New Zealand (Aotearoa), 2024.

I’ve never really been a computer game player. I have a finite number of fingers and a limited concentration span, so trying to get Link across an unending landscape is pretty much a full-time occupation for me, let alone having to despatch enemies that pop up unannounced every blood moon. Games like “Street Fighter” and “Mortal Combat” are, for me, simply exercises in button-mashing, and are strictly a workout for the controller rather than its operator. “Metal Gear Solid” always seemed too self-important and cool-fixated for me, and any time a Mario Brother entered the mix I just turned my attention to more grown-up matters. There was a time when I was pre-occupied with “Twisted Metal”, but that’s definitely an outlier. I like games that are a bit think-y with lots of puzzles and atmosphere, things like the “Myst” franchise and “Silent Hill”, and I think I’ve found another game to join this list in “Dredge”.

Like with the movies, Lovecraft is making inroads into the gaming arena. I mean, sure, there are games out there that are explicitly channelling the Mythos and with Lovecraft’s name on the lid, but there are others where the cosmic weirdness is not obviously stated and in which the elements take some digging to unearth. This game is one of those.

“Dredge” is advertised as a “fishing and survival horror” game and this is a pretty accurate summation. The horror here is cosmic in nature and based in thalassophobia, or fear of the deep and the unknown things which might be hidden there. In approaching this game, it seemed a pretty obvious choice for me because I am terrified of things lurking beneath the waves: show me a sunken ship slowly emerging from out of the gloom and I’m gone. In this game you often encounter rocky shoals where massive cargo boats have come unstuck: sailing above these wrecks is an exercise in creeping horror for me. If you feel likewise, you might like this game as well.

The wrecks and the fathomless depths are not the only thing to worry an erstwhile fisherman either. There are places in the “Dredge” world inhabited by monstrously huge fishy beings whose only pleasure is trashing you and your doughty craft. I was warned while visiting the region known as Gale Cliffs – an otherwise homey little Scandinavian coastal settlement – that there was a big fish harrying seacraft in the vicinity, but I pooh-poohed the notion of having to take extra care. How big and bad could it be? Not only was there a terrifyingly dangerous fish out there in the fjord, it was unbelievably huge and bent on my destruction. This is a pure Lovecraftian narrative waiting to be uncorked.

In another region called Stellar Basin, there is an equally terrifying encounter waiting. This region is a subaqueous sinkhole surrounded by a ring of small tropical islands. As you head inside the atoll and blithely attempt to cross over to the other side, you become acutely aware that there’s a bottomless hole beneath you and that it’s inhabited by a kraken-sized thing that spends its time waiting for idiots to mess about in boats overhead. Boats like yours.

The basic premise of the game is that you are new to the region overseen by the twin settlements of Greater and Lesser Marrow. The previous fisherman disappeared under shady circumstances and here you are ready to pick up where they left off. The two towns are across a small nest of islands from each other and Greater Marrow is the site of the Lighthouse which is your best source of navigating this reality (its light can be seen no matter where you are on this planet). Your main occupation is to catch fish: shoals of these can be spotted as you cruise about and catching them requires that you amass the right equipment to match the specifics of each species, thereafter playing a quick mini-game to secure them. Once you get a full hold, you have to go see the Fishmonger who assesses your catch and pays you in the coin of the realm. This you can spend at the Shipwright’s store upon fixing your boat or upgrading your gear to catch more and more diverse types of fish. Simple. Occasionally, you come across floating remnants from other travellers, flotsam washed off unluckier ships than yours: some of this material can be used to fashion better equipment, by developing skill trees and research objectives, while other stuff is of interest to the Trader who lives in Lesser Marrow. Then there are stranger objects.

A slow narrative unfolds as you begin to work for the Collector who lives on Blackstone Island to the south of the Marrows. By reading many serendipitously-discovered books and notes in floating bottles, we learn that this fellow went to sea with his wife, discovered a Lovecraftian tome and summoned a subaqueous horror which – whoops! – killed his beloved. Now he wants you to comb the region for his wife’s lost relics so that he can summon her back from the grave. You know, a normal, everyday sort of hobby. In return, he offers you magical assistance in the form of spells that enable you to put the mockers on some of the nasty fishy things that get in your way. Be careful though: casting these rituals scores deep marks upon your soul and the insanity meter maxes out pretty quickly when this happens.

Yes, there is a sanity gauge. If you go without sleep, travel by night, get attacked by monsters, or cast spells, you start to freak out. The world starts to look a bit weird, rocky reefs appear where they aren’t supposed to be and then sea-monsters start to home in on you. These include massive tentacles reaching up from below or super-fast Great White sharks with glowing mouths that rocket out of nowhere, amongst others. Of course, if you’re completely thalassophobic, the normal things that happen during the day are equally concerning, like lightning strikes hitting the waves, whales breaching unexpectedly off the starboard bow, waterspouts, or unexpected rock shoals. A good night’s sleep will soon see you right, though.

A common complaint on the review boards for this game is that the repetition of fishing and catch-selling is a bit monotonous, but I didn’t find it too bad. Yes, occasionally you find yourself needing to fish hard to earn the cash for your next crab pot upgrade, but it’s never too onerous – nowhere near “World of Warcraft” levels of grinding anyway. Each fish species has its own wrinkles – best time of day for catching; best type of line or net; best regional distribution – and so, if you’re into these strategic types of hunts, it’s really no biggie. Every now and then, you bring up a mutated creature, a deviation from the standard species type and you start to enter a world where the Fishmonger begins to demand these aberrations for select clientele, muttering in his musings about what they taste like and what ‘effects’ they will have. Most of these twisted fish are particularly squicky, so this part of your story breeds quite a lot of unease.

Your narrative winds between a number of locations each environmentally unique. Gale Cliffs is northern European, Stellar Reach is tropical, Devil’s Spine is a volcanic archipelago and the Twisted Strand is a series of mangrove-choked islands. The local fish are unique and require adaptations to your gear and there’s any number of side-quests and sub-plots to keep you busy. Of course, the overriding narrative arc gives you good reasons to discover these locales as well, so it’s not as if you ever feel like you have time on your hands. There are two downloadable content packs (DLCs) – “The Pale Reach”, a polar region, and “The Iron Rig”, in which a greedy corporation builds an oil rig that causes horrible environmental destruction across the world – which extend the gameplay without butchering the original story. I played with both packs running and can heartily recommend them.

Everything barrels towards two conclusions, depending upon how you follow the narrative. Either we help the Collector revive his wife (which coincidentally re-summons the colossal horror that killed her – oops!), or it transpires that the ‘Collector’ and his woes are just a figment of our own tortured psyches and it’s our own beloved wife who we caused to be killed and who we’re trying to bring back. There’s no happy ending – we’re all just snacks for the Cosmic Entities – but there’s plenty of warning when the finishing line’s in sight, so you can go off and finish all the side-quests, or just get in some fishing, first. Up to you.

In conclusion, this game is engaging, very pretty to look at and requires only the regulation number of fingers to operate. It’s more creepy than scary, but the horror is palpable and satisfying (no jump scares, all consequences), especially if deep water gives you the willies. There are more than enough missions and engine-building goodness to keep the most hardened gamer content and, on top of all this, you can go boating and sail across the waves, master of your own destiny. Even Patrick O’Brian would approve!

Four Tentacled Horrors from me.

Review: "Shark Warning"

Jimmy Gadd (Dir.), “Shark Warning”, The Asylum, Acme Holding Company, 2024.

After the release of “Jaws”, the summer blockbuster became a thing and film production houses were keen to capitalise on this piece of marketing success. Even the Jaws franchise was quick to jump, getting sequels, 3-D versions and three-quels into cinemas in short order. All this in the face of foreign film companies making obvious rip-offs and look-alikes which glutted cinemas in the years following. The only one who wasn’t making quick-and-dirty shark flicks in the wake of Bruce’s rampage was Steven Spielberg – he was onto his next blockbuster hit, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.

Shark films have come and gone since then but recently there’s been a sharp uptick. Cruising through Tubi TV you can find a slew of the worst zed-grade shark attack movies that you could ever think of: A movie about a vampire shark that Dracula attacked en route to England? Check. A movie about humanoid mutated sharks built by Nazis that live on the dark side of the moon? Check. Phantom sharks summoned by teenagers messing about with a Ouija board? Checkity-check-check-check. Whatever your variant, there’s a movie for you and it comes with a side of fries too. I’ve often theorised that the regular influx of shark films must be due to the relative ease of building them in cyberspace, making animating them less expensive than, say, H.G. Wells’s Martians, or the average werewolf; however, even amongst these bottom-of-the-barrel scraping outings, whenever you think the bar cannot get any lower, it goes there. This rubbish makes “Sharknado” look like Oscar-contending stuff…

But let’s get on with today’s offering. There’s a warning on the tin of this film and it’s in the title.

Many of the films that poured into being after “Jaws” left the cinemas took some pains to try and distance themselves from the source material. While the basic premise remains – shark attacks people; people get eaten until they devise a way to stop getting eaten – at least there was an effort to vary the essential plot points involved. Not so here. What “Shark Warning” offers is geographical inversion rather than any plot innovation. “Jaws” took place on an island, see? This movie takes place on a lake, albeit a lake separated from the ocean by a dam, but still. Amity was land surrounded by water; here we have water surrounded by land – huzzah! Litigation neatly avoided. And they needed it too because the plot is stolen wholesale.

In the nearby sleepy tourist town, an annual fishing competition in the ocean-adjacent lake floods the township with dollars and ensures financial security for the following year. At least that was the case before the dam was foolishly left open to encourage fish in from the sea and a Great White shark slipped in unnoticed. Having devoured a young lad, the place saw a downturn in tourist visitation and now – twenty years later with the return of the young lad’s brother, still tortured by the event – the fishing gala seems doomed because the dam hasn’t been opened in all that time and the fish population is in decline. Now, this doesn’t seem a whole lot like the plot of “Jaws” but it’s necessary backstory for the ‘local-residents-united-in-opposition-to-the-reckless-mayor’ plotline that both “Jaws” and “Jaws 2” hammered away with.

Anyway, the town Mayor arranges for a shady local guy to blow up the dam to allow fish to swarm in on the eve of the fishing party. Yes – that’s the best plan she could come up with. And we’re supposed to just nod our heads and say, “sounds reasonable”.

Anyway, the brother of the young guy who got eaten – let’s call him Allan – comes back to town in order to punch his still-resident uncle – Ron – in the nose for not having thrown himself at the shark way back when. Much manly soul-baring takes place between these two and local bar owner Lisa - she with the magical talent for famous fish sandwiches – banters from the sideline. Somewhere in amongst all the nose-punching, we meet Ron’s best buddy Bobby and Lisa’s no-hoper sister Sienna, along with the Mayor’s brother Will, so we know just who is going to get eaten and who isn’t. I’ll bet most of you know already, too.

There’s a thing that the writers of this screenplay obviously missed at film school: film is a visual medium; you don’t need to tell the audience about anything that they can see with their own eyes. I blame modern blockbuster movies – especially all of the Marvel and DC stuff – for having made us lose sight of this important fact. In fact, go and watch “Jaws”: much of what we take away from that movie is non-verbal in nature. We feel upset and uncomfortable – even scared – by what we’re shown, not by what we’re told. Here, there is a terrible waste of dialogue – people yammer on about things that we get to see subsequently anyway, or which are not in any way remotely important. At one stage, Lisa rocks up with her dead dad’s arsenal of guns, thinking that they might be of use in combatting a shark, and we are treated to wasted minutes of ballistics descriptions and performance issues that might well have been better spent on something – anything – else. People verbally flag what they’re about to do and then go and do it. What? Did the director have an over-abundance of film stock that needed using up? I got very bored listening to the plot rationales and exposition drone on ad nauseam, and I became painfully aware that the distance between scenes filled with shark action were being unnecessarily drawn out.

(Also, guns are crap at shooting things that are underwater. Look it up. Why are we always being told to bring a knife to a gun fight?)

Speaking of shark action. There are some early moments where film stock of sharks underwater is used to build the tension and, while it looks a little cheap, it works a treat (in fact, “Jaws” did some of this too, so there’s precedent). But when an excess of stuff happens off camera (a la “Sharknado”), cheap starts to give way to tawdry. Then come the clunky matte shots and the remote-control sub with the attached shark fin and believability goes right out the window. You’ll notice from the film’s promotional image (above) how it looks as if there’s a girl lying on the ground with a picture of a shark on a poster behind her? That’s how most of the shark action looks here.

The pleasure to be gained from a B-grade film lies usually in seeing how – with a modest amount of cash and material – a decent narrative can still be aired. Here, it feels like the crew is desperately trying to paper over the cracks in ways that simply make them seem more obvious. To highlight the slim budget, everyone here has a single outfit, even though the action takes place across several days. Or at least, they get a single outfit and a swimsuit (with optional tattoos), despite the fact that no-one really goes in the water – on the water, in boats, yes; not in the water. I can only assume this was budgetary, meant to limit expenditure on clothes, hair and make-up, but maybe, given that this film drones on interminably, it was also a decision made to stop us being confused about who was who.

In the end, everyone gets what’s coming for them and the Boy gets the Girl as an added – almost incidental – bonus. The town gets to have its fishing gala and then gets to think about electing a new mayor. You will jerk awake as the credits roll, wonder why your tea has gotten cold, then wonder if there’s any point in rewinding to catch the pertinent details you might have missed, before deciding not to bother. There is a warning on the label of the tin for this film but it’s a warning about the quality on offer, not the content: no sharks were harmed – or, in fact, were even present - during the making of this movie.

One-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.