DREDGE

DREDGE is a game that starts with a sleepy lighthouse and ends with you muttering about ancient relics and crab-infested hallucinations. On paper, it’s a fishing game. In practice, it’s what if Animal Crossing got possessed by a Lovecraft novella and started muttering about tentacles at dinner.

You’re the new fisherman in town, piloting your rickety boat across a beautifully grim archipelago. By day, you fish, sell your catch, and upgrade your vessel with brighter lights and faster engines. By night? You pray those upgrades are enough to survive the fog.

Time only moves when you move, great for slow-paced vibes, until that sun hits the horizon. Because then? Rocks shift, shadows whisper, and something starts swimming just beneath the surface… and you swear it’s getting closer.

The fishing itself is low-stakes fun: a mix of mini-games and spatial inventory puzzles that turn your cargo hold into underwater Tetris. But it’s the vibe that makes DREDGE special. One moment you’re peacefully hauling up a fat grouper. The next, that grouper sprouts eyes and starts… twitching.

Is DREDGE a hardcore survival sim? Not really. Money flows like seawater, and most quests are more about where to fish than how. But that doesn’t stop it from pulling you in. The world is dripping with tension, and the deeper you sail, the stranger it gets.

DREDGE may not be the fishing horror sim it pretends to be, but it is a compelling little monster of a game, one that whispers to you even when you’re done playing.