VideoGame You Fond of me Lobster?
If you want to easily impress me, set a story in cute little place by the sea, and then utterly smash it to pieces with every bit of seadog mythology you can find. Dredge, a story about a lone fisherman unveiling an insane, Lovecraftian World that lies just beneath the waves, punches all my buttons.
In a format familiar to anyone who has played the old Sid Meier's Pirates! titles, the game presents you with a little boat that you pilot around an open ocean, doing jobs and sailing from port to port. Instead of pirate battles, your bounty lies at the end of fishing poles and inside nets. You anchor by a shoal and trigger a minigame to catch a few specimens. It's purposefully straightforward, up until you start catching weirder and weirder looking fish. The townspeople appreciate the food and business you bring, but they warn you not to stay out after dark. If you do lose track of the time and spend too long looking at the sea, the sea starts to look back.
This is a game that places a lot of emphasis on lore and atmosphere. The gameplay is quite simple; this isn't like Sunless Sea, where you have to fixate on things like fuel and food. I died once in my entire run time, and due to the game's frequent autosaves that presented only the most minor of set backs. If the fishing and dredging minigames annoy you, you can even choose to switch them off completely (though I never found the need). It does not want to piss you off with tedium or repetition. In short, the game is deliberately easy and wants to get to the point. I was appreciative of it, but it might turn off those who enjoy their survival elements.
As to the story, there are mysterious and mad figures, strange quests and treasures, sea monsters and otherworldly phenomena. The plot is a little bit derivative, familiar to anyone who likes their nautical yarns, but fits the mood. Early on I carefully kept my fishing trips to the day time, scared off by some of the milder threats that come just as night sets in. But as I got more confident and my boat more upgraded, I grew more reckless. The horrors of the night eventually become known entities, and mild inconveniences to manage. Quite fittingly, I was racing around the ocean, oblivious to threats, and manically trying to catch every last kind of fish.
Dredge does a good job of balancing its gameplay and story, and knows not to push things too far. It's not a long game; I clocked in about 8 hours before I was finished with it, and I was trying to finish all the side quests and upgrade my boat completely. You could finish the main plot in half that time. It's probably for the best that it finishes so soon; whilst I was enjoying the routine of filling my hold with sea beasts, it could easily become tedious if it went on much longer.
VideoGame Shallow Depth, No Biting
This game started out so strong. As an unfathomably huge fan of H. P. Lovecraft's body of work and The Shadow Over Innsmouth especially, I was really excited to play this one, especially with its rave reviews. If there's one thing I can truly commend, it's that it nails that insular, vaguely xenophobic small-town New England feel that makes Innsmouth so iconic. The atmosphere in this game is great all the way through.
That being said, this game is...not scary. In fact, it's outright boring at times. After you start accumulating the tools to catch super expensive fish and deal with the Panic meter, any of the malingering fear the game is trying to generate goes out the window. It doesn't matter if LE SPOOKY GHOOOOST SHARK jumpscares me for the eightieth time when I can tank five hits with my upgraded hull anyway and the worst that's going to happen to me is either losing some items or my engine conking out. I should be pissing-my-pants scared every time I get caught out on the open ocean at night with a full panic meter, but I'm not. What they should have done was only allow you to make cargo and equipment upgrades but have you die in one hit to monsters (maybe not to bumping into stuff, that would be annoying), so that there's an actual mechanical danger to compliment the unnerving atmosphere the game is trying to present.
Despite being billed as an "open-world exploration game", the world is pretty barren and there's very little to actually explore or do. Each region has one, MAYBE two side quests in it and a handful of POIs that stop giving out worthwhile loot by the mid-game. This game so magnanimously overcompensates with the amount of resources you can collect that you can have every single research and upgrade unlocked by the halfway point, and suddenly every single dredge point becomes less than worthless. I don't know what games like these' aversion to giving me a gigantic Money Sink to work for is.
This game's story also sucks. It's trying so hard to be vague and mysterious like a true Weird Fiction story, but it's literally just one giant Fetch Quest with none of the mystique or engaging characters or dialogue that make games like Darkest Dungeon and its sequel so gripping. There are a handful of colorful personalities (I like the Travelling Merchant and Lighthouse Keeper, they'd feel right at home in Innsmouth alongside Zadok Allen), but the vast majority of them are pretty bland. Plus, the ending (SPOILERS) literally pulls an "it was all in le head because YOU were le bad guy all along" twist on you in the year 2024 and both choices you get are three-second cutscenes which reveal nothing about the story or world. There's nothing hopelessness or existential terror-inducing about these endings because we haven't gotten meaningfully attached to anything in this world and the mysteries it holds weren't adequately developed.