YMMV / DREDGE

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Several:
  • The Collector. An Enemy Within separate entity from the player character, created by the Tome of the Deep to trick the Fisherman by playing on his love for his lost wife? Or a result of Sanity Slippage after the loss of the Fisherman's wife, echoing his genuine desires? The fact that in the Good Ending, you can choose to give up the Tome of the Deep in repentance points to the former interpretation, although there is still room for the latter.
  • The Hooded Figures. Though extremely creepy, it can be debated if they are truly Dark Is Evil monsters or Creepy Good helpers just hungry for a bite to eat. Furthermore, their Ambiguously Human nature lends a few interpretations: are they simply cultists from the Devil's Spine, scattered about the Isles? Abominations in a similar vein to the Aberration fish the player can find? The game offers no answers either way.
  • The Mayor of Greater Marrow: Many of his lines can be taken as Shame If Something Happened thinly veiled threats, although there is a chance he simply appears sinister and is another example of Creepy Good in a game full of it. Furthermore, how aware is he of your true nature? Does he know about your wife, the true nature of the monsters, or even the Tome of the Deep?
  • Even the monsters trying to kill you can be seen this way, due to the Lighthouse Keeper's comment that the fog and the things in it hate the Fisherman most out of all the ships on the water. So are the monsters that attack you at high panic mindless or malicious monsters drawn to you by the influence of the Book of the Deep, or, like the Leviathan, are they the good guys who are desperately trying to stop you from awakening the God of the Deep?
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • There's some overlap with some Dave the Diver fans, given both games' nature of trawling the ocean - in both contexts - for various types of fish^note Also worth noting is the surprising amount of overlap in fish species that can be caught in both games to make profit to get upgrades to make a bigger profit, all the while trying to solve a mystery of the ocean they operate in. Both games also have contrasting tones, with DREDGE's Cosmic Horror Story compared to the much more lighthearted Dave the Diver. And then, a Dave the Diver crossover collaboration DLC was announced, making the fandom connections even greater.
  • In a genre-crossing example, the game is occasionally recommended on horror forums alongside John Langan's The Fisherman, as both pieces of media combine incorporate themes of fishing, grief, Cosmic Horror, and a man's desire to bring his wife/family back from the dead by using the power of an ocean-dwelling Eldritch Abomination which may result in the destruction of the world.
• Game-Breaker: Dumping all your research parts into engine setup early on makes the rest of the game a breeze. Any setup that pushes your top speed above ~50 knots lets you simply outrun almost any threat on the ocean, which can be achieved within the first 1-2 hours of starting a new game. Panic becomes almost a non-issue because you can simply sprint to the nearest port and sleep it off. The only things you need to look out for are (imaginary) rocks, and the giant ghost shark that may spawn at maximum panic. Excessive engine speed can also make it slightly harder to maneuver, such as in the Twisted Strand and the Devil's Spine due their cramped geography. That still leaves the vast majority of enemies out there a non-issue, allowing you to fish and explore at night with little trouble.
• Goddamn Bats: Most monsters at sea are annoying but surprisingly easily to deal with, either by just driving around them (jelly bombs, the Unseeing Mother), turning your lights off (Miasmas, Night Anglers), or just being faster than them (almost everything else). Others are harmless even if they do catch you, like the demonic crows that simply steal some of your fish but don't deal damage otherwise.
• Narm Charm: The realization that the Unseeing Mother has an eyepatch on her model can cause some laughs. However, it does little to detract from the threat that she poses so it is saved from full on Narm.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • Aberrant fish sell for more than their unmutated counterpoints, which can make discovering them seem like a stroke of good fortune rather than a sign of anything horrific.
  • Once you have any halfway-decent amount of speed to your boat's engines and the Banish spell, having a high Panic meter goes from frightening to an annoyance, as you'll be able to effortlessly evade and outrun all danger except for things like the Crows and infected fish.
  • Boating at night stops being scary the instant you realize you're in the exact same amount of danger as in daytime and the only way to increase that danger is by increasing your Panic level. And since the Panic meter stops being an issue around the mid-game as well, you'll suddenly realize there's almost no actual risk involved with nighttime fishing beyond not being able to see three feet in front of you without a powerful light and therefore incurring a small risk of crashing into stuff.
• Shocking Moments: The entire ending sequence of either the Good or Bad paths, with each one complementing the other and offering a full picture, starting off with The Reveal that you and the Collector are the same person.
  • The Bad Ending: You and the Collector agree to complete the Ritual and revive your deceased wife. She rises up from the deep, but something else arises in the background: a horrible, skeletal Eldritch Abomination whose head is bigger than all of Greater Marrow. We then cut to the credits, where the Greater Marrow is seen in ruins, and the sky is colored in Miasma... Earn Your Bad Ending and Nothing Is Scarier indeed.
  • The Good Ending: You meet with the Lighthouse Keeper, who contextualizes that you were the true owner of the Tome of the Deep all along, that you lost your wife long ago to an incident involving the Leviathan, and that it is up to you to dispose of the Tome of the Deep and repent for your sins. You then follow the Light out to a remote location, disposing of the Tome and quickly being Swallowed Whole by the Leviathan, a bittersweet but fitting demise. The credits then show the sun rising on Greater Marrow, the Isles no longer affected by the curse.
• That One Achievement: There's an achievement for trawling up 150 fish. This takes forever to complete because even the best nets in the densest fishing spots work extremely slowly, maybe two a minute on average.
• Ugly Cute: Some of the less horrifying aberrants can be considered this. That a majority of them are implied to be in horrible pain from their new unnatural forms also makes them pretty pitiable.

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