DREDGE

I wish there was more to the townies (was hoping the fish seller had more orders for me, or some more packages from one island's natives to the others..) but otherwise nice gameplay, surprisingly relaxing and very forgiving even in normal mode. Also loved being scared out of my mind even in broad daylight :D now back to the stupid sunfish....

i spent a large sum of my time playing the game without any of the dlc's (about 20 hrs) and early on when your ship is far slower and easily overtaken by the threats if you decide to pull out an all-nighter, the decision-making process is more about the risk you'll face and the resources you'll accrue/lose if you decide to spend more time fishing in the sea, especially considering some of the fishes in the marrow are nocturnal. this no longer applies when my ship has gotten all of the upgrades, and therefore significantly faster and can tank more damage, i can easily outpace the threats and traverse between the islands during the night. there less of the risk and even more advantages to not skip the night considering the threats are not scaled in proportion to the upgrades that the ship got, which is kind of a missed opportunity but it does makes a little bit sense if you view it from a narrative standpoint. the threats and enemy difficulties will be building up to a nonexistent culmination because if you want to continue the game, you have to pretend the final task doesn't exist because there is no ending in which your character continues to fish like nothing had happened. up to the original ending, the game was certainly more than enjoyable. i find the twist to be very compelling and effective despite how simple it is. the npc's are enjoyable, although the cult members requesting different types of fish can be a little bit repetitive, but character interaction is something i did find myself waiting for whenever i decided to explore a new region. the visuals in this game is incredibly pretty, and the art style of the character designs are absolutely gorgeous and some of the tasks are incredibly fun as well. the horror aspects (although i find that it has exponentially less effect as your ship gets more powerful, and its presence is kind of lacking in both dlc's) is genuinely immaculate in early games. exploring the open ocean feels kind of awful especially if you're surrounded by islands that you can wreck but nor dock your ship on, and you still don't know whether you can reach the other region in time before night falls of not. moving between two regions within the same day in the early games is something pretty unthinkable and probably is the result of poor planning, but something like this turns into a simple hassle as your ship gets more and more overpowered. distance between regions becomes something you have to go through instead of it being an enjoyable journey. without the dlc's (especially the iron rig) trying to get all the fishes and aberrations is just a plain tedious endeavor, and it's the main reason i dropped the game the first time around. rare fishes has even more rare aberrations that sometimes do not show up at all after one or two days in the region, during the time i'd get burnt out and just choose to move on to another region first. i cannot imagine trying to get the exotic fishes without the iron rig dlc. it's just not worth the time and effort to me. i played the game again when i bought all three of the dlc's. the blackstone key dlc is just as horrendous as people say. it truly is egregious that so little content is turned into a dlc. the machine that it gave me (after having a fully upgraded ship) is completely useless and frustrating in that it took a storage space and cannot be discarded. another thing is that i've accidentally gotten so much money in my attempt to catch all of the fishes and aberrations the first time around to an extent that both the pale reach and the iron rig dlc's barely made any dent in my in-game money. i've also garnered plenty of resources that certainly greatly aided my quick progression of the iron rig, but the dlc introduced plenty of new resources that are fun enough and does serve its purpose of kind of slowing my progression well enough. so yes, the resources that you've sequestered the first time around will play a difference in how both dlc's play out, far more so in the iron rig compared to the pale reach. the pale reach is an okay region, although i find its placement on the far south to be kind of a pain to reach from the heart of the map. i was truly expecting a boss battle at the end but practically...nothing happened, so it's kind of disappointing in that part. i think it's an okay map that could've had ice caves or underwater caverns, and instead it felt like the map was a little bit too big for the amount of events that was happening, which adds more to the distance problem of this map. i don't really see myself revisiting that map aside from collecting the fishes and aberrations, especially considering the pale reach doesn't have iron rig fishes. i was expecting that getting both dlc's will get you a special content, in which two of them interacts, but unfortunately no such thing exists. the iron rig is the far better one out of the tree. it introduces interesting resources and most importantly an easier way to collect aberrations, exotics, and aberrative exotics. the characters could be more fleshed out and the dlc itself could be integrated better into the main game (e.g. none of the original regional characters have anything to say to the sudden appearance of multiple massive masses of oil in their homeplaces, which is disappointing), but its placement on the map itself is far more acceptable compared to the pale reach. overall this one is a really good and enjoyable dlc. i find myself enjoying the game again and even managed to get all of the achievements. so yeah, dredge is a really good game as long as you don't play it too long.