This review contains spoilers
In a way this is the worst kind of game for me, one that has agreeable yet shallow mechanics that aren't bad, but also has been designed to be an 8+ hour experience banking on my being enchanted by the aesthetics and story. It's nice enough to look at and listen to, and there are a few moments here and there where it lived up to its spooky Lovecraftian promise. It unfortunately seems like most of the focus went into boat and space management, and since it doesn't go nearly far enough it ends up feeling repetitive before the main quest has even reached the halfway point. And yet, because the "vibes" are so rarely effective or surprising, I spent like 90% of my time with Dredge thinking about finding resources so I could get more cargo space, to hold more items or better equipment so I could get even more resources for even more cargo space.
Making me spend so much time doing inventory management is only going to make me want a better-designed inventory system, or at least something more creative. I would say a lot of the other 10% of my time with the game was spent thinking about Wilmot's Warehouse, where inventory management, and even defining what inventory is, is actually the game. Your personal creativity and ability to compartmentalize determine your success, and likely your level of frustration. In Dredge, inventory management is of very little interest because you quickly fill up, even when you're far into the game, so it's more like you have the smallest suitcase that you constantly have to unload. The choices I was making regarding my stock were typically along the lines of "do I want to spend two minutes fishing or two minutes getting materials?" Management in this situation isn't really a choice, it's just homework.
So since inventory management is constant and mundane if you get anything, and the fishing mechanics while satisfying on a nonzero level don't particularly evolve, the worldbuilding [via exploration] bears the brunt of Dredge's burden, and while I occasionally ran into fun surprises, a lot of my reward was being informed of a new fetch quest for some specific sea creature. The writing wasn't bad enough to deter me, but only good enough to give me hope for a payoff that would make it all worth it. I don't know if I saw all the endings, but the ones I did see could not have landed more flatly and did not make it worth it in the slightest.
If the game was better at any of what it was doing I could have still come away from the experience with a positive stance. If it was worse I could have called it off after an hour or two and saved time. As it stands, it was really only good enough to pull me along, and left me feeling empty at the end. Oh well!
Making me spend so much time doing inventory management is only going to make me want a better-designed inventory system, or at least something more creative. I would say a lot of the other 10% of my time with the game was spent thinking about Wilmot's Warehouse, where inventory management, and even defining what inventory is, is actually the game. Your personal creativity and ability to compartmentalize determine your success, and likely your level of frustration. In Dredge, inventory management is of very little interest because you quickly fill up, even when you're far into the game, so it's more like you have the smallest suitcase that you constantly have to unload. The choices I was making regarding my stock were typically along the lines of "do I want to spend two minutes fishing or two minutes getting materials?" Management in this situation isn't really a choice, it's just homework.
So since inventory management is constant and mundane if you get anything, and the fishing mechanics while satisfying on a nonzero level don't particularly evolve, the worldbuilding [via exploration] bears the brunt of Dredge's burden, and while I occasionally ran into fun surprises, a lot of my reward was being informed of a new fetch quest for some specific sea creature. The writing wasn't bad enough to deter me, but only good enough to give me hope for a payoff that would make it all worth it. I don't know if I saw all the endings, but the ones I did see could not have landed more flatly and did not make it worth it in the slightest.
If the game was better at any of what it was doing I could have still come away from the experience with a positive stance. If it was worse I could have called it off after an hour or two and saved time. As it stands, it was really only good enough to pull me along, and left me feeling empty at the end. Oh well!