Heavy spoilers for Dredge.
I wasn’t sure whether to play Dredge at first. While I’ve always loved horror literature, I’m far too much of a scaredy cat to consume any other form of horror media. I am also not a video games person, being so inept at it that I look up walkthroughs for nearly every game I’ve ever played. However, my partner recently moved in with a gaming PC, so I was eager to try some of the many games that had been unavailable to me as a MacBook user. So it seemed like a good time to try Dredge.
Dredge is a Lovecraftian horror fishing simulator, in which you, the player character, sail around all day, fishing up mostly normal fish but occasionally encountering grotesque, mutated fish that look like something straight out of Chernobyl or Fukushima. This is all while trying to not get eaten alive by the eldritch monsters that lurk in the depths.
Normally, I am not into Lovecraftian horror. I have not actually read Lovecraft, and I confess my own less-than-informed opinion of him is essentially “overrated racist white man.” His fear of people of color aside, Lovecraftian’s horror ethos seems to exude a bizarre existential helplessness that I don’t share and that feels poorly articulated. Compare, for example, horrors which are immediate: personal trauma, global inequality, the very real violence visited upon us in our everyday lives by colonialism and capitalism and, you know, Society.
“Unknowable eldritch being” just doesn’t keep me up at night, you know? It’s not what’s going to kill me. I’m not particularly interested in Stephen King’s work, but at least I’m more likely to die from a car accident than Cthulhu.
However, the Lovecraftian horrors of Dredge have been made immediate and real. The game’s world is intensely claustrophobic and isolated. People are unable to travel between the region’s tiny islands because the vast ocean between them is hostile and filled with monsters. In one quest, two estranged brothers have wanted to reconcile with each other for decades, but haven’t been able to make the short boating trip that separates their homes until the player arrives. (There’s something so desperately lonely and tragic about that.)
The monsters are real, foundational to the worldbuilding, and profoundly affect the characters’ way of life. Despite everyone living on islands and most of the world being ocean, the player character is unique for choosing to be a fisherman. The shipwrecks that litter the region make it clear that being a fisherman in the world of Dredge is a risky profession.
The shipwrecks are one example of Dredge’s effective environmental storytelling, which is common to video games but which I often find lacking in written media. No one in Dredge tells you, “Hey, you live in a terrifying world where monsters eat you.” There’s no bloody writing on the wall of an abandoned house.
People talk about the monsters like it’s really sad but it’s also an inconvenience, like it sucks that a huge sea serpent lives in your backyard just like how it sucks you can’t go to certain sketchy parts of town at night or that your local campground is being shut down because of a bear problem. And sometimes you catch a fish with two heads or organs on the outside that should be on the inside, but hey, don’t eat it and it’s fine. An underlying sense of resignation colors life in Dredge. You can survive, you can adapt, but you can never beat the monsters. There is no possible “better.” This is just your life now.
Except there might have been, as implied by my favorite marker of the environmental storytelling: Dredge’s world has airplanes. Or rather, it had.
At first, I thought the only way to travel between islands in Dredge was by boat. The world is low-tech, but ambiguously so. You can craft new equipment for your boat, stuff like better nets or engines, with “research parts” that just look like gears. A researcher on one island seems to have a decent grasp of technology, but computers and phones are nowhere in sight. You have no weapons with which to defend yourself (except some magic spells you get later in the game, but nothing which deals actual damage). Everyone seems to live in tiny, rundown villages with no methods of long-distance communication.
Then, as I was sailing around one day, I saw the wreck of an airplane. And I thought: YOU CAN FLY IN DREDGE?
Technically, you can’t, because all the airplanes have been destroyed, which just adds to the horror. At one point, people had vehicles that allowed them to escape the monsters, to travel the world safely without worrying about getting swallowed by a sea serpent or a kraken, except it turns out the previously-thought-to-be-unreachable air isn’t safe either. On one island, you find a former pilot, who explains he and his teammates had crashed the planes—killing his teammates—due to the mind-controlling hallucinatory effects of nearby swamp monsters.
This raises so many questions. Firstly, the pilots are mentioned to have dog tags, and all the planes are fighter planes. So they were fighting a war, but what war? Was it a war between humans, or a possible aerial effort to combat the monsters? It’s not a bad idea, considering that you’d be out of striking distance for most of the monsters, but obviously it failed. Were there other airplanes who did survive? None of the characters ever mention it, even though it’s a clear way out of their predicament. No one’s interested in trying to rebuild them.
The existence of airplanes hints at far more advanced technology than the world had previously implied, but it also suggests that the world has regressed, most likely due to the isolation caused by the monsters. (And if you read into the ending, that isolation might just be your fault.)
(If you really want to read into this, one possible interpretation of Dredge is a “nature takes revenge for the harms inflicted by humanity” sort of theory, like Princess Mononoke or Janina’s beliefs in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Maybe that kraken was a normal, harmless squid once before humans moved in and wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. As someone prone to climate anxiety, I love these sorts of interpretations, but that’s a whole other essay.)
As previously mentioned, I am a scaredy cat. I convinced myself to play Dredge in part because there’s a passive mode where you can turn off the combat, although I’m proud to report that I resisted the temptation to turn it off (but it did reassure me to know it was there).
Playing the game, however, helped me understand horror fans better. I came to enjoy the pervading sense of anxiety and fear; it was oddly cathartic. One of the incredible things about media is that it allows us to experience and familiarize ourselves with a huge range of emotions in a safe environment. And as someone who does not live near the ocean, Dredge helped me develop more empathy for those who are terrified of it. I’d never been so grateful for lighthouses before.
I will close this post with a fact I learned recently from reading Sabrina Imbler’s gorgeous nature essay collection How Far the Light Reaches: did you know that pet goldfish, once dumped into natural bodies of water, are an invasive species? They devour all of the food available, leaving none available for the native fish, and they can grow to become much larger than their tiny bowls. Goldfish are incredibly resilient, hardy creatures that can grow to the size of cantaloupes. On top of their huge size and hefty appetites, they also reproduce rapidly, decimating local ecosystems. Don’t release your pet goldfish into the wild.
All this to say that fish are pretty terrifying as they already are.