Ice Fishing To Send Shivers Down Your Spine In More Ways Than One: A Dredge: The Pale Reach DLC Review

By Janette

Players: 1
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, XBox One, XBox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC

Dredge: The Pale Reach is a pretty inexpensive DLC for one of the best and most stressful fishing games I’ve played in a long time. While the DLC won’t cost you much more than a $5 box from Taco Bell, is there enough there for you to really sink your ship into? Or are the icy depths no cooler than the glass of water on your nightstand?

Dredge is the debut title from New Zealand dev team Black Salt Games, and might be one of the best games I’ve played this year. Without giving too much away, there’s fishing, there's inventory management, there’s treasure hunting, there’s cursed fish? Lovecraftian overtones? A stressed out eyeball meter that panics while you’re out at night?? It’s great, if a bit short and repetitive at times, but there’s only so much you can do when your main mechanic is “catch fish and tetris them onto your boat”. Still, overall it manages to take a thing I love (fishing), and make it spooky, and give it some intriguing story. So to hear that DLC was on the horizon did excite me, as the core game loop is pretty enjoyable despite the repetitiveness.

The Pale Reach takes Dredge’s fundamentals (fishing, tetrising your inventory, light puzzling, scary monsters and situations), and plunks them into an arctic zone. For better and for worse, that’s pretty much it. Now you have some more map to explore, some more fish to catch, some fun story bits, but that’s about it. It’s pretty short; I got to the end of the “story” in what felt like maybe an hour and a half, and the general consensus seems you could likely do everything The Pale Reach has to offer in about 2 to 3 hours. As for the reward for completing the story, I was already in the “end game” of Dredge and didn’t find it particularly useful. A shame, really.

I don’t like to imply DLCs are just content cut from a game’s release, but maybe because this fit into the main game without a lot of weird “this is clearly DLC”, it feels… strange. It slots right in real nice. Maybe too nice. But then, if there was a defined “THIS IS THE DLC” feeling, I’d probably hate it. But then, I understand it's hard to balance that sort of thing in a somewhat open map game, and that's more on me than Black Salt Games.

For what it’s worth, The Pale Reach is fine. Not amazing, not terrible, but fine. If you liked Dredge, this offers up more of the same but with a chilly palette. It’s cheap and it’ll keep you busy for a bit without overstaying its welcome. If you haven’t played Dredge yet and are thinking about getting it, it might be worth picking this up alongside it, because it seems the DLC reward does benefit players in the earlier parts of the game. And honestly, there’s much worse ways to spend $6 and two hours of your time. But I also wouldn’t say this DLC alone is enough justification to buy the whole game and DLC at the moment. If Dredge wasn’t something you were interested in to begin with, more of it but cold isn’t about to change your mind. It doesn’t add anything game changing or incredibly interesting to the base. Not getting it won’t fundamentally change your Dredge experience either if you haven't jumped onto the boat yet, so to speak.

Overall though, I do think it's worth the additional $6 if you enjoyed Dredge or are thinking about picking up Dredge for the first time. While it's not huge, it's a nicely priced bite of more from one of the best indie games of the year. Black Salt Games is doing a cool crossover DLC for Dave the Diver (another very good fishing game from this year, but not an indie game in my opinion), and has plans for a bigger DLC piece tentatively titled Iron Rig in 2024, so I don’t see Dredge falling off into the abyss just yet. Here’s hoping the interest for it doesn’t either.

For more information about Dredge and The Pale Reach, please visit https://www.dredge.game/

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Story: B
Gameplay: B
Graphics: B+
Music/Sound: B
Value: C+

Overall: B

Pros:
+ A great addition to the world of Dredge that players can quickly get into.
+ Who doesn't love more spooky fishing?
+ Setting fits in beautifully with the rest of the game, showing off Black Salt's strengths with consistency.
+ Additional lore to be found nicely expands the story without feeling "mandatory" to complete the base game.

Cons:
- Doesn't add anything fundamentally changing to the base game.
- Pretty short, especially if you're good at catching fish and are on a lucky streak.
- Reward for completion rather useless for late game players.
- If you weren't already a fan of the core gameplay loop, this isn't going to change your mind.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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