The Bodies Beneath
Aries M. Gacutan on Dredge
Squid fishing happened at night, with a tackle box of dead-eyed, colourful squid jigs at my mother’s side. As a cold and trembling teen, I would spend my Saturday evenings casting off unfamiliar piers, squatting in the only fold-out chair that had been brought along, and side-eyeing my dad as he swore over tangled lines. Mostly I was on my phone. Then the worst would happen—I’d feel my rod twitch, the fish bite bells cutting a tinny jingle through the night. Here was where I’d set aside Subway Surfers to attend to the dreary task of reeling in a life.
There was no triumphant musical sting as I hauled my catch up from the water. I did not hold up the squid to the sky and say, as if in Animal Crossing, ‘I had an inkling I might!’ . Instead I dodged out of the way of its ink spray as it splashed my sibling’s shoes next to me, nearly slipping on discarded fish guts and seawater. The squid’s rubbery muscles expanded and contracted like heartbeats, searching for breath in this alien, waterless environment. Tentacles writhed and wormed, obscuring most of its head. I still wasn’t used to seeing bodies move like that.
Fishing was one of my parents’ attempts at facilitating familial bonding. My parents—my dad in particular—loved the calmness of the water and the excitement of a bite. I tolerated going for a time, if only because saying no was not really an option, but my unenthusiasm at ripping strange creatures from their homes eventually made itself clear. Fishing plans turned into suggestions, which turned into mild statements about the week’s catch over dinner.
I don’t care for recreational fishing. At best, it’s boring (if forgivable). At worst, it strikes me as a bizarrely fucked-up pastime, inexplicably tied up in western domination over nature, the flaunting of wealth, and the glorification of the laidback coastal lifestyle that only repulsively rich Australians can afford. I only truly enjoy it in video games, where fishing is entirely abstracted from its material reality. Fishing pops up in all sorts of low-stakes management and simulator games (see: Stardew Valley, Spiritfarer and Cozy Grove), and the charm of cheesy puns and fish encyclopaedias have cemented the trope firmly within the cosy gamer zeitgeist.
Contrast this with Dredge, the game that turns ‘cosy fishing’ on its head. Released in October 2023 by New Zealand developer team Black Salt Games, Dredge is a single-player horror adventure game that reintroduces the horror of writhing squids back into fishing. You play as a fisherman traversing a hostile archipelago, catching and selling fish in order to upgrade your tiny boat. As you progress, you improve your boat to be bigger and sturdier, and along the way you are tasked with fishing up mysterious artefacts from each of the main islands. And when night falls, vast creatures begin to rise from the depths to chase you down.
Early in the game, you are tasked with ferrying packages back and forth between two towns across a small bay. A single trip takes the better part of a day, which means that even the slightest delay can plunge the player into the dangerous depths of night. You have little in the way of combat abilities, and god help you if your manoeuvring skills aren’t up to snuff, as your engine can be destroyed by even the slightest bump against the rocks. On a mechanical level, the most pressing tension during the early-game is between the player’s desire for responsiveness and speed, and the sluggish pace of your dingy little vessel. This is part of Dredge’s masterful construction of player agency, which informs much of its inherent horror: the disconnect between the player’s real human body (what they are using to make game inputs) and the boat.
Games do more than construct alternate worlds or tell immersive stories. In his seminal work, Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen argues that video games create modes of agency that a player adopts, creating an array of specialised actions (such as kicking a goal or choosing a super-effective move) that are enacted in the pursuit of a preset goal. These goals range from the technical, such as winning a match, to the story-driven, such as unlocking a good ending, and they are just exciting as they are ultimately arbitrary. In the podcast Overthink, Nguyen describes the motivational state of ‘striving’. ‘What’s beautiful is the struggle’, as they note, not the achievement of the goal. In Dredge, not only do you strive to survive the horrors of the game, you also embody the literal struggle between fish and angler. You do this over and over and over again: another dark and lonely night, another cast, another hour. You are constantly confronted by another flailing, bug-eyed fish on the line. In other words, games are a means-first, ends-second storytelling medium, which create agency frameworks that change from game to game. A handy way to understand the differences between these frameworks is through genre. Pure platformers often forego combat mechanics in favour of complex and responsive movement capacities. Conversely, first-person-shooter (FPS) games are almost exclusively about combat, and most of the movement comes from aiming guns and navigating maps.
Horror games go out of their way to limit and direct these means, and Dredge elevates this ‘agency anxiety’ by (literally) putting its players at sea. You are in control of a slow, unwieldy, fragile body, one that is only barely suited to an oceanic environment, navigating an unfamiliar space filled with monsters stronger and faster than you are. A bitter reversal of the traditional fishing scenario. Yet, instead of an unassuming fish, it is you whose body has been yanked into an alien space, once-familiar motions turned horrifically unresponsive while hulking creatures watch you gasp.
With every movement, every cast, and every upgrade, the clock pushes resolutely towards nighttime. Once night does fall, the music cuts out entirely, leaving only the sound of your puttering engine. A thick fog descends with supernatural speed upon the islands. Switching on your feeble light, you swing around desperately for landmarks. Is that another boat you spot in the distance? You sound your foghorn, and a rush of relief washes over you as you hear the boat honk back. You make a beeline for what might be your companion, but as you approach, a bigger shape under the water resolves itself, approaching at speed, opening its jaws…
Once night falls, the player’s panic meter kicks in. Signified by an unblinking eye beneath the clock, the panic meter is a measurement of the protagonist’s stability and mental fortitude. Allow this to climb too high, and the player will attract the attention of boat-eating angler fish and bloodthirsty birds. At certain panic levels, the game will rearrange the map entirely, spawning hazards in places where they definitely weren’t before. Many times, this caused me to careen into brand-new boulders as I was convinced that I had misremembered the map’s layout entirely. This is a fantastic way of compromising players’ sense of their own agency, limited as it already is. Our own memories become unreliable, which increases panic (both mechanically and literally), and makes it harder and scarier to navigate to safer waters. In a game where you can do little other than fish or run away, it is an awful thing to realise that even your second option can’t be trusted.
On his YouTube channel The Architect of Games, games critic Adam Millard accredits the popularity of fishing minigames to their efficacy at solving the problem of habituation. Players who get too comfortable and familiar with a primary gameplay loop will get uninterested or frustrated—and uninterested, frustrated players do not an engaged audience make. As such, many developers will put secondary (or even tertiary) game loops into their games, which are ’used to destress’ from main quests and reset players’ brains, all while still racking up the hours played. In Dredge, as fishing is the main action that pushes the clock towards night (the others being resting and upgrading your boat), one must keep a close eye on the time—it is imperative not to get swept up in a fishing adventure lest you wind up stranded in the dark. Sometimes, mandatory quests will force the player to brave the night in pursuit of rare nocturnal fish, where any slip-up makes it ever likelier that an underwater monster will be alerted to your presence.
Compare this with titles like Spiritfarer, whose fishing minigame is actively designed to pass the in-game time. In Spiritfarer, you are also the captain of a boat, but unlike Dredge, you are able to plan routes ahead of time and let your magical vessel take the, well, wheel. As such, the focus lies in the downtime between disembarking and arriving, part of which includes fishing up new critters to cook for your ghostly friends. Where Spiritfarer prioritises relaxation, Dredge threatens to lull you into a false sense of security, where the flow of fishing could lead you directly into a dangerous night.
As Steve Farrelly writes in an AusGamers interview with Black Salt Games, Dredge combines its central pillars of ‘exploration and collection’ to unsettle and displace the player. The combination of blinking monsters in the depths, fishing in a quiet and rock-riddled archipelago, the glaring absence of your human form in favour of a dinky little boat, and the sheer scope of the yawning horizon—every element of Dredge’s atmosphere conspires to remind you that you do not belong here. This is where we encounter the horror of Thomas Weiskel’s sublime, what he coined as ‘man … in feeling and in speech, transcend[ing] the human’. Not only a transcendence, then, but a distancing and a belittling. The physicality and psychology of the human is irrelevant in the world of Dredge, defined only by its submission to the march of time and to creatures bigger than itself.
The second you think you understand the creatures you’re fishing up, scrawling what you can into your notebook and learning how best to fit them into your boat, you are faced with the final twist that drives home Dredge’s layers of horror and alienation. Just like the jingle of the fish bite bell, a trilled minor chord heralds an aberrant catch, and you pull up a mutant with too many eyes or not enough skin. The aberrant fish are the greatest dual narrative/mechanical sign that something is amiss, at a physical and existential scale that truly boggles the mind.
Dredge’s dreary seaside towns, monster-fish, and panic meter all take clear inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft, even as the development team has emphasised that they intend for their horror to be, as they mention in the above interview, more ‘eldritch’ than ‘Lovecraftian’. The infamy of Lovecraft’s racism looms over Dredge, and I contend that semantic evasion does not count as active anti-racism. Just as Dredge borrows horror from the Romantics, so too does it repurpose settler-colonial Romanticism about nature as inherently Other. At best Dredge’s natural world is beautiful in its ability—or perhaps refusal—to be understood by humanity. At worse, nature kills, drawing attention to alien bodies and shoring up the separation between the natural ‘them’ and the human ‘us’. On the surface, Dredge makes a decent effort to situate the game’s environment within Aotearoa. According to a Reddit thread, the audio design team for the game inserted bird calls that were native to Aotearoa in each area of the game, and a significant late-game location called Devil’s Spine features a fictional civilisation lost to volcanic activity. But the tragedy of Devil’s Spine feels more akin to Pompeii than Aotearoa, and ultimately it is the New Zealand government who gets the credit for collecting and archiving native birdsong. Overall, it reads as a repackaging of white understandings of nature for global western (or adjacent) audiences, which doesn’t sit well against the nod to Lovecraft.
At the same time, Dredge also warns against the consequences of taking too much from a place that was not yours to take from in the first place. The player’s world is scattered with messages in bottles (hallucinated? Or remembered?), which lets you piece together the protagonist’s grim past. Treasures had been taken from the deep, and as punishment for being lifted from their home, they took lives and minds as they saw fit. Yet there cannot be respect for nature if its very existence is predicated upon fear—there is only domination: explosives packed into hollowed whale teeth, baited traps and aggressive scientific invasion. Dredge’s focus on the horror of the sublime is both its strength and its downfall, as it presents a colonial and survivalist relationship to nature, rather than centring humanity’s place in the wider ecosystem.
One of the most prevalent critiques of Dredge is against its late-game. Several reviewers have expressed disappointment at the late-game plateau, as linear upgrades and increased abilities make the threat of sea monsters far less pressing. The game manages well enough: by introducing more difficult-to-navigate areas, faster engines might actually be likelier to send you careening into rubble sitting low in the water. However, as monsters become easier and easier to outrun, less of the world opens up to you, which results in Dredge losing a lot of what makes its early game so enchanting. It begins to feel very streamlined, and the agency anxiety it first establishes is overshadowed by safety and competency. With bodily confidence comes mastery over the land, and the colonialist-survivalist reduction of the horrific sublime to a series of objectives. Suddenly the ocean is very knowable, and there is nothing left to do but finish the game.
With each area you successfully clear, you unlock abilities that more firmly synthesise your body and your agency, bridging the gap between player input and desire. After reuniting a pair of brothers, for example, you are sold explosives that enable you to create shortcuts through the terrain. As you deliver relics to the shady Collector (who—you guessed it!—wants to collect the relics), you unlock spells that increase your speed, or are able to fish up entire shoals instantaneously. You can even banish the once-untouchable underwater monsters for a short period of time, and once your cooldown is over, you can do it all over again.
You—like the sublime, like the aberrant fish—transcend both man and monster, developing into a conglomeration of magic and might that teeters ever closer to some unseen yet keenly-felt precipice. The boundaries of your personhood and your morality alike become blurred. You, as in both player and character. Therein lies the final act of horror that Dredge leaves its player with, that last corruption of the familiar into the uncanny. You are faced with two endings, and although they are metaphorical extensions of the agency framework that you have always operated on, the distinction between them is nevertheless clear: return your relics to the deep, or continue on your quest and run from consequence. Face the (colonial, conquering) self, or face the (sublime, natural) Other. At the last, the player’s agency balloons, leaving the fate of the entire miserable archipelago in your hands. Implicit in Dredge’s dual endings are the questions: ‘Who could blame you for letting it all burn?’ and ‘Who could possibly forgive you for saving yourself?’—and above all else, the situating of human agency above the natural world, the sublime be damned.
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WORKS CITED
✷ Natalie Mulligan, ‘The Cozy Gaming Takeover: How Social Media’s Cozy Gamers Gentled Their Way to the Top’, Grattan Street Press, October 19 2023.
✷ C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, Oxford University Press, 2020.
✷ Overthink podcast episode 23, ‘Games and Gamification (feat. C. Thi Nguyen)’, 2024.
✷ Steve Farrelly, ‘From Depths Unknown: Talking and Playing Dredge with Black Salt Games’, AusGamer, 27 February 2023.
Aries M. Gacutan is a poet and digital writer working on the traditional lands of the Woi Wurrung and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin nation. They are a recipient of the 2024 Emerging Poets Residency with Red Room Poetry. They focus on how space, place and mundanity can form identity.