I know that many people stare directly into the face of survival game progression systems - passive income systems, market manipulation tactics, little woodchopping/pickaxing/fishing improvements - without flinching, but when I see grossly monolithic games composed of 1000s of intricately laddered scaling ‘hoe the ground faster so you can hoe the ground faster’ mechanics, I go mad. I think what others see as holy and that which I see as damning is a kind of mercurial thing which manifests depending on tolerance, or, maybe more scathingly, depending on whether one can see themselves as the operator of any of the many assembly belts that develop within these games, or as the sorry, oblivious until-too-late, thing being carried into the maws hungry at the end of the line. It may be a patience thing; it may be an attention thing; it may be a matter of whether you fall into the idea of games as a pursuit vs. leisure thing. If I am to diagnosis what it is in myself that retreats from survival automation games or their mechanics in migration, I would say that it falls under the purview, or compulsion, of endstate necessitation specific to my type of gaming psychographic: I need to see a conclusion which satisfies play theses, which fulfils themes offered, which sees the change occurred over the playthrough as something more than pure refinement and process evolution. It’s an embarrassing flaw in my critical ability, but I will never see, adequately, the merits of the design in something like Stardew or Factorio because what I am compelled by internally being intrinsically counter to the preeminent occupation of those games.
Now imagine those mechanics are taken out of their vacuums, allowed the possibility to repeat ad infinitum as is demanded by the genre, only to have them encroach an offer of cessation of play with a thematic completion derived from the greatest, in scope, possible expression of fully consuming oneness? That’s more my speed. Dredge’s scale is the work of balancing uneven juggling - on one hand, the climax of the game eludes to grander things than are possible to render within the scope of representation within play or plot (something which may have even failed to form for Lovecraft when he was pioneering the modern form of cosmic horror, encumbered as he was by human language, narrative, and their dual formulation, as well as the drawing of the horrors represented from petulant and embarrassing human fears rooted in bigotry), and on the other hand, the scale of the game’s economy is minute in comparison to genre stalwarts like Stardew, Terraria, or Don’t Starve, which seek to take up the world entire of their respective zealots. While it is possible in Dredge to endlessly fish, fill out logs, or find ever bigger translucent carps or wider vortices of collapsing squid, there is only, after filling the other human desires on the islands, the Sisyphean reason to do so: as a knowingly meaningless human task that is set before you - one which may or may not be pleasing to enact. Continue on in your little steamer, drop your little lines or nets, even use your little enchantments disdainfully bestowed to grease the works of your plaything tools; the ocean continues on forever and the fish replenish and the mongers of baubles and bass have depthless pockets, but as the smallness of the tasks become obvious, and as the painted picture of futility is realised with the boundaries of the map, the idea of something greater looms. Suddenly each act, acts which in games of pixelated chemistry seek to make the work of intricate paints on a vast canvas operate beauty on the macro and micro, the pigment and the impression, which fail to represent anything at all at their remove, become the little strokes of a paranoiding bedlamite - or should I say, they become the acts of a institutionalised person being shown how increasingly representational their scrawls are.
Fishing amidst the depths is a bit obviously crass, given how the Old Ones are so often made out in their tentacles and lanterned rows of teeth. Of course, cosmic horror is a crass thing told when we realise that, in its fiction, we are the scatological elements that must be cleansed to sanitise the upset order. Such is the obviousness of the metaphor and of the grotesqueries of Dredge, to its benefit: we are tilling the evershifting slosh, uncompromising and capricious, so foreign to our humanity (unlike that stolid earth, so thoroughly tamed), and realising the demands of its creatures and their dealings. Dredge shows the small ways we may transgress - bounties of ripe and succulent meats (nevertheless poisoning and changing the people with even the smallest doses of the ocean), detritus that adorns with broken rules of order by shining clearly, salvage that stupidly convinces some reinforcement despite its being born from pulling apart the already dashed - and makes a masterful journey of little tasks, even small victories against pain, which nonetheless arc towards the impossibility of being one in the monopneuma; the which of things that contains all that can be. It seems, to me, to be a small inkling that can be sewn into the designs of survival/base-building/resource farming games revealing what the actions of these games may be building, what may be behind those cages of chickens or bundles of wood. Were there less here to show the scope of those kinds of systems, it would feel too hollow a representation, something that is a mere fooling at comparative quality; if there were more than there is, it would fail to be dwarfed by the incomprehensible scope of its completion.
I’m trying to be a bit light on the details of play because Dredge gets by on mood as much as play. In the end, the gaminess of it all, which really only takes over the micro narratives and not the overarching plot nor the player actions, can show a few cracks in the facade that may or may not ruin the degree to which you might sympathise with the pathology of the player character’s ending state of mind. That all has to come at the pace of play, which comes with the pace of play elements revealed, which reinforce the obvious enough mood from the bareness of a game named “DREDGE”. If the idea of dredging, in every sense, makes enough hint in your twinging for annihilation, whether it be from you unto the trout population or from the great trout in the sky unto the earth, then hopefully this little creative writing blunder-about can sell you on the idea that the least character invested mechanical genre, a game type whose most beloved entry tries to package factory farming and diamond mining in the adornment of ‘escaping to and connecting with nature’, has managed to eloquently and succinctly package these mechanics into a narrative that demands them.
Now imagine those mechanics are taken out of their vacuums, allowed the possibility to repeat ad infinitum as is demanded by the genre, only to have them encroach an offer of cessation of play with a thematic completion derived from the greatest, in scope, possible expression of fully consuming oneness? That’s more my speed. Dredge’s scale is the work of balancing uneven juggling - on one hand, the climax of the game eludes to grander things than are possible to render within the scope of representation within play or plot (something which may have even failed to form for Lovecraft when he was pioneering the modern form of cosmic horror, encumbered as he was by human language, narrative, and their dual formulation, as well as the drawing of the horrors represented from petulant and embarrassing human fears rooted in bigotry), and on the other hand, the scale of the game’s economy is minute in comparison to genre stalwarts like Stardew, Terraria, or Don’t Starve, which seek to take up the world entire of their respective zealots. While it is possible in Dredge to endlessly fish, fill out logs, or find ever bigger translucent carps or wider vortices of collapsing squid, there is only, after filling the other human desires on the islands, the Sisyphean reason to do so: as a knowingly meaningless human task that is set before you - one which may or may not be pleasing to enact. Continue on in your little steamer, drop your little lines or nets, even use your little enchantments disdainfully bestowed to grease the works of your plaything tools; the ocean continues on forever and the fish replenish and the mongers of baubles and bass have depthless pockets, but as the smallness of the tasks become obvious, and as the painted picture of futility is realised with the boundaries of the map, the idea of something greater looms. Suddenly each act, acts which in games of pixelated chemistry seek to make the work of intricate paints on a vast canvas operate beauty on the macro and micro, the pigment and the impression, which fail to represent anything at all at their remove, become the little strokes of a paranoiding bedlamite - or should I say, they become the acts of a institutionalised person being shown how increasingly representational their scrawls are.
Fishing amidst the depths is a bit obviously crass, given how the Old Ones are so often made out in their tentacles and lanterned rows of teeth. Of course, cosmic horror is a crass thing told when we realise that, in its fiction, we are the scatological elements that must be cleansed to sanitise the upset order. Such is the obviousness of the metaphor and of the grotesqueries of Dredge, to its benefit: we are tilling the evershifting slosh, uncompromising and capricious, so foreign to our humanity (unlike that stolid earth, so thoroughly tamed), and realising the demands of its creatures and their dealings. Dredge shows the small ways we may transgress - bounties of ripe and succulent meats (nevertheless poisoning and changing the people with even the smallest doses of the ocean), detritus that adorns with broken rules of order by shining clearly, salvage that stupidly convinces some reinforcement despite its being born from pulling apart the already dashed - and makes a masterful journey of little tasks, even small victories against pain, which nonetheless arc towards the impossibility of being one in the monopneuma; the which of things that contains all that can be. It seems, to me, to be a small inkling that can be sewn into the designs of survival/base-building/resource farming games revealing what the actions of these games may be building, what may be behind those cages of chickens or bundles of wood. Were there less here to show the scope of those kinds of systems, it would feel too hollow a representation, something that is a mere fooling at comparative quality; if there were more than there is, it would fail to be dwarfed by the incomprehensible scope of its completion.
I’m trying to be a bit light on the details of play because Dredge gets by on mood as much as play. In the end, the gaminess of it all, which really only takes over the micro narratives and not the overarching plot nor the player actions, can show a few cracks in the facade that may or may not ruin the degree to which you might sympathise with the pathology of the player character’s ending state of mind. That all has to come at the pace of play, which comes with the pace of play elements revealed, which reinforce the obvious enough mood from the bareness of a game named “DREDGE”. If the idea of dredging, in every sense, makes enough hint in your twinging for annihilation, whether it be from you unto the trout population or from the great trout in the sky unto the earth, then hopefully this little creative writing blunder-about can sell you on the idea that the least character invested mechanical genre, a game type whose most beloved entry tries to package factory farming and diamond mining in the adornment of ‘escaping to and connecting with nature’, has managed to eloquently and succinctly package these mechanics into a narrative that demands them.