Dredge
#7
PC - Steam
Beaten April 17th, 2023


Dredge is a game I really WANT to love - a fishing game set in a small chain of islands where something sinister is lurking just beneath the depths... Hell yeah Lovecraft!! But, like almost everything Lovecraft, I'm loving the premise but the execution leaves a great deal to be desired. This is a fishing game at its core and that is its largest failing: the fishing and gameplay just are not very interesting!! Your little boat is fun to drive around the wider seas but ultimately you just stop at POIs and play a little minigame (a simple timing game) to scoop up whatever treasure or fish you've got and thats'... like 95% of the game right there and gosh it's just never interesting honestly? The other chunk of the game is its spooky atmosphere and the occasional threat that pops up in the darker hours: and you might say:

"oh, so things get more dangerous at night but more rewarding??" Technically yes, but only barely more rewarding and you don't reallllly need the upgrades anyway, or at least not badly enough, so you'll only go out at night as the plot demands.

"oh, but at least nighttime is more interesting right? With all the monsters? That's neat!" Well, yes, but again only barely. What few extra enemies MAY pop up (most nights nothing will happen to you) are not terribly dangerous and almost all of them just give you a good whack and wander off, your chances of dying are quite slim. 

"Ah, but I bet the story is super creepy and messed up right?? Lots of good Lovecraft horror!" Yeaahhhhhh about that...



The Good
-Visuals overall are pretty stellar. Character art pops nicely in a painterly style, fish look fucking weird even when they're "normal" fish and only get stranger from there, fog rolling in at night looks super spooky
-Each island chain (there are 5) have their own overarching stories that are all pretty good and either feed into the main plot (the calamity that destroyed a seafaring civilazation seems awfully familiar to what little we've seen from what we're dealing with now...) or just weave a darn good spooky supernatural tale (a great beast is being studied by a lonely researcher and you've got to help them out)
-The music is a pitch perfect "chill music for the waves.. with a slight underscore of dread"
-No "oh you're going out of bounds!" warnings on this map... something else keeps you in the zone =D


The Meh
-The pacing is a bit off, the early game goes by pretty slow as you're bouncing between trying to upgrade your boat to be actually useful and go faster than a rowboat and moving the actual plot forwards. After the first two story sections though you'll be flying through things and those last two island chains (which are pretty cool!)
-Story is generally pretty good beat for beat, but overall is a bit... lacking? Lovecraft does its best work when things go increasingly bonkers as the ending ramps up: this is not the case here at all, outside a 15 second cutscene at the end. I think the "bad" ending is by far the more interesting of the endings but the "good" ending does explain a bit more in what the heck is going on, though it raises even more questions that would be too spoilery to be get into but just aren't that important anyway so I'll just leave it at: some things don't make entire amounts of sense if you do both endings, and not in a good "Lovecraftian what is reality anyway?" way, but a "why would a normal human being say and do that thing" way, which is a bit disappointing
-Some gameplay systems need a bit better of an explanation: you can ONLY get upgrades through research + stacking your motors makes you go much faster!

The Bad
-The fishing minigame starts off as tolerable and is just kinda annoying about 2 hours in. There is no challenge or skill or even barely an evolution of it the entire game, and there are no stakes whatsoever. It is however mercifully short.
-As I mentioned above, the gameplay variety is pretty minimal even for a twelve hour game. You boat around with no challenges or real changes (minus the 4th island, they have some neat twists there but that's less than an hour in this 10 hour adventure) and fish with no challenges or real changes.



The Hmm
-The pacing is a bit off, the early game goes by pretty slow as you're bouncing between trying to upgrade your boat to be actually useful and go faster than a rowboat and moving the actual plot forwards


So while I do think Dredge was overall a good experience it does leave me with a bit of disappointment. The gameplay could've done with quite a bit more shaking up and I'm not sure the upgrade system really works properly with the day/night cycle or even the "fear" system that I was pretty much free to ignore.  The story had plenty of opportunities to tell about the horrors of the deep and rarely did more than dip its toe into the shallow end. So despite this Lovecraftian Horror having way too many appendages I found Dredge to be oddly toothless. 


Final Grade: B-

I feel like I've given this one a pretty good try, doing a few of the chapter 2 stories before wanting to fully put this down, but yeah, I'm just really not a fan of Octopath Traveler unfortunately. When you look at it broadly, it seemingly has a lot of ideas that could make for a really engaging RPG, but unfortunately, I feel like the skeletons of most of these ideas are all that's present. You have 8 characters, but none of them feel interesting and barely even talk to each other, you've got unique ways of interacting with a lot of NPCs, but the interactions themselves feel hollow, you have a ton of plot threads going on at once, but never any sense of actual stakes nor an instance of them intersecting, and this issue pervades the whole experience. This isn't even a case of just disliking this for being an RPG either, because RPGs are cool, this one just doesn't do it for me despite the amount of promise and how genuinely great certain aspects of the experience were, it's all just disappointing really.

Everything surrounding the writing is where a lot of my biggest complaints stem from, not just from one particular aspect either, it's just all rather bad to me. The premises of each of the 8 plotlines is where I especially take issue with, as none of the set ups really do anything especially interesting on their own, but due to the way everything is structured due to the fact that there are 8 of these, none of the individual plotlines feels as if they really have any ground to fully take off, instead feeling like truncated ideas that aren't allowed to actually expand in interesting directions. This causes the narrative to feel like a consistent drag without an end in sight, further hindered by the pacing being rough thanks to having to jump between each of these narratives regularly, causing everything to feel stagnant with how long it takes to see anything progress in any meaningful way.
Doesn't help that the characters don't really have much going for them, similarly largely feeling like skeletal concepts and tropes without much to really differentiate them. The choice to write all of this in such a self-contained manner as if each adventurer has entirely set off on their own does no favours either, completely hindering a lot of potential interactions and making everyone feel like even more of a blank slate. I personally feel that structuring the game in a way where after the intros for each character, it was possible for a player to fully complete each storyline in full would've done a lot to help with the pacing issue, because as it stands here, it really just feels like an endless sea of nothingness.

The world itself similarly doesn't really do anything for me, neither to towns nor the overworld. I'll say that the game mostly looks very pretty, including these environments, but that's really where it ends for me. I didn't really feel any sense of cohesion in it especially, with generic biomes bleeding into one another without much that felt like it was connected in an especially interesting way, just, "ok and now the scenery is suddenly a desert, and now it's a beautiful, grassy area with absolutely beautiful water, and now it's a giant, mysterious forest" and it just, doesn't feel interesting, there's no real intrigue to any of these places, and as such I end up feeling absolutely nothing when exploring them. Doesn't help that the NPCs don't really add anything to the experience either, having a tendency to just not really say anything of note, at most occasionally providing a single line tidbit of information that I never really found myself caring about given that it never really did anything to make the setting feel any more interesting. The side quests also suck and reveal how empty the whole path action mechanic feels in its implementation, not to mention having other issues to go along with it. So many of them feel vague to the point of being ridiculous while simultaneously almost always just being solved by spamming certain path actions towards surrounding NPCs. It makes for a dynamic that simultaneously feels obtuse while being totally braindead, almost never really knowing the exact thing you need to do, but being able to brute force your way through a lot of them anyway.

Despite all of these complaints, there's one area that the game absolutely excels at (mostly), and that's the combat. Even some of the earliest fights feel pretty engaging due to the combination of the break and boost system being tools that are able to contribute both to long term strategic play while also giving the player a lot of tools to make a lot of nuanced spur of the moment decisions. It adds a lot to the battling experience in a few different ways, as not only does it lead to a more dynamic experience as a whole, but it also feels awesome when you've planned everything out and then enact it all to deal an utterly absurd amount of damage, and can also make each individual fight feel a bit more involved. This last point is a bit of a double edged sword however, as while making it that even a lot of common enemy fights require a bit of thought at times is cool for giving a bit more gravity to each encounter, it also has the effect of making grinding feel agonisingly tedious when you can't really have anywhere to fall back on to only half pay attention while mashing the attack button to gain those extra couple of levels you might need. If the game didn't feel grindy that'd be one thing, but the jump from the chapter 1 areas to the chapter 2 ones felt pretty steep to me with how tanky some of the enemies ended up getting, and it doesn't help that only your 4 active party members even gain any exp, basically forcing you to either grind, or to kneecap yourself by having certain party members be slacking in a combat scenario. Doesn't help that actually exploring a lot of the dungeons was just lame, nothing really going on in them.

Octopath Traveler is a game that has some serious promise in some areas and is outright amazing in others, but the whole package doesn't connect in a way that I feel is particularly interesting, especially since so many of the promising ideas never really deliver on anything more concrete. So many times I was thinking "this could be awesome" only to repeatedly see it exclusively utilised in the more barebones way possible, doesn't matter if this was to do with the world, the characters, or the narrative, basically anything that wasn't the core combat felt lacking, and combat alone really just isn't enough to make for a game I want to play to completion, especially when it's this long. Basically a game that I could only recommend to someone who just reaaalllly loves JRPGs and enjoys this sort of very stylistically basic experience, but even in that case I would probably just recommend playing through a Dragon Quest game instead.