Dredge: The Iron Rig Adds Depth, But Not Finality to Your Fishing Adventure

When it comes to downloadable content for a game, particularly content that arrives a year or more after the game’s initial release, it’s fair to ask which consumer that content is really most intended for. Is the content targeted at the game’s previous players, as a way to bring them back into the fold, to spend some more time with an experience they’ve previously gone through and put aside? Or are the new additions primarily tailored at deepening the experience for those who have never actually picked up the game in the past, effectively serving as a way to make another sales/advertising push for those people who may have previously been curious, but not made the leap? Ideally, the answer would of course be that a new piece of DLC for a game like Dredge would serve both types of prospective player equally well, but the newly released Dredge: The Iron Rig can’t really make that boast. This is a decently well-sized and executed expansion of the base game’s aesthetic and objectives, but one that doesn’t offer much to the seasoned player who has already fully explored what the world of Dredge has to offer.

The aesthetic and storytelling style of Dredge has always been its strongest aspect, thrusting the player into the role of a silent commercial fishing boat captain who finds himself/herself caught up in the plight of a seaside community of islands beset by strange, supernatural forces and Lovecraftian horrors increasingly infecting the previously tranquil pace of day-to-day life. You are both a helping hand, and a complicit one, running an array of side quests to repair broken communities and family relationships, even as your tasks to collect arcane artifacts for a mysterious hermit seem to only be fueling the mounting darkness oppressing the area. And of course, you’re fishing! Dredge‘s fishing (and dredging) minigame makes up one of the central tenets of the experience, never particularly demanding in terms of skill, but wonderfully rewarding in terms of the beautiful art and descriptions of a wide variety of marine life. Filling up the Pokedex-like encyclopedia with every possible entry is difficult for any compulsive player to resist, particularly the imaginatively deranged “Aberrations” of each mutated species. You want to go out of your way to see them all, even without the game specifically requiring you to do so.

The Iron Rig just adds another concurrent layer to this base storyline, centered around a large drilling platform operated by the (again mysterious) Ironhaven Corporation. Surely these corporate executives have only the best and most conscientious of intentions for the area, right? It’s not as if turning on the drill will immediately throw the region into chaos, right? I think you can see where we’re going here. The Iron Rig‘s environmental message is hardly a subtle one, equipping you as it does with such pieces of equipment as a tool that can literally suck up the pools of gunk that the drill platform has unleashed, but it’s still a welcome addition to the game, given that the original never really paid much heed to the environmental impact of the player as a commercial fisherman.

The titular rig is located in the north of the map, conspicuously close to the starting location in the Marrows, sandwiched pretty narrowly between the Twisted Strands and Devil’s Spine. Those who have played previous Dredge DLC The Pale Reach will note that it’s much more directly accessible than the icy, southerly island in that title–this is no doubt because The Iron Rig‘s story and objectives tie in more with the areas you’ve previously visited and are already familiar with, rather than sending you into an entirely new area to explore. The overall effect of The Iron Rig is thus to just layer more content onto the existing locations–new characters, new abilities, a modest new narrative, and new craftable pieces of equipment … which you will notably need in order to catch the new fish that have been added.

And therein lies the rub for the player like myself, who has already more than completed both Dredge and The Pale Reach–it can’t help but feel like busy work to construct entirely new rods, nets, etc. just to be able to catch new fish in areas you already know like the back of your hand. At least the need to do so in The Pale Reach made logical sense, as it was an entirely new area. It’s not that creating said new equipment is some onerous task, but it feels like a task that primarily exists just to give the player something to briefly check off a list, to extend the playtime of the “new content” by another 15 or 30 minutes. And that becomes a running theme in The Iron Rig, whose central series of objectives involves revisiting each of the game’s main zones to collect samples in a way that quickly becomes rote and predictable. In each area, you have basically the same mandate: Go there, collect four new species, bring them back to the increasingly shady Scientist who seems to be running things on the Iron Rig. Progression is just a simple matter of fishing and dredging–there’s relatively little interpersonal dialog, and none of the already established characters around the map even note the existence of the Iron Rig in these waters. Its content thus feels very cordoned off, even though it shares the same area.

The Iron Rig also lacks much of a conclusion or sense of finality in its own storyline, which serves to make it somewhat dissatisfying as an epilogue to someone who has already completed the main story of Dredge. This is not helped by the fact that you can do some of the objectives involving the rig seemingly out of order without even realizing you’ve done so–this is precisely what happened to me when I completed a late quest involving the defense of the rig, when I still hadn’t yet completed all of the sample-fetching quests. This resulted in me seeing what amounted to the final “main” story development involving the rig, when I still had smaller tasks left to finish, which yielded less dramatic results. The effect left me assuming that “there must be more to do,” without even realizing I’d technically completed the DLC. It would have been nice to instead encounter something with more of a cathartic ending for the region, especially considering that The Iron Rig has already been announced as the final DLC for Dredge.

That isn’t to say that there’s been some kind of slip in the quality of content that Black Salt Games is delivering in The Iron Rig, only that this content feels a little superfluous when consumed en masse by a player who has already completed Dredge. The new art, fish and characters are as lovingly drawn and rendered as ever. It arguably contains more new content overall than The Pale Reach, though I’ll always take a new area over expanded details in existing ones. A new fifth tier of boat hull blessedly adds a bit more inventory space, which is something you’re pretty much always pining for in Dredge. This DLC packs the existing map significantly more tightly with areas for fishing or dredging … although one could argue this perhaps has the unintended effect of making the entire region feel a bit smaller, as it reduces the feeling of scale and open space between the landmasses.

At the end of the day, the experience of The Iron Rig would be best suited to a player who is firing up Dredge for the first time, as its greater suite of tools and craftables–such as the ability to make bait specifically for aberrated fish–would be of great help in simultaneously completing the main story. Playing the DLC this way should give players a central experience that is that much richer and packed with details, rather than an experience that feels a bit like a perfunctory add-on at the end of a game’s natural life cycle. If you’re a Dredge fan who is interested in tackling The Iron Rig, you might want to consider booting up a fresh game from scratch to truly experience the DLC at its best. Perhaps some day in the future, when I’m pining for the spray of digital salt on my face and the sounds of seabirds in the air, I’ll return to the Iron Rig that way and get the best experience Black Salt Games has to offer. For now, though, I’m just about all fished out.

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film and TV writing.