In Dregde you play in the role of a nameless fisherman stranded with a wracked ship on a small island. After the local major of the island provides you with a new ship you start to catch fish and sell it to the local merchant to pay back your debt. While exploring the nearby island you meet more character requiring your help, may it be transporting them to other island, find special objects or collect special fish for them.

Upgrading you boat and fishing equipment with resources you find by dredging them out of the deep water or for completing quests allows you to explore faster, buy fishing equipment for different conditions (flat water, deep ocean, volcanic conditions), increase income by placing crab pots, or increase the headlight power of your boat.

The day and night cycle plays a key role as soon you get to know that what happens on the sea at night is not normal. Without proper light and lack of rest you will experience hallucinations, like monsters chasing you, suddenly appearing rocks ahead of your boat and much more strange phenomena. Only enough sleep at on of the harbors can recover your mental sanity level.

The main quests will require you to search certain artifacts for a dubious old man living on one of the islands. Main and side quests are well intertwined as only side quests will provide you with the resources to upgrade your ship to a level allowing you to proceed further along the main quest questline. This makes collecting materials and ship upgrades motivating and meaningful.

By exploring the map and meeting more characters the strangeness and subtle horror grows continuously, as all the characters make various kinds of insinuations on suspicious and dangerous things going on in certain parts of this maritime world.

The mechanics for fishing and dredging are simple mini-games requiring you to press buttons at the right moment. An encyclopedia of all the different fish and crabs found motivates to search for different species and find them all. You will also find deformed fish mostly during night emphasizing the horror going on in this world.

The graphics design uses a comic-light art style (which reminds a bit of Disco Elysium). Character drawings and the animation of the water and fish are nicely designed . The music contributes well to the atmosphere with relaxed music during day-time fishing and more dense soundtracks during the dangerous nights.

Dredge is a special adventure mixing crafting gameplay (fishing, ship upgrade) with subtle horror adventure elements. The great achievement of the developers is combining the fun of exploring, collecting fish and crafting with a quite own way of creating horror, which is slowly increasing in course of the around 8-10 hour story playthrough.