izigame.me

I've seen some negative reviews that I heavily disagreed with, or at the very least I believe they completely miss the point of the game, plus theres an egregious amount of joke reviews, so I felt like I needed to leave a positive one:
Do you like fishing? Do you like exploration? Do you like a somewhat laid back experience, with mild horror elements? if ya do, then DREDGE is a good game for you.
DREDGE is a game about a Brooding Aura of Something Evil or Unknowable hovering around what may possibly be the only civilization left on earth. It tells that story through the eyes of a Fisherman (you), and you get to see what all the people staying in town don't get to see: The True Horrors of The World Around You. Something is in the water, and you nor anyone else is really quite sure what it is, but you know it's there because sometimes the fish you catch are Changed, in one way or another, but almost always in a horrifying manner. Maybe they ate a weird pebble that contained some vile energy, or maybe whatever it is just simply lives deep under the water, its aura oozing out into the sea around it.
Here's the deal, I'm a bit of a Fishing Minigame Fiend, I live for these games. Hell, I caught every fish in Cruelty Squad and some of those fish are intentionally only on your hook for 1 Frame. Just throwing that out there to flex, mostly, but also I'm tellin you I'm a Friggin FIEND man. The gameplay is a nice middle ground maybe slightly more challenging than your average Fishing Minigame inside another Game. Harder than Terraria Fishing, easier than Sega Bass Pro Fishing, or Big the Cat's stages in Sonic Adventure DX. It's mostly just a timing game setup in a few various ways, and in my opinion it does all it needs to. Don't go into this game expecting 2000 different Warioware-esque fishing minigames for every fish, theres maybe 4 or 5 different timing games. A lot of reviews and complaints I have read about this game include something like "Oh it's boring and the gameplay loop is the same every time, I was expecting MORE types of fishing minigames" and I believe they are completely missing the point. It is NOT a Fishing Game. It's an Exploration / Mystery game with Fishing as a way to tell the story.
There are a total of 128 fish to catch and collect, around half of them are Fricked Up Variants of normal fish, but that adds a nice spice to collecting all the fish, it gives you a reason to keep going back to pools of what would otherwise be referred to as "dead content". The tools and resources you're given are quite nice in helping you find the fish as well, the Telescope is especially underrated I think, especially from seeing how theres already Guides for this game on How To Find Certain Fish. Just pop open the telescope, and boom, you can see exactly what fish are in which pools out on the horizon, incredibly nice for finding specific pools that you may need certain variants of still. The Day / Night stuff is really well done and I'm a really big fan of it. Staying out late into the night can cause Rocks and stuff (psychosis, basically) to simply appear out of thin air, only seen by your lights. And the moments of Oh God I'm Going To Die To This Giant Fish Help Me are really nice and add a good amount of tension. Especially early on, its a lot of fun managing the Risk/Reward of whether it's really worth grabbing that last piece of wood if it means 18:00 rolls over and you have to find your way back in the fog and dark.
I'm nowhere near done with the game at 10 hours in, but I'm also intentionally taking my time and finding all the fish, discovering secrets, completing the side content, etc. Some complaints I've seen mentioned the game only being "7-9 hours long" and I feel like you'd have to intentionally blitz through the game and do absolutely no side content or even just Fish for Fun for that to be true. It feels like there is a bigger mystery under the surface of this game that I'm only just starting to unravel, and I'm very eager to see where it leads.