Video Game / DREDGE

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DREDGE is an open world Cosmic Horror fishing game that was out as early access in 2022 and fully released on March 30, 2023 by New Zealand-based Black Salt Games and published by Team17. The game was released on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S, and later, the Epic Games Store on December 24, 2024, where it was temporarily released for free.

You're a sailor who gets caught in a storm and washes up in the seaside town of Greater Marrow while answering an ad asking for a fisherman. Luckily for you, they need a new fisherman after their last one disappeared, and you just happen to fit the bill. The mayor loans you a boat and urges you to get started feeding the town, but before you begin, he gives you a stern warning — don't stay out on the sea at night.

You get to work, but soon you start catching fish that... aren't quite right. A local collector takes notice of the odd fish, and approaches you with an offer — use your ship's salvaging equipment to help him find relics from shipwrecks that seem to be connected to the grotesque fish, and he'll help you improve your vessel. Sounds like a good deal... Right?

Along the way, you'll explore the strange archipelago, help out the people who live there, upgrade your fishing boat, and try to make a living as a small-town fisherman, all while unraveling the mystery of the eerie fog that rolls in after the sun goes down, and the things it brings with it.

Following the release, Black Salt Games have stated their intention to keep supporting and expanding upon the game, with both some free minor updates and paid DLC. The first expansion, The Pale Reach, released on November 16, 2023, and adds an icy area and the story of how a doomed expedition to the region met its end. The second expansion, The Iron Rig, focused around the somewhat sinister Ironhaven Corporation and their mysterious drilling activities in the area, was released on August 15th, 2024.

During The Game Awards 2023, a crossover collaboration DLC between Dave the Diver and DREDGE was announced, which was released on December 15, 2023.

On April 9th, 2024, a film adaptation of the game was announced to be in development.

Previews: Announcement trailer, Date Reveal trailer, Pre-order trailer, Feature Length animated trailer, Launch trailer.

There are tropes in the deep. Begin dredging?

• Ability Required to Proceed: It is impossible to complete the main story without equipping and using a specialty fishing rod, a fishing net, a crab pot, and the deep-casting lines at least once each.
• Action Command: All fishing and dredging operations are conducted using action commands on a circular interface. Fishing requires to press the button in the exact moment that an indicator is inside a green or yellow bar, whereas for dredging, a dot must be navigated across two circular trails and evade obstacles by jumping between the two trails.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: The encyclopedia's description of the Common Crab.
  "A crusty carapace and clicking claws. Caught in a cage close to the coast."
• All There in the Manual: The fact that the player character dredged up a stone casket and broke it open to discover the Tome Of the Deep is alluded to throughout the game, but an actual depiction of this event is only shown in the official trailer.
• And I Must Scream: Many of the aberrant fish mention in their description how the mutations that have overcome them make them act against their will. Others describe unending agony inflicted on the helpless victim, to the point that at least one example (the Consumed Grouper) doesn't resist its capture because it just wants its torment to end. It doesn't matter that they're "just" fish, these are fates no living creature should be forced to endure.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The timing-based minigames to fish and dredge wrecks can be disabled from the settings menu, the only penalty being that the action takes longer than it would have if you had completed the minigame without error.
  • Failing a sidequest (such as by losing an item you were supposed to deliver) still counts as completing it for the purposes of achievements and the like.
  • If the monstrous Serpent patrolling the Gale Cliffs damages your boat, it will just keep on swimming past you, even though in context, it would make more sense for it to hang around attacking until you died. This is useful since you can't really fight back and it's possible to have it chase you into a dead end. This doesn't mean it won't come back eventually, however, so it's best not to loiter.
  • The Wandering Merchant carries at least one each of refined metal and research parts, which refresh every time the shop is reset. If you're having trouble hunting down upgrade materials, she's a quicker alternative if you're willing to shell out the cash. This is especially true of research parts, which are a rare drop outside of quests, making it unlikely you'll naturally find enough to cover all your research. She'll also sell explosives, bait, and ice blocks at all of her locations once you've unlocked them, so you don't have to sail back to the main source each time you need more.
  • An early quest has you retrieve a belt buckle for a grieving father. This buckle counts as a trinket and can be sold as one (if you want to be cruel), but will not be sold automatically with the "Sell All" option, hinting at its importance if you dredge it up before getting the quest.
  • Quest items specifically tied to progression in the main plot cannot be lost through damage to the boat.
  • Docks cannot harm your boat, no matter how hard you hit them. So if you come into port a little too fast on your way to get repairs, you won't kill yourself trying to dock.
  • If you find dodging sea monsters at night to be more annoying than exciting, then you can engage "Passive Mode" on the options menu. This also disables the Panic Meter, which means that you cannot interact with some mysterious rocks, which have stories to tell if you are panicked enough.
  • Whenever possible, using Atrophy will guarantee you an aberration that you don't currently have in your encyclopedia. This makes the late-game grind for aberrations much easier.
  • The secret fish added in The Iron Rig is very rare and catching it has some specific and costly requirements. Because of this, it isn't required for any achievements and catching it doesn't give any reward.
• Anti-Hoarding: Not only your ship has a limited storage space, but your land storage is limited as well. As such, you cannot simply store everything you want indefinitely. Fish rot quickly as well, so there is even less reason to hold on to them for too long.
• Arc Words: "Throw it back!"
• Artifact of Doom: Before the game, a salvage team dredged the ocean of a casket that summoned the fog once it was opened. Inside was the Tome of the Deep. Opening the casket summoned the Leviathan, destroying the boat and killing the team, including the Fisherman's wife. The only survivors were the Fisherman, the Old Mayor, and the Lighthouse Keeper. Racked with grief over what he did, the Fisherman used the Tome of the Deep to make him forget it all, creating the Collector. The Old Mayor went mad as a result of witnessing everything, while the Lighthouse Keeper became a hermit.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Larger engines have better performance than smaller ones, relative to their position in the research tree, but they're also more likely to be disabled by hull damage, forcing you to crawl to the nearest port for repairs. Multiple smaller engines, by comparison, allow you to keep moving at a reasonable pace even if one or two take damage. This is best demonstrated by the Engine Stack, which provides 67.2kn (11.2 per slot) of speed, making it the best engine in the game. That comes at the cost of being a six-slot engine that more often than not is going to be the first victim of potential hull damage. By comparison, the Jet Drive Engine provides 9.5kn per slot (third best in slot efficiency), only takes a single slot, can be researched immediately after the first engine unlock, and you can stack up to ten of them on a fully-upgraded ship. Hull damage will at worst disable two of them, which won't affect performance significantly, and your top speed will only be slightly lower than an optimal setup. While it's a more costly setup, as a single Jet Drive Engine costs nearly half what you'd pay for the Engine Stack, money is easily earned and the cost is spread out depending on how early you unlock the option.
  • The supernatural ability Atrophy allows you to instantly fish up everything available from an active fishing spot, at the cost of destroying it for a very long time (around three in-game weeks). There is no reason besides insanity (and one achievement) to ever use this skill on regular fishing spots, because the cost far outweighs the benefit, even in comparison to other supernatural abilities. However, when combined with Bait, the player can create their own fishing spots without worrying about the local ecosystem. It's also quite useful in catching aberrations from low-volume fishing spots like the various sharks or other large species, because Atrophy has a massively increased aberrant catch chance, and losing access to these spots for a while won't impact your finances.
• Bait-and-Switch: After you deliver the dog to the Researcher, the dog suddenly starts convulsing and vomits, giving the impression that he has been infected like the Aberrant fish. It turns out he actually just swallowed a piece of jewelry, which becomes your reward for the quest.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool:
  • The Stellar Basin tropical atoll is full of bioluminescent coral and jellyfish that glow at night. Some of the fish you can catch also bioluminescent. Oh, and so is the giant, aggressive, ecology-destroying tentacle monster lurking in the crater at the atoll's center.
  • To a lesser extent, the Twisted Strand also has some interesting-looking glowing mushrooms. That the Mindsuckers glow in the exact same way suggests a connection between the two, though it's possible it's just a form of camouflage.
• Bittersweet Ending: In the Good Ending, the fisherman throws the Tome of the Deep back into the sea, saving the Gray Isles from the fog he had unleashed 20 years ago, but in the process he is killed by the Leviathan that patrols the archipelago swallowing him and his boat.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Leviathan isn't some vicious mindless predator, but a living guardian that protects the seas from an Eldritch God seeking to destroy the entire world. For recovering the Tome of the Deep that can summon the cosmic horror, the sea monster swallows up everyone, including the Fisherman's wife. Only the Fisherman survives. It follows him in the hope he'll dispose of the Tome. Once redeemed the monster swallows him up as well in the good ending.
• Body Horror:
  • The grotesque fish you catch have all sorts of bizarre mutations, ranging from extra eyes, flayed bodies, spines bent at unnatural angles, pulsating growths, and more. The descriptions emphasize the sheer wrongness of their mutations, from their jaws extending the length of their body to how their "scales" try to escape the body.
  • The Dockworker can be subject to this too if you deliver the packages from the Mayor and the Courier before they spoil. Nothing of note happens after the first one, but after the second one, his eyes become pitch black, he constantly stares out to the ocean with a pained look on his face, his voice becomes nothing but pained gurgling noises, and his skin becomes ash grey with faint red stains on his face and clothes, heavily implied to be blood. He also begins spurting out the same black ooze the packages had from his ear.
• Border Patrol: If you sail too far out into the open sea, the Leviathan will growl at you twice to turn back. Refuse both warnings, and it will instantly devour you and your ship.
• Brown Note: The Mind Suckers in the Twisted Strand let out a cry that gradually chips away at the Panic Meter until it's at max and keeps it at max, even in daylight.
• Bubblegloop Swamp: Twisted Strand is a coastal wetland strongly resembling a swamp, with its dense vegetation and mangrove roots spreading all over the water and the mutations chasing you around.
• Catch of the Doomsday: Horrifically mutated and monstrous fish are the least dangerous things you'll catch. In the backstory, you fished up the Tome of the Deep, a Tome of Eldritch Lore that got your entire crew including your wife killed when the Leviathan ate your boat in an attempt at stopping you from using it.
• Cave Behind The Waterfall: Found in the Gale Cliffs and containing the first freely accessible piece of refined metal to upgrade your hull with, a valuable trinket, and the spawn point for one of the rare fish the Wandering Merchant is after.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: In the beginning, the game is strongly leaning towards Survival Horror, where you slowly gather resources and avoid being outside at night at all costs. The further you progress and the higher your panic tolerance becomes, the more the night changes from imminent danger to a mere nuisance - opening the curtain for the second half of the game, which is a lot more exploration-based.
• Characterization By Flavor Text: The fish descriptions are written by the Fisherman. The Gulf Flounder is called pathetic and cowardly, giving an impression that the Fisherman has some kind of a grudge against the fish.
• Checkpoint: The game auto-saves everytime you dock at a harbour. The only exception to this is after passing the Point of No Return, when all save points are disabled.
• Chest Monster: There are a few giant hermit crabs scattered around the Isles that disguise themselves as shipwrecks or other points of interest. They'll flail at you if you approach but won't chase you.
• Chekhov's Gun: The lighthouse at Greater Marrow. If the Fisherman decides to go against the Collector's instructions and shows the Lighthouse Keeper the Tome of the Deep, she'll use the lighthouse to point the way to where the Fisherman should throw the Tome back into the ocean.
• Cool Boat: The player's fishing boat, sold to the player at the beginning of the game by the mayor of Greater Marrow. It doesn't start as cool, being horribly slow and able to be destroyed in a couple hits, but investing into the boat and appropriate research and artifacts will result in a vessel that moves well over a hundred knots, can raise any type of fish or salvage, can withstand multiple attacks from all but the largest Kaiju, and in The Pale Reach can even become a mini-icebreaker.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Larger fish are often (but not always) more valuable per slot than smaller fish, but the larger a fish is, the harder it is to fit multiples of them into your hold without wasting slots. They're also harder to find, spawn in smaller numbers, and take longer to regenerate. Smaller fish, by comparison, are easier to fit into every nook and cranny, and are more plentiful to boot, both in terms of available spots and volume per spot. A good example is sharks and blackfin tuna. Sharks are one of the most valuable normal catches in the ocean, but have extremely weird shapes that don't make up for their value. Even a fully upgraded boat can barely fit two big sharks in its hold, three if you're frugal with your equipment. Tuna are a measly two-slot catch, but worth almost as much per slot as some of the bigger catches. It's much more efficient to go after small to mid-sized fish that are far easier to store while turning a significantly higher profit through volume.
• Cool Gate: Completing the main quest of the Pale Reach DLC rewards you with the Aurous Anchor. Throw it overboard to create a two-way portal between that spot and Blackstone Isle.
• Cosmic Horror Story: To be expected for a game that wears its Lovecraft influences on its sleeve.
• Crazy-Prepared: There's an achievement for filling every equipment slot on your vessel with the appropriate equipment. This is more involved than it sounds because there are usually additional spaces you won't use, so getting the achievement requires intentionally filling space with parts you're likely going to sell off as superfluous right after.
• Creepy Crows: Should the Fisherman sail during the day while the Panic Meter is maxed out, he can be harassed by a murder of crows with glowing red eyes that will continuously steal fish off of the boat, though they're easily scared off by the foghorn.
• Critical Existence Failure: Zig-zagged. On the one hand, every hit the ship takes damages the hull, causing you to have one or two cargo spaces disabled, and any item on the disabled slots is lost, whereas ship equipment is disabled. On the other hand, the game still has a traditional HP system stating how many hits you can take in total before you die. At the beginning of the game, this trope is averted as your ship will be almost completely dysfunctional before you tank your last hit. But at the end of the game, with far more cargo spaces available, damage taken by the previous hits may almost be negligible, before you lose the last hit point and all of a sudden the entire ship is destroyed.
• Deceased Estate Conflict: In Gale Cliffs, the Hermit and his brother, who lives in Ingfell, fell out over their parents' inheritances. The player can help them reconcile to get access to the explosives.
• Developer's Foresight: The devs planned ahead for any situation that might leave you in a completely unwinnable situation. First, there is one engine, the Peculiar Engine, that you can neither sell nor discard, ensuring that you'll always have at least one engine available wherever you are. And second, should you somehow end up with no fishing rod and no money, the Shipwright will always give you one rod for free, so you'll never run out of an income source.
  Shipwright: "Just don't tell the Mayor I gave you something for nothing. He'll lecture me about taxes for an hour."
• Drone of Dread: An ever-present droning sound emanates from the center of the Stellar Basin atoll. It serves as a decent warning to not approach the darker waters closer to the middle or else your ship's getting wrecked by giant tentacles.
  • A low tone also plays whenever you get close to a Hooded Figure, which is both useful (since they're on smaller islands and can be easy to miss) and insanely creepy.
• Early Game Hell: When you first start out, you have barely any space for engines, the ones you do have are slow, your cargo space is cramped, you only have the gear to fish in a few spots, and being out at night is practically a death sentence. As you upgrade your ship and your equipment, as well as gathering books that can increase your panic resistance, all of these get alleviated until you can easily cruise anywhere, gather lots of every type of fish, and easily evade the night's threats.
• Easy Level Trick: Fishing and dredging spots respawn completely any time you exit and reload your current game. There are multiple locations on the map where numerous of these spots are close to a dock, making the acquisition of money and upgrade components essentially a non-issue. The only resource you can't repeatedly dredge up is refined metal, but that can be purchased from the Wandering Merchant, and the cash for that can be grinded easily this way.
• Eldritch Location: The Gray Isles are already suspect, having a variety of biomes impossibly clustered within spitting distance of each other, but the Pale Reach, an iceberg that appears and disappears on a random basis, is the most blatant.
• Eldritch Ocean Abyss: The main setting of the game, where while you don't ever go beneath the water, some of the... "fish" that can be caught certainly do look like they belong in the abyss. Some of the normal fish caught require equipment that can reach "abyssal" or even "hadal" depths.
• Encounter Repellant: The Banish ability holds almost every possible enemy at bay and therefore protects you from any grave danger for a short while. Using it increases the Panic meter, though.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: The Glaring Sunfish and the Many-Eyed Mackerel are covered in extra eyes.
• Fatigue Mechanic: If the player character doesn't sleep for an extended amount of time, his panic meter increases substantially faster and he'll see more hallucinations at an earlier time. After being awake for a certain amount of time, NPCs will comment on his deteriorating status and suggest that he rest a bit before venturing out again. Being awake for a full 48 hours yields an achievement though.
• Fetch Quest: Most quests revolve around gathering specific items (usually fish) and bringing them to a specific spot. The fact that fish spoil fairly quickly often makes this a Timed Mission as well, although you usually have enough time to not have to worry about it too much. It might force you to venture out at night, though.
• Fishing Minigame: A case where the fishing is actually a core gameplay mechanic rather than a side minigame. Fishing in this game consists of pressing a button when the cursors are aligned with the highlighted zones of the various shapes on which it roams.
• Fish People: The Scientist on the Iron Rig DLC has been sampling those contaminated marine life samples you bring him. When you give him the final samples from the Devil's Spine region, he will transform into a catchable fish person known as a Deep Form. If you catch him, there's no description under his name unless you reach full panic - then you will get a passage of how the black ooze is going through layers of reality to warp life.
• Flashy Teleportation: A grimdark variant, as use of the Manifest fast-travel effect causes your boat to seemingly explode into ominous dark vapors and a swirling vortex of black fabric-like scraps.
• Foreign Queasine: Rotting conger eels are a delicacy in Ingfell, and one of the locals will pay you if you bring her one. Since they're caught fresh, you have to sleep off a day or two with one in your hold to get it to the right state.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The first time the Fisherman meets the Collector, he suddenly appears in a porthole window, or rather, since the Collector is the Fisherman, its reflection.
  • Whenever you go to speak with the Collector, his character art has him standing just inside a wooden frame, giving the impression that he's always talking to you from just inside a doorway. Or from inside a mirror.
  • If you ask the Dockworker about Blackstone Isle, he'll mention that it doesn't have a shipping address despite the Collector living there. This makes sense once the Collector's true nature as the Fisherman's other self comes to light; why would the Dockworker need to make deliveries to an imaginary person?
  • When you deliver the second relic to him, it's so heavy that you scrape up his floor while dragging it to him. It's noted he doesn't seem to care about that at all. Of course he wouldn't care about damaging the floor of a house "he" doesn't actually live in.
  • The description for the Manifest ability reads "Return to where it all began." This might strike you as odd given that the game started in Greater Marrow and you're teleported to Blackstone Isle - until you learn that it really all began there.
  • You can ask the Collector if he's human. He says "As human as you are." And he is, indeed, exactly as human as you are.
  • The only person you bring into the boat that does not show up in cargo is the Collector. Instead a simple message says "The Collector is in your boat." He was always there.
  • Relics recovered for the Collector appear extraordinarily large when drawn up from the water, yet look more normal-sized once the Fisherman hands them over at Blackstone Manor. This may hint that the items in question were in the keeping of something much larger than the deceased wife - maybe the Leviathan, maybe the God of the Deep - during their sojourn undersea, and had been supernaturally enlarged to suit that being.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In the opening cutscene, you'll find in the boat cabin alongside the want ad the Tome of the Deep and the Collector's glasses.
• Ghibli Hills: The Gray Isles are a beautiful place, but that beauty also conceals great danger. The further you stray from the Marrows, the more lethal things get.
• Gigantic Adults, Tiny Babies: One possible explanation for the monstrous "narwhal" in the Pale Reach DLC is that it's the much smaller child or more distant descendant of The One That Lost, a kaiju-sized dismembered beast with similar claws, multiple eyes, and yellow horn.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: As of The Iron Rig, there's a total of 230 different marine species to catch, over two-thirds of which are aberrant variations of otherwise normal real-life species. Achievements are awarded for catching every aberration and every species in general, respectively. Thankfully, the game provides a comprehensive encyclopedia to keep track of your progress and help you hunt down specific targets you still need to bag, and the achievements for catching everything in the main game and each individual DLC are separate.
• Grim Up North: Inverted. The Pale Reach part of the game takes place in the frigid and cold far southern part of the game map.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Some of the secret achievements are obscure enough that some players might never unlock them without a guide, depending on their playstyle. Examples include the one for spotting one fishing spot of each fish category through your telescope, banishing ten threats at night, or honking your horn at a Miasma.
  • Unlocking the numerous pieces of arcane equipment, some of which are the best of their respective category, may require some outside help to figure out which fish they want delivered.
  • Nowhere was it ever mentioned that the series of Fetch Quests given by the Hooded Figures used to have hidden timers. This led to a couple of unpleasant surprises if players put them off for too long, but at least the game was gracious enough to still count the quest as completed. Thankfully, these timers were eventually patched out due to player pushback.
  • The exact mechanics of the Atrophy ability aren't explained anywhere in the game itself. Specifically, the fact that it will always catch an aberration the player doesn't yet have, and also that fish harvested with it have a much shorter spoilage time than regular fish.
  • Nowhere in the game does it say that crows can be scared off using the boat horn, leaving many players to go through the entire game thinking that they are unavoidable.
• Hallucinations:
  • Throughout the game you can spot things in the distance at night including other boats, crashed ships, even an entire island complete with lit buildings, all of which will fade and vanish when you get close.
  • When you're at high panic, there's the rocks, which may or may not be this. Move carelessly at night and you'll find yourself running aground on stones that weren't there in the daytime and aren't visible until you're right on top of them. They always appear in the same places though, so spend enough time dodging them and you can learn the safe routes.
• A Head at Each End: You might fish out a two-headed eel, the second head on the tail.
• Human Resources: The secret fishing equipment is heavily implied to be fashioned from human remains. The only exception is the Mouth of the Deep, a unique fishing pot created through the sacrifice of a bunch of large crabs.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The Mouth of the Deep is the best crab pot in the game, being slightly larger than any other crab pot and longer-lasting than all but the best normal crab pot. It also has the best aberration catch chance. The only trade-off is that it has the worst catch rate of any pot, only catching two a day at best when all other pots catch at least two as a standard with better pots able to catch three. It can be obtained as soon as you reach Ingfell, as long as you have a basic crab pot, and can carry you through most of the game despite its flaws.
  • The Flame of the Sky is the most powerful light in the game, marginally stronger than the best purchasable option and one slot smaller, but with only half the range. It can be obtained by dredging up three pieces of a tablet in Devil's Spine, well before the final light is available for purchase.
  • The Pale Reach adds the Radiant Trawl Net, the reward for completing the DLC. It trawls as fast as the best normal net, has more space than nets of comparable size, has an aberration bonus to help catch those trawl-specific aberrations, and can trawl in four of the six available zones.
• Inventory Management Puzzle:
  • Your inventory is handled as a grid where your catches, supplies, and equipment all take up a set amount of space, and equipment can only be put on specific regions of the grid. Upgrading your ship is often based on increasing the amount of squares on the grid and modifying the grid squares to allow better equipment, which takes up more space. Taking damage causes grid squares to become damaged, preventing those spots from being used until repaired. An additional challenge is posed by most items and fish having weird, rotatable shapes similar to Tetris, which usually forces a fair bit of fiddling to fit as much as possible into your hold, to the point that completely filling your inventory awards an achievement.
  • The shrines don't precisely tell you what is required, but you can gather based on the carvings and the inventory grid what you need to catch and how many. This is particularly true of the shrine near Stellar Basin, which requires four unique sharks.
• Jungles Sound Like Kookaburras: The Stellar Basin is rife with the distinct laughter of kookaburras. Although the islands don't directly respond to any real world locations, they still seem quite far from Australia or New Guinea.
• Kaiju: The monster/god/Cthulhu you free in the bad ending is enormous. Its head alone appears to out-mass any of the islands in the archipelago.
  • The gargantuan whatever-it-is that's trapped in the ice of the Pale Reach was large enough that two Expedition members built campsites inside its frozen hands.
• Kraken and Leviathan:
  • Stellar Basin is home to a massive kraken that is holed up in the center. If you idle too long over the center, such as when attempting to fish, it will lash out with a tentacle that will wreck all but the strongest ships, though it can be dodged if you get moving quickly. The Reseacher's quest provides a way to suppress it temporarily.
  • A leviathan, meanwhile, patrols the edges of the map and will eat you if you attempt to leave. It's targeting you, specifically, for your possession of the Tome of Eldritch Lore, and in the good ending swallows you and the book to protect everyone else.
• Last Lousy Point:
  • There's an achievement for catching all the aberrant variants of fish species. This can be extremely tedious for the large species with low-volume spawns like sailfish, requiring you to scour the map for fishing spots hoping the one or two you drag up is the right one, especially since they'll rarely get aberrant catch bonuses. Even worse are the trawl-specific catches, which are down to random chance. Crab aberrations, while not required for the achievement, also suffer from random chance and the added problem that crab pots can only hold so much. For the larger crabs, if the aberrant variant isn't caught first, you'll have clean the pots daily just to have a chance of getting one.
  • The final fish added with The Iron Rig DLC is a nightmare to catch. It can only be caught with aberrant bait, only spawns in the ocean, and is randomly sorted amongst all possible spawns. You can abuse the system to limit your possible options (simply equip the Glacial Rod and use bait neat the rig, as it limits spawns to Oceanic types), but even then you may have to craft quite a bit of aberrant bait to get it.
• Lighthouse Point: The lighthouse on the cliff north of Greater Marrow is visible from almost everywhere on the map, making it an excellent visual indicator for navigation.
  • Similarly, The Iron Rig DLC's titular structure can be spotted from anywhere.
• Lovecraft Country: The Greater Marrow and Ingfell areas are based on the kinds of New England fishing and whaling towns common in H. P. Lovecraft's works.
• Lovecraft Lite: The game has Lovecraftian elements with sea monsters, a Tome of Eldritch Lore, and hints of greater evils, but it's ultimately more of a fishing game than a horror game. The monsters can't be defeated (for the most part), but they can be evaded with some good engines, to the point that by the end of the game (and likely well before) the player can drive around in the dead of night at max panic with little to fear.
• Luring in Prey:
  • One of the things lurking in the fog is a huge angler fish that uses its lure to disguise itself as another fishing boat.
  • You can do this yourself once you've unlocked the ability to use mixed bait. It works by creating a temporary fishing spot at your location that can spawn any combination of fish native to the biome you're currently in, regardless of the time of day. Some extremely rare fish like the moonfish can be easier to find through this method than tracking down their (extremely limited) natural spawn locations.
• Message in a Bottle: Several are scattered throughout the world, and the messages inside provide some background on the relics you're seeking out. It is implied that there may be something supernatural about them; the Researcher at Stellar Basin mentions finding similar letters written by her deceased sister. She doesn't remember bringing them with her to her new outpost and she keeps finding them in unlikely places, such as inside her sampling equipment. Some of them reference events that happened after her sister died...
• Money Grinding: Cash is tight only in the early game, so anyone looking to upgrade their ship as quickly as possible can make use of the Easy Level Trick mentioned above to accumulate loads of money and upgrade resources in no time. After that you can get by easily with what you earn just by playing the game normally.
• Monster in the Ice: In the Pale Reach DLC you can find an enormous Narwhal frozen in the glacier.
• Multiple Endings: Two possible, one bad and one good.
  • Good Ending: The fisherman follows the Lightkeeper's advice on throwing the Tome of Eldritch Lore back into the sea at the specific point she directs the spotlight at, and sadly gets swallowed by the Leviathan that's been warned about. The result is that Greater Marrow is safe.
  • Bad Ending: The fisherman can follow the Collector's instructions on bringing back his love from where she had drowned, and in turn unleash a Cthulhu-like giant squid from the depths. This results in Greater Marrow's burning destruction.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Most of the game is just fishing and dredging... in an ocean haunted by eldritch horrors of the deep.
• Nameless Narrative: None of the characters are given names, instead being referred to by their occupation. Asking the Fishmonger what his name is and he'll reply that it's not worth knowing.
  Fishmonger: There's no sense getting familiar. You'll be on your way like the rest of them soon, no doubt.
• Necromantic: The end goal of the Collector/Fisherman is to use the eldritch powers of the book and artifacts to bring the Fisherman's dead wife back to life. And for what it's worth, it does appear to work... along with ending the world.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: Invoked by the player character's panic meter. While there are actual monsters lurking about at daytime as well (mainly in late game areas), it's the night where on top of the already present dangers, many hallucinations start to chase your ship, infect your fish, or attack you mercilessly.
• Noodle Incident: One of the collectable messages is the cargo manifest from a shipwreck that was carrying mysterious artifacts. One of the items on it is a seemingly normal tea set, with the warning "DO NOT USE."
• Non-Fatal Explosions: If you finish his quest, the Whaler in Gale Cliffs will provide you with Packed Explosives. These bombs made with a whale tooth container will blow up breakable obstacles next to your ship, but you won't take any damage.
• Notice This: Things like bottles and certain quest-relevant dredging points have a orange glow that pierces through the fog and makes them easy to see.
• Not So Extinct: With The Iron Rig DLC, you can catch various prehistoric fish, including Dunkleosteus, Xiphactinus, an undefined ostracoderm, and various Cambrian invertebrates. Given the general weirdness of the setting, it's not really clear if they've always existed, or if the destructive drilling of the eponymous rig somehow brought them back to life.
• Not the Intended Use: There is a glitch which allows items to be duplicated, including quest-critical items. Aside from the obvious possibilities to farm resources, it also turns out that the Collector, technically, just needs five relics to complete his quest, not exactly the five items that he requested. Therefore, this glitch can be abused to just give him the same duplicated item five times, after which he is ready for the end game. This allowed speedrunners to drastically reduce the run time, down to around ten minutes.
• Offscreen Teleportation: The Travelling merchant has a marketplace in four places in the four corners of the map, and wherever you go, she will always be there before you. And that's applies all the way through the game even though at one point you will have the fastest ship possible.
• Opening the Sandbox: At the beginning of the game, your ship runs extremely slow, you have almost no capacity to store any loot, and your resistance to panic is close to none. Therefore, in the first few in-game weeks, you'll mostly move between Greater Marrow and Little Marrow, with little trips outside of this small bay, if any. As soon as you've upgraded your ship enough, you will be able to cross the sea way further, and from then on, you can tackle the remaining areas of the game in (almost) any order you like.
• Ominous Fog: Every night, a fog rolls in that almost completely takes away any visibility. With the fog come dangerous beings that can attack at any time, constantly driving the Fisherman mad with panic.
• Ominous Music Box Tune: Part of the ritual that leads to the bad ending involves winding up the music box you dredged out of the Gale Cliffs, and the soundtrack is replaced by its simple, mournful tune as your wife returns to you from beyond death... and the God of the Deep rises from below the waves.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: The eponymous Iron Rig of the DLC is a new oil rig set up by the Ironhaven Corporation, but whatever it strikes clearly isn't normal oil. The ooze spawns monsters, and long-extinct fish can be fished out of it.
• Ominous Oil Rig: The Ironhaven Inc. Oil Rig, which is the titular focus of The Iron Rig. In keeping with the rest of the game, this involves eldritch happenings with the rig apparently extracting some Ominous Obsidian Ooze rather than oil.
• Organic Technology: Diligent players can unlock up to five creepy pieces of fishing equipment linked to the monsters in the deep. They're all made from various organic components like tendons, sinew and bone, with the occasional hunk of stone thrown in for flavor. They vary in usefulness, from the best crab pot in the game to fishing lines that work as intermediary options between the starter and best researched equipment.
• Overdrive: The Haste ability acts as a booster rocket for your boat, but generates a lot of waste heat that will damage your engine(s) if you run it for too long. It remains the most practical of the supernatural abilities, however, as it otherwise has no cooldown period and is reasonably safe to use.
• Patchwork Map: The five main island groups that make up the Gray Isles are rocky New England islands, sheer cliffs, a tropical coral atoll, a mangrove swamp, and a volcanic ridge. The Pale Reach adds a glacier.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: The Gale Cliffs is a great place to build up your boat, the area has quite a bit of profitable fish and there are ports (including the Traveling Merchant and the Whaler who sells you Packed Explosives) in close vicinity of each other, so safety isn't a concern as long as you stay clear of the sea serpent in the interior areas. Migrating between the Gale Cliffs and the Marrows/Steel Point will you get a plentiful supply of salvage until you have a strong boat with many upgrades and researched equipment. After that Stellar Bay has lots of fishing points with many different types of valuable fish as well as a relatively safe, spacious area so long as you avoid the stationary Kraken in the center of the Bay.
• Permanently Missable Content: Prior to an update, the Hooded Figure missions had a hidden time limit, so if you failed to deliver all fish in time, you were barred from getting their rewards. It's still possible to lose valuable quest items or even passengers overboard, which renders them gone for the rest of the game, but any achievements associated with them will still be unlocked.
• Point of No Return: Mixture of Polite and Strict. When you start the endgame, the game will tell you if you continue, saving will no longer be possible, and asks you to confirm twice. If you continue, you see the end, the credits roll, and you are returned to an earlier autosave, allowing you to try for the other ending.
• Power at a Price: As you progress the story, the Collector will grant certain abilities that are obviously useful, like the option for a speed boost. The "price" is increasing your panic (even during the day), and in the speed boost's case, using it too long will overheat the engine(s) into requiring repairs.
• Purple Is Powerful / Mysterious Purple: Items of eldritch significance appear in the game's inventory boxes with a purple background, as do aberrant fishes.
• Raising the Steaks: Many of the aberrant fish are implied to be undead, such as the Decaying Blackmouth, Flayed Mackerel, and Perished Loosejaw. The Enthralled Stonefish appears to be a Parasite Zombie, as its description calls it a "hollowed husk, holding a hostile dweller."
• Random Event: With a high Panic level, strange things will start to happen to you out on the water. This can range from relatively harmless stuff like the lights on your boat conking out and you having to restart them to all manner of Sea Monsters attacking you in various ways.
• Rare Candy: Two examples: research parts and refined metal.
  • Research parts are mostly acquired through quests, but can also rarely be dredged from wrecks, and are crucial for advancing your Tech Tree. They can also be purchased from the Travelling Merchant if you find yourself lacking, which is likely to happen near the end of the game once you've exhausted the static supplies. Any surplus can be sold to the shipwright for a very healthy sum.
  • Refined metal is an extremely rare resource that's required for upgrading your ship's hull. It can be found in well-hidden spots around the game world, and occasionally as quest rewards. There are two more in the world than are necessary to pay for every upgrade. Alternatively, they can purchased from the Travelling Merchant for a whopping $500 apiece if you don't feel like waiting. Strangely, selling the stuff pays out less than the research parts do despite being more expensive to buy.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: The lone Researcher studying Stellar Basin believes this was done to her, as the game is set in the 1940s and few people were willing to take a woman scientist seriously.
• Sanity Meter: Once the sun sets, or in certain dangerous locations, the player character begins to panic, represented by an eyeball at the top of the screen rapidly looking around. The longer you stay out, the more things appear to hunt you down. Certain abilities can also increase panic, even during the daytime. Panic can be reduced quickly by sleeping at a dock, but it also slowly goes down once day breaks.
• Save Point: Resting at the docks, which also protects you from being targeted by any monsters or hazards.
• Scenery Porn: The graphics may be fairly simple, but the world is still gorgeous, especially Stellar Basin.
• Sea Monster: Most of them come out at night, though there are a few that come out during the day, such as the giant serpent in the rivers cutting through the Gale Cliffs.
• Shop Fodder: To be expected of a game where a primary focus is catching and selling fish. If you fish and sell regularly, you'll be rolling in cash by the end of the game, especially with the relatively small number of things to spend it on. You can also dredge up trinkets that can be sold to the trader in Little Marrow.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the books you can read is called "Getting Over It with Mind and Body".
    A strange journey, smattered with quotes and wisdoms that promise enlightenment. But towards the end it became tedious and unrewarding slog, akin to climbing a mountain. An odd mix of relaxation and frustration. Maybe I'll read it again someday.
  • The mutant form of the Giant Amphipod, the Ruptured Vessel, seems to take some inspiration from Hollow Knight: it's named similarly to the Broken Vessel, one of the bosses, and its design as a white arthropod with its body broken open by distended orange sacs is very reminiscent of Radiance infection in that game. And its flavour text, "Willing host, or sacrificial receptacle?", relates to the general fates of Vessels like the Knight, the Hollow Knight, or indeed the Broken Vessel boss: binding the Radiance inside them as Sealed Evil in a Can.
  • The Pale Reach is a double shout-out to The Thing (1982) and The Terror. The lost expedition is implied to be the game world's version of the Franklin expedition, as they came to the Pale Reach in 1847, the year that the Franklin survivors abandoned Erebus and Terror, and the Bosun mentions having served on the Terror. The DLC centers around an eldritch abomination that is frozen in the ice and can't be allowed to escape, lest it destroy the world, much like the titular antagonist of The Thing and/or the Tuunbaq.
• Shown Their Work: The Dunkleosteus in The Iron Rig is correctly depicted with the shorter, rounder proportions it is now believed to possess, rather than the longer, shark-like body endemic to most outdated reconstructions.
• Sliding Scale of Collectible Tracking: "Individual Identification." The main collectible is different species of fish. The encyclopedia starts off with nameless silhouettes in each location, with a suggestion about how to catch them. When you catch a fish for the first time, the details are filled in. Flipping through the encyclopaedia reveals how many fish remain uncaught in each location.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The DLC area Pale Reach is a frozen sea with huge glaciers and icebergs blocking your path, although you can equip your ship's hull with an icebreaker to traverse it more easily.
• Subsystem Damage: Whenever your boat takes damage, a random square in your inventory grid is rendered unusable until you get it repaired. If there's an item in that spot, it's ejected from the ship, which can happen to certain quest items. If that square happens to intersect with a piece of equipment, that equipment is disabled until repairs are made. Losing your engine in this manner can leave you crawling back to the nearest shipyard at a snail's pace, unless you have more than one.
• Supernatural Light: Multiple examples of this crop up, especially in the dead of night:
  • In the beginning, a conspicuous red Pillar of Light can be seen a little ways to the west of the Greater Marrow. Both the Fishmonger and the Shipwright will comment on it. Once you've acquired Dredging equipment from the Collector, the Lighthouse Keeper can mark the spot on the map for you after talking to her, though she'll recommend you actually stay away. The glowing red pillar is revealed to indicate the locations of the artifacts that the Collector seeks to acquire. Collecting the first artifact by the Greater Marrow will have the local merchants notice how the eerie red light at night has disappeared and how things seem somewhat more peaceful.
  • Patches of Disturbed Water for fishing may sometimes have a glowing blue aura filled with rising sparks above them, even during the day. This means that there's a much higher chance of Aberrations being caught when fishing in that spot.
  • At night, you may notice an ominous shifting cloud of light hovering over the seas. These "miasmas" are a type of enemy that will literally Turn Red if you have your lights on. Get too close with your lights on and they will envelop your boat and cause your Panic to skyrocket while eerie whispering can be heard. You can keep your lights off to keep the miasmas docile but that will also make it harder to safely navigate through the dense night fog. Also for some reason, they sometimes make industrial noises comparable to a busy dock filled with shifting cranes and clanging noises like a distant hammer striking metal in a large room.
• Tentacled Terror: One of the things that can appear at night are tentacles rising from the sea that sink your boat if you get too close. One living in the middle of Stellar Basin can also attack you in broad daylight.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Every major location has a curious formation of basaltic black rock that the Fisherman can interact with, though nothing happens... unless the Fisherman's Panic Meter is sufficiently elevated, in which case the black rocks appear to be covered in glowing red runes, and touching them grants a vision describing whatever Eldritch Abomination menaces the local area.
• Timed Mission: A few missions have invisible timers attached to them; namely, the delivery missions to the dock worker in Little Marrow (the packages will spoil if you take too long). More broadly speaking, if a mission requires a fish delivery, you're generally expected to deliver them in reasonable condition, not spoiled.
• Tomato in the Mirror: The Collector is the fisherman's suppressed grief, trauma, and guilt over the incident 20 years ago that killed his wife and cursed the Isles with the eldritch fog, speaking to him through his reflection.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: What the red book with silver ribbons - the Tome of the Deep - used by the Collector is implied to be, given by the player character's reactions to it whenever the book is mentioned or something read from it by the Collector. It is a Tome of Eldritch Lore, given how the silver ribbons react as if trying to cling to the fisherman when you choose to throw it back into the ocean in the Good Ending.
• Unique Items: Besides the weird fishing equipment formed of black magic and body parts, there are the Exotic fishes and the secret...er.. "fish" found at Iron Rig after fulfilling the Scientist quest. These Exotics (Gulper Eel, Coelacanth, Oarfish, Goliath Tigerfish and Sleeper Shark) are located in only one specific place per region and when you catch it, that fishing spot will never replenish itself. If you want to catch more Exotics and their Aberrant forms, the only way to bypass this is to use the Exotic bait which costs a whopping $700 to craft and requires a vial of Black Ooze and an Ironhaven crate.
• Upsetting the Balance: It later becomes apparent something massive is following the player in the open seas, punishing him for overuse of powers, and prevents him from charting a course out to unexplored waters. For falling under the spell of the Tome of the Deep that can summon an Eldritch god, who'll bring about the end of the world, the Leviathan is pursuing the Fisherman in the hope he'll dispose of the book. The beast swallows him up in the good ending.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • At least four sidequests act as an escort for someone to either give them a better life or to bring them to safety. One of these even has you rescue a stray dog in the Stellar Basin, which you can bring to the Researcher to give her some company.
  • One sidequest has you dredge the shipwrecks behind Little Marrow for a belt buckle belonging to the deceased son of the Grieving Father.
  • In Twisted Strand, you meet the Airman whose squad has been killed by the Mind Suckers. You can help him get his revenge and kill the monsters. You can also find and return to him the dogtags that belonged to his comrades.
  • During The Iron Rig DLC main quest, spills of what is basically corrupted oil will begin spawning all over the map. Shortly after they first appear, the player will be provided with a siphon trawler to take samples, but which also clears up the oil slicks with enough use. A dedicated player can clear up every spill in the game, gaining no reward but a bit of Dark Fluid, the ability to travel less impeded, and the knowledge that they're helping the environment recover.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can sell the belt buckle that belonged to the Grieving Father's deceased son and the dogtags that belonged to Airman's lost comrades to the trinket merchant for a paltry sum for no good reason other than being a dick to the already grief-stricken people.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: There are two sidequests where you are given the task of retrieving the mementoes of dead loved ones: the belt buckle that belonged to the Grieving Father's son and the dogtags that belonged to Airman's brothers-in-arms. If you do this, you will get Research Parts — a rare and expensive upgrade material — as a reward. But if you sell the mementoes to the trader like regular trinkets, all you will get in return is a tiny sum of money, which you could've easily earned just by catching a couple of fish.
• Warp Whistle: The Manifest ability lets you return to Blackstone Isle instantly. It's meant to be a fast way of transportation to what is almost the central point on the map, but it can also help you to instantly escape delicate situations.
• Wham Line: "Don't you remember? You were there."
• Wham Shot: After collecting the relics required to reach the end of the game, the fisherman can confront the Collector about the book and the purpose behind the relics. The Collector's cagey responses annoy the fisherman to the point you have the option to slug him in the face, only for the next shot to show the fisherman punching a mirror while holding the book while his reflection stares back, also holding the book.