Dredge

This is for the most part a very satisfying game, simple yet original, with a clever Lovecraftian story that is subtly revealed.

It's all about grind: fishing, selling fish, upgrading your fishing boat, with lots of exploration and secrets to discover. The game loop is quite polished and addictive and I found myself having trouble leaving the game aside, wanting to see what one more game day would dredge up. A core reason for this appeal is the game's reliance on fairly balanced randomness: while you can affect the fishing results, for the most part you don't know what you're going to get, so you'll experience many moments of feeling quite lucky fishing up something that can help in a quest or that is just plain rare and worth a nice chunk of coin.

If the game were any longer, this loop would have been tiresome. Luckily, the game is short and interesting enough to keep things moving, even with the DLC, which is not necessary but does add a new area with its own puzzles and atmosphere.

But ... it's not quite perfect. Towards the endgame, if you're a completionist, you'll be looking for a few specific fish, and that's when the randomness might wear out its welcome. You'll find some help online for maximizing your chances but you're still a slave to the RNG. On that note, if you're focused you can also max-out your boat early in the mid-game. After I did that, I found subsequent rewards to be unhelpful and unnecessary. Progression could have been better tuned.

The game also suffers from its own success! I enjoyed the story but was left wanting for more depth and more things to do that would directly relate to it. The grind is pleasurable enough, but there's potential here for a bigger, more complex game. I don't know if the dev could have pulled that off based on the wonderfully minimalistic concept of Dredge, but I hope they have ideas for future games that delve more into storytelling.