In the roiling waters of the northern sea, a mysterious oil rig has appeared whose lights can be seen by thousands in the darkness. The foreman is a bit jittery, clearly worried about the platform’s somewhat shoddy construction and his overbearing boss docking his pay for being behind schedule. When the drilling does begin, it’s not oil they strike, but something far more sinister that splinters the sea floor with an ominous red, volcanic glow. And the resident scientist and his corporate suit boss only seem to want to feed this supernatural terror, the safety of their fellow workers be damned.
To some, I’ve just described the plot of The Chinese Room’s recent walking horror, Still Wakes the Deep. But in a strange coincidence, Dredge is now following the same trajectory with its latest DLC, The Iron Rig – albeit with fewer left hooks throwing errant Coke can distract wandering nasties and more current hooks reeling up yet more fresh horrors from the deep. This new chapter in Dredge’s faintly cursed archipelago finally puts the spotlight on the mysterious Ironhaven Corporation, whose CEO is a dead ringer for Wake’s weaselly boss Rennick, right down to his last-minute escape on the corporate helicopter. It’s all profits before people in this unfortunate corner of the ocean, although unlike Wake’s poor Caz, at least you can share in some of those benefits this time thanks to the plentiful supply of upgrade opportunities for your boat.
Over the course of three to four hours, The Iron Rig will see you revisit each of Dredge’s main island clusters, hunting for fresh fish in new micro-habitats created by pools of ungodly ooze that have sprung up from the fissures created by the rig’s drill . Each time one of these clearly very bad cracks opens up, the rig’s scientist will task you with collecting various samples to bring back to him for further analysis, but some of these aren’t easily won with your default set of equipment. Cue, then, a gentle and well-paced upgrade back and forth that will see you construct new buildings on the rig to unlock enhanced versions of your rods, nets and winches, as well as blueprints for new engine parts, bait types and other gadgets to help speed up the process along.
You’ll also eventually gain the ability to suck up that dreadful ooze into ‘dark canisters’ to further fuel your expanding toolset, though there’s no real reward for doing so beyond that. There’s no drive to ‘clean up the sea’ from an environmental point of view, for example, and your taskmasters at Ironhaven (even the nervous foreman) don’t seem overly concerned about the impact they’re having on the wider communities dotted around the ocean. Then again, as someone who rinsed Dredge for everything it was worth on release last year and hasn’t returned to it since then, the locals don’t have much to say about the matter either – their dialogue being stuck in that same loop of exhausted text I read 18 months back.
In this sense, it’s a shame the world of Dredge doesn’t have a stronger reaction to the events of The Iron Rig. The landscape, of course, is irrevocably changed – as even if you do opt to clean up the ooze out of the goodness of your heart, the new fishing spots still crackle with an unearthly kind of energy to distinguish them from your ‘regular’ disturbed waters, and the sea floor itself is forever scarred with those ominous and lurid fault lines. But beyond those visual flourishes, everything else remains unchanged, robbing this once rich and melancholy world of its underlying mystery. Heck, even once you’ve seen the DLC through to its conclusion and slapped the biggest health and safety warning possible on that mountain of metal, the rig’s inhabitants still won’t leave to, say, resettle elsewhere, or you know, just get away from that godforsaken place to somewhere a little less… well, calamitous. There they stay, becoming just another point for you to sell off your fish, tool up your boat and buy new supplies from.
Don’t get me wrong. This new stretch of story is engaging enough to pull you along for the length of its run time (even if its conclusion is another almighty anti-climax), and it’s reminded me that I should really have a winner at its previous, altogether icier DLC expansion, The Pale Reach, at some point. But I do feel like something has been lost coming back to Dredge after all this time. Playing with a completed save file, the ocean no longer holds its strange and alluring magic anymore. Its tense, nighttime escapades and mad visions are now just increasingly annoying busy work getting in the way of the next story beat, and there’s an emptiness to its new fishing objectives that feel like I’m just ticking off a checklist for the sake of ticking off to checklist.
Perhaps I might feel differently playing on a fresh save file, where the impact of its (highly worthwhile) boat upgrades would perhaps be more keenly felt, and the nature of its bizarre aberrations would still have more layers to peel back and discover. Indeed, the recommendations from developer Black Salt Games on when best to tackle The Iron Rig come surprisingly early – after completing The Marrows and unlocking both your first relic power as well the ability to use nets, for example. That’s it. You don’t need any of its more advanced powers to get the most out of it, and you don’t really even need to have visited its later island clusters before either, as each area’s ooze pools are conveniently dotted around the outer edges of them, allowing you to continue with those main game story beats without much interference.
Somewhere, something has shifted, like one of Dredge’s ‘dark splashes’ creeping into the bowels of my hull with sinister intent.
But for me at least, this return visit has left a few more fractures of a different kind running through my previous fondness for Dredge. They’re not so large and unholy that I now feel outwardly repulsed by it or anything. Far from it. But somewhere, something has shifted, like one of its ‘dark splashes’ creeping into the bowels of my hull with sinister intent. Indeed, at one point, you’re forced to say to a character, “We need to protect the rig and its workers,” and part of me baulked that my sailor chap would even think such a thing. Sure, the workers aren’t all bad, but the rig? I’m not so sure that needs saving, let alone protecting. The faster that thing goes the way of Still Wakes the Deep, the better, if you ask me, and it was here that I felt that maybe Dredge and I had just drifted too far apart since I last played it.
What I wanted was a firmer and more rigorous appraisal of Ironhaven and its up-to-no-good execs. But as is often the case with prequels and expansions, seeing them in the flesh inevitably fell short of the picture I’d built up of them from the whispers and murmurs gleaned from other characters in the base game. By filling in the gaps of our imagination with the same old late-stage capitalist stooges we’ve seen a dozen times before – not least in actual Still Wakes the Deep – it all just becomes a little more rotten and ordinary. For all its frustrating stealth sections and obviously bad operators, at least Still Wakes the Deep still has something to say about family and the nature of sacrifice and redemption. Dredge’s The Iron Rig, on the other hand, shifts its focus squarely onto consumption and your own personal profit, and it can’t help but come across as a little toothless by comparison. As fishing games go, I still believe Dredge is one of the most curious specimens you’ll find in the genre, but this particular DLC mutation has the unfortunate air of an evolutionary dead-end about it.
A copy of Dredge: The Iron Rig was provided by Team17.
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