I binged Dredge this weekend. It’s an excellent game with immaculate horror vibes, which I described before playing as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Wind Waker meets Majora’s Mask. I was correct in more ways than I could have thought, which shows how on point the marketing has been. But I’m not here to talk about marketing, I’m here to talk ab🃏out fishing. Kinda.
Dredge is a chill gamꦫe, until it isn’t. You while away a day exploring foggy mangroves and hooking in all manner of fish, crabs, and eels – are they fish? They’re certainly not land. They’re their own thing now. Anyway, as soon as darkness falls, everything changes. Eyes peer at you from the shadows, unspeakable horrors claw at your hull and infect your stock, and your sole light starts failing. You’ve gone from summertime fishing to navigating the open sea in complete darkness. What’s more, is you’ve got numerous holes in your hull and is that a rock oh my go–
I’m a self-professed scaredy cat, so the lack of ‘proper’ horror that some reviewers lamented wasn’t a problem for me. Spooky vibes are scares enough. And what could be scarier than your own fishes transforming into Lovecraftian creatures before your very eyes, and the c🅷🧸ursed sea tearing holes in your hull? If I was a fisherman, that would be the last thing I’d want! I’d want my hull whole, and my fish fishy.
This is the perfect game for the Steam Deck. That’s why I played the entirety of Dredge on my Steam Deck. The fishing mechanics and boat controls are made for a pad rather than keyboard and mouse, and the Deck makes peering into the darkness even more sc🉐ary, as your nose is pressed to the small screen when the abhorrent jaws of some abyssal creature emerge around your tiny tug. It doesn’t help that you’re probably playing on the lowest brightness setting, either.
The Steam Deck is great for playing a game while sitting on the sofa. I was watching TV with my partner while playing Dredge, occasionally chipping in to tell them my latest otherworldly escapade. Dredge’s stylised graphics and simple mechanics mean you don’t have to pay it complete attention all the time. You don’t need to sit at a desk with perfect reflexes like you would for CS:GꦓO, and you don’t need to marvel at the photorealistic graphics on your 4K TV like The Last of Us Part 1. Its mysterious tale is imparted through text-based conversations and a pervading aura of dread, which works just as well on the small screen as it does the big.
However, I menꦏtioned earlier that I was playing Dredge on the lowest brightness setting. That’s because I faced the eternal Steam Deck struggle: managing its battery life. More difficult than any Souls boss, mor𝕴e annoying than any chatterbox companion, I stand by my opinion that the Steam Deck is not fit for purpose. It lasted about three hours a night when playing the indie fishing sim, which is hardly the most taxing of titles.
While this did accidentally help increase my immersion by forcing me to peer into the deepest corners of the screen as dusk set in, it’s simply not good enough for a portable device. I don’t think ♛it can really be called portable at that rate. Hell, I’ve had baths that last longer than my Steam Deck, and playing Dredge in the bath is surely the most immersive you can get this side of training to be a fisherman and taking 𒐪your Deck out on the deck of an actual trawler. Dredge is perfect for the Steam Deck, but sadly the Steam Deck is not good enough for Dredge.