I’ve previously written about Dredge, and how horror games terrify me in general. Dredge isn’t that scary, but that’s largely because I fine-tuned my gameplay experience to ensure I’d play as safely and calmly as possible. In Dredge, you’re a fisherman who mostly, well, fishes. But you also run errands for a mysterious collector who gives you almost supernatural abilities in return, and each new area you venture to has a new kind of scary monster keen to kill you and gobble you up for dinner. It’s not just that – the game is Lovecraftian to its core, filling the waters with terrifying creatures. You can’t fight them, only flee them. There’s a mechanic where the more sleep deprived you get, the more paranoid you get, and the world gets more dangerous. Forget to sleep for too long and a ghost ship will appear and smash into you at full speed, or birds may steal your catch.
These are great touches in the context of a horror game. They create a sense of ever-present danger, that something could hurt you at any time if you’re not extremely careful. I, however, don’t react well to pressure like that. The moment my adrenaline spikes, I either stop playing or a controller goes flying. I didn’t want to do that to my Switch, so I changed the way I play. I ensured I was in a safe place by nightfall, I slept often, and I started my days extra early to maximise daylight. I changed my entire gameplay style, completely upending the way the game was supposed to be played. Fear? Panic? Dread? No, not for me, thank you. I’m playing a fishing simulator, that’s all. No monsters will be crushing this boat on my watch.
Unfortunately, it’s this alternative playstyle that eventually drove me away from Dredge before I finished it. It’s a great game, but feeling as if I wasn’t experiencing the game as it was meant to be played put a damper on my time with it. I found that I wanted to go out at night and catch the weird night fishes, but I was too afraid of the inevitability of being hunted down by some eldritch, unnameable horror and killed almost instantly. That’s why Dredge’s new patch has made me so excited – as of last week, they’ve added a Passive Mode that you can activate at any stage from the Settings menu. In this mode, you don’t have to worry about monsters that would usually attack you as they lose their aggression, leaving you alone. It’s basically scaredy-cat mode, ensuring that the scariest thing about the game is rendered totally inert.
I am thrilled about this update. It means that now I can enjoy the game as it was made, in all of its nighttime fishing glory, just with far less baseline anxiety than I was playing it with before. I’m extremely excited to pick my Switch back up, pop it into my dock and start sailing around the terrifying waters of Dredge again, knowing that they’re now way less terrifying. The survival horror aspect is toned down, and I can just pretend to be a fisherman again, picking up weird eels at night and minding my own business when I see something impossibly large in the water.