Summary
“It’s a Lazarus taxon,” a scientist aboard the capitalist abomination that is The Iron Rig explains to me. “A species seemingly raised from the dead.” The fish I’ve shown him is inexplicable, as big as a wrasse with a long snout of sorts, which ends in a puckered mouth stuffed with too many teeth. If I hadn’t pulled it out of the water myself, I’d have guessed it was the spawn of a xenomorph rather than a marine creature.
If you’ve playedDredge, this won’t be too surprising. The second piece of DLC is more of the same fishing goodness that made the base game so engaging, but with a bleak capitalist overtone as you aid the enigmatic Ironhaven Corp.
Dredge’s first DLC, The Pale Reach, is maybe two hours spent in one new location. The Iron Rig is comfortably three times the size, taking you back to every area of the map and recontextualising these biomes in the wake of a polluting capitalist force. This being Dredge, the pollution is an unnatural, chthonic sludge rather than a regular oil spill, but the parallels to real-life corporations and pollutants are clear.
I’m glad Dredge has finally decided to make a statement about environmentalism. This was never a game about mass fishing or factory farming - you’re one small trawler, no matter how many hull upgrades you apply. But capitalism corrupts even the most honest fisherman (which you by no means are), and is wreaking havoc on our environment and the habitats of the creatures we share the earth with. However, sometimes the premise misses the mark slightly.
I think the pollution angle would have worked better if fishing in the affected areas unveiled more messed up aberrations rather than new species entirely. The rig is a corrupting force, polluting habitats, so why should new species appear?
The actual answer is that the Rig’s drill opens up the seafloor and thought-extinct marine life swims to the surface. Yes, that’s the plot of The Meg.
I’m also not a great fan of having no choice but to voluntarily help out the evil corporation, even if you do change your mind later on. This is a downside to a silent protagonist – it robs the player of any agency and makes The Iron Rig’s core gameplay loop of upgrading the eponymous rig so it can further devastate the ocean frustrating.
That said, the loop is still immensely gratifying. I’m a sucker for Dredge’s curated checklist gameplay, and the DLC is more of the same. Dredge never overwhelms you with too many tasks, but there is always something to aim for. Whether you’re searching shipwrecks for parts to upgrade your engines or casting a line into a fathomless ocean pool to reel in a new marine abomination, Dredge is a rare game that hooks me in for binges into the small hours.
If, like me, you fully upgraded your ship and exhausted every research path while playing the base game, The Iron Rig finally gives you more options. Crafting materials are useful again, new materials are introduced, and the loop that felt forgotten in The Pale Reach is resumed anew. Progression is steady and meaningful, Rig upgrades cleverly coincide with missions in each biome, and nothing ever feels out of reach. I started the DLC with my ship fully upgraded and five grand in the bank, seemingly never to be spent, but as costs spiralled and more upgrades revealed themselves, I soon found myself with a pitiful $8 to my name. I had a level five hull and every rod in the game, though, so who’s the real winner?
Your trawler grows as the tasks become more difficult, and it always feels like you’ve got one too many upgrades to work towards, one too many plates to spin, but it just about stays manageable. This is what makes Dredge so satisfying.
Drop your Aurous Anchor near the Rig to freely teleport to it from the starting lighthouse. Combined with the Manifest mechanic, this essentially allows you free fast travel back to the Rig at any time and cuts out a lot of backtracking.
I never felt the backtracking was unwarranted, but it’s been a good while since I played the base game. If you’re picking up Dredge with its DLC right now, you might feel different.
The Iron Rig offers plentiful quality of life improvements – a portable ship repair kit was the most handy for me, as I too often Haste into rocks, ships, or aberrant apparitions. But there are souped-up crab pots, vats of heartwarming tea to stave off the madness that seeps into your brain after dark, and all manner of boat buffs that improve its handling, fishing speed, reversing, and more.
This is a much more fleshed-out expansion than The Pale Reach, but some of the quality of life improvements feel like they’ve arrived too late. Where were the repair kits when I was crashing into more icebergs than the Titanic in The Pale Reach? Where was the expanded hull capacity when I was nearing the end of the base game? For all the upgrades and improvements in The Iron Rig, there’s no postgame during which to reap the rewards of your hard work. If you haven’t already completed yourPokedexmarine encyclopaedia, perhaps more storage capacity will help you finish it off, but the effectiveness ends there.
The Iron Rig is a great addition to Dredge, but going any further would be scraping the rotting guts from the bottom of the barrel. The second piece of DLC already reminds me of the Lazarus taxon that Ironhaven Corp’s scientist explained to me early on; it raises a seemingly extinct game from the dead and gives it life once more. I loved my time with the DLC and binged The Iron Rig over the course of a day in a way that I rarely do with games any more, but the game itself offers a warning to developer Black Salt Games: drilling too greedily and too deep can have devastating consequences.
