Narrative Thoughts: Cosmic Horror and Dredge’s Protagonist

The Real Nightmare is Ourselves

Warning: this article contains spoilers for Dredge’s ending(s)

For most of my Dredge playthrough I didn’t stop to question the player character. I was a simple fisherman, obviously. Nevermind that some folks find you familiar, there’s no real explanation of how you turned up, or that you spot the wreckage of a boat nearly identical to yours. At times I did wonder why we ventured to Greater Marrow, and why we seemed unable to leave. I also wondered why we were a set character rather than being able to customize a little, since you rarely see the fisherman in cutscenes outside of the intro sequence.

Dredge is a fishing and exploration game with a cosmic horror twist. You play as the town’s new fisherman (no one has proper names, just identifiers of jobs they have or roles they perform), and you are given a boat by the mayor. Throughout the game you find messages in bottles telling the story of a woman and her newlywed husband. They find a book, bad things happen, and then the wife is lost. People are complicated, emotional creatures. We do a lot of things in love and hurt and jealousy, so the journal entries felt ominous but I honestly didn’t think too much on it beyond “aw, sad dead wife flavor text,” largely because I was streaming the game and skimmed the journal entries at best. At that point I was in it for the fishing, not so much the plot. Don’t get me wrong, the cosmic horror elements of the aberrant fish and strange happenings in various parts of the map intrigued me, but I was in it for the chill fishing moments. Those unsettling bits and hints of more to uncover kept me going, though.

When I got the ending, the one you get when you gather all the relics and give them to the Collector, the plot grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me into the depths of hyperfocus and would not let me go for days.

At that point, I had a running joke with my stream chat that I shipped the Fisherman and the Collector. I even have a whole short story based on it that I need to finish. I gladly took the strange and otherworldly trinkets to a spot left of Greater Marrow and chucked them into the ocean as the Collector instructed. He recites some words, saying “we” and “us” to the Fisherman all throughout—as if they had been planning this all along, despite the Fisherman’s seeming ignorance of the Collector’s plans. A woman floats out of the sea, the aforementioned wife from the journal entries. Behind her, a behemoth of an abyssal sea creature erupts from the water, lightning flashing overhead. The credits roll, and Greater Marrow is on fire.

What?

I played The Pale Reach DLC as I mulled over that ending, with the town perpetually on fire, and couldn’t help but feel a little confused and unsatisfied. The DLC was blissfully brief. I saw some complaints about it being too brief, but it felt just long enough for me. I put an icy, massive creature back to sleep and rescued the souls of several expeditioners trapped in strange ice. Not a bad way to finish my months-long Dredge playthrough, even if the ending was lingering on my mind like a bitter aftertaste.

After I realized I completed the DLC but had some time left in stream to do a little more, someone in chat tells me there’s a secret ending and gives me an article on how to unlock it. In theory, I could’ve wandered to these locations and found my way to this ending on my own—and I probably would’ve! Had I not been pressed for time on stream.

As it was, I followed the guide and went to Devil’s Spine to find the old mayor of Lesser Marrow, where he yells about a book. The Lighthouse Keeper then tells me to throw the damn book back, the one that the Fisherman possesses. It’s such a massive realization. The Collector is always seen holding a red book, not the Fisherman. Anytime you get a relic and he gives you a new power, he reads from that red book.

The Fisherman can then confront the Collector, and you discover they are the same person. The Fisherman gets heated in their conversation, shattering a mirror, and the broken reflection of the Collector peers back at him. From there, you can take the book to the Lighthouse Keeper. She will prompt you to follow her guiding light and throw the book back into the sea where you found it, ending the darkness the Fisherman unleashed. You toss the book back into the sea, and it struggles against you, but you do it. As the tome sinks, a giant creature comes up and eats the Fisherman, taking him down back to the depths.

The choice to tell this singular Fisherman’s story now made sense. The Collector’s comments in the original ending now aligned. We, the Collector and the Fisherman and the player, were one and the same. The Fisherman simply erased his own memory and understanding of his own dark doings in desperation and despair, and maybe in his hunger to pursue the dark and unspeakable things that live in the deep.

Dredge does a great job of being a relaxing fishing game, especially if you turn on passive mode so nothing can attack you late at night. But the cosmic horror attributes and the core bleakness of the plot are what make it stay in my memory. The exploration reinforces this. The Fisherman can be attacked by birds, if he doesn’t sleep—now it makes sense how he can stay awake forever, he has the powers of this book casually at his call, even if he doesn’t know it—and he might get attacked by spectral sharks, angry waterspouts that follow you for a few minutes, and other deep sea friends that sometimes try to nibble on your boat.

The boat, too, is a vessel (hah) for the Fisherman’s story, which is an exploration into dredging up (I’m so good at this) our darkest behaviors, our most tormented thoughts. Even the aberrations echo this theme. A fish you catch can be an average looking anchovy tangled up in your net. Sail around long enough with your net out, though, and you might catch one that’s strangely fused together, doing its best impression of a Biblically accurate angel, its many eyes sticking out of contorted flesh. Everything, even the subplots, reflect this worldbuilding and this theme. There are monsters, unfathomable and terrifying, but they’re also a reflection of ourselves.

Humans can be terrifying. We can do and say terrifying things. We can want and think and feel giant emotions that seem as all-consuming as the fearsome creature rising from the depths at our sacrifice. It makes the cosmic horror themes feel connected and grounded, while still being grandiose and a well-done homage to other cosmic horror story influences. It’s why the game is so relaxing and yet will not leave my brain until I get these thoughts down. It’s why it’s such a refreshing take on otherwise typical cosmic horror tropes, which tend to classically focus on the scary Other rather than looking inward (something I feel is more typical in gothic horror, actually, not cosmic).

Dredge is all about the Fisherman’s story, about him desperately trying to be a normal fisherman, trying to fish regular fish, and the seas constantly denying him this, always reminding him of what he did until he accepts the inevitable and faces it head-on, choosing to either go along with the lies he tells himself, to sink into those depths or face the reality of his actions and make one last sacrificial plunge.

Of course, there’s other themes in there, this little indie game packs a lot of ambience and several sidequests in each of the main zones. But this one stuck out at me. Or maybe I’m looking at my own reflection. Maybe I’m putting these themes in there a little bit, interpreting the weather on the open sea in a way that skews towards my own thoughts and desires, but that’s the joy of a story, and it’s what makes Dredge such a great experience.

Thank you Sahana for editing this! And thank you for reading. If you enjoy my Narrative Thoughts articles or my writing, consider becoming a patron on Patreon for $1 or a leave a tip on Ko-fi—or share my work around! Any support is appreciated.