Confession: I never finished The Pale Reach. This is because, as I kind of alluded to in an opinion piece a while ago, a not-insignificant part of me doesn’t like finishing games. Games are a playground, and part of me sees finishing the game as closing that playground down. So I kept that expansion open, unfinished, waiting for me to come back. At least, that’s the excuse I give myself for why, when I launch DREDGE to start up the new Iron Rig expansion, I don’t actually remember what I was supposed to be doing before this. Fortunately, I can just shove my frozen ice pick in my storage and go from the southern end of the map to the very northern edge.
It takes me a bit to get back into the groove of the game: the rhythm of fishing, crabbing, repairing, and dredging. (Dredging. How I missed you, you beautiful activity that named the game, but I’ll get to that.) Then I hit my stride; the game opens up, and I fall into it like a kid in a ball pit.
Going Deeper
The expansion’s page says the game will let you attempt the content in The Iron Rig at any point as long as you own it, but it’s really meant for endgame. This is partly because the prices are eye-watering if you haven’t already unlocked everything in the base game ($2500 for the final hull upgrade is cheap to me now but sure wasn’t when I was in mid-game), and partly because you need access to most of the equipment unlocks in the game to take full advantage of what you can get from the rig (Including eleven new cargo spaces. Eleven new cargo spaces. ELEVEN NEW– Ahem).
The jobs that the game gives you in order to reap these rewards are, frankly, a lot simpler than I remember The Pale Reach to be. There aren’t any puzzles here, no brain-bending mazes of maps or obstacle courses of straits to get through. This time, your job is straightforward: collect material crates from shipwrecks or collect other materials from shipwrecks to build material crates, use them to upgrade the fishing and dredging equipment you have from the main game, and go fish. It feels very much like an extension of the main game, more so than The Pale Reach did. That expansion felt like a new environment; this is just more of everything that you were doing before, which is not by any means a bad thing.
Did We Just Fish Up Cthulhu?
I love cozy games, especially when they come with a side of Eldritch horror trying to eat your face. (“Wait, how can you have a cozy game where something wants to eat your face?” I don’t know, but this one did it!) The story of The Iron Rig is more of the base game’s “fishing up baby Cthulhus,” this time with added environmental hazards and a helipad. It’s definitely not about Big Oil, though. Oil doesn’t spawn floating eyeballs that follow you around or turn the world bright and red around the edges when you drive a boat into it.
But whether we overlook the real-world allegory or not, the story of The Iron Rig is a good one. It’s like a Whopper candy. You know, the malted milk balls? It’s small, self-contained, pretty tasty, and doesn’t really impact your appetite for the main course at all. It’s a nugget of story that plays out mostly how you expect it to, both in the Eldritch horror and corporate allegory sides of things, and then it leaves everything how it was before (I mean, plus a few areas of map that are now contaminated and have different fish… so yeah, back to normal). I wish it was longer, I wish it was deeper, but it was good for what it was. Plus, the Undermarket is hilarious.
No, really. My favorite part of the DLC story is the Undermarket, which needs more credit and more love. Take my advice: read the dialogue when you go there, every time. I wish they made the other stations of the rig give dialogue with that kind of personality and dynamism.
Stamina Meters Aren’t Any Less Annoying if You Call Them “Heat,” Just FYI
There’s a downside to putting the new region at the very north end of the map: how many times you have to go all the way to the south end of the map.
The original game map is brilliant in this regard. The Marrows is a central location, and not only can you teleport back there every so often, each region’s story is self-contained, so you only have to go between the Marrows and the story location when you’re starting and ending the location’s story. The Pale Reach took a different route, and it just kept you in one place to enjoy all the cosmic horror and monsters that would definitely be sucking your brain out through a straw if they weren’t currently frozen in blocks of ice.
The Iron Rig doesn’t do either of those things. The rig is as far north as you’d ever bother to go, and you can’t teleport to it, so you end up having to spend basically an entire in-game day to get between it and the southern regions. And the scenario starts by sending you to those southern regions, too. It might have been better if it started you with the north. Or if the heat reducers that supposedly let you use your acceleration spell for longer (I say “supposedly” because I haven’t figured out how to activate them and it certainly doesn’t feel like they’re doing anything yet) were available sooner and were clearer on how to use them. The slog of getting between the rig and the southern regions was, well… a slog.
A Good Catch
In the end, the thing The Iron Rig does that the game really needed was breathing new life into the endgame of Dredge. It expanded the encyclopedia, created new methods of advancing and upgrading your ship and equipment, and, in doing that, it made dredging useful again. By the time I beat Dredge originally, I was selling off the materials you get by actually, well, dredging. I had no more use for them. I was maxed out on everything. I was avoiding dredging sites, even though I knew there were still treasures I could find because the odds of finding them and not more cloth, lumber, and scrap metal were so low. The Iron Rig adds enough new upgrades that I’ll have plenty of use for them for hours yet, and, through clever crafting trees, it creates the ability to recycle materials I have too many of into ones I don’t have enough of to help with the pain of inventory management.
Dredge isn’t a big game, and The Iron Rig isn’t a big expansion. It was never meant to be. The Switch page says it’s 2-5 hours of content, and I’d say it’s on the higher end of there, maybe even 6-8 if you like to spend some extra time fishing (I certainly do). But I still wish there was more. The game has some absolute gems of dialogue and characterization, and I wish there was more of it in here.
Also, I wish the damn heat meter didn’t rise so fast and sink so slow.
You definitely should have finished pale reach…. The complaint of traveling back and forth to the rig becomes a moot point if you do because you are rewarded with the Aurous Anchor, which is a drop-anywhere, set and forget, two-way teleport back to the Blackstone Isle. Not to mention missing out on the best trawl net in the game, the radiant net, which gives a +5% aberration bonus and works in shallow, coastal, ice, and oceanic waters…