As with any other medium, gaming phases through discrete cycles, with successive genres falling in and out of favour. The ‘90s were the heyday of mascot platformers, military shooters were all the rage towards the end of the noughties and, most recently, we’ve been living through the era of the FOMO-inducing live service.

We are now on the cusp of yet another trend, as the “Cosy Game” seems poised to dominate the next few years of our interactive entertainment. And at a time when our real world feels so damn inhospitable, it’s no wonder that these congenial experiences have managed to strike a chord with audiences.

They really took off with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic (during which loved ones kept in touch via the chirpy universe of Animal Crossing) and have continued to remain popular as society has been riven by a wearying string of tragedies, economic woes, political divisions and injustices. Not to mention a troubling resurgence in galaxy print fashion.

In the face of all this awfulness, you can’t fault anybody for wanting to retreat into something wholesome and non-threatening. The kind of fantasy world where your biggest concern is how you’re going to rearrange all that expensive furniture you keep accumulating, or in which you can afford to pay off an extortionate mortgage by just heading out into the garden and digging up random crap. It’s the same blissful escapism that draws throngs of holidaymakers to Disney World year after year.

At first glance, Dredge appears to fit snuggly into the cosy game classification. Scored by quaint piano music and utilising an enchanting watercolour aesthetic, it give off a distinctly mellow vibe. Meanwhile, in terms of its mechanics, you’ll be spending a great deal of your time chit-chatting with friendly locals, drifting through serene waters in a dinghy, and engaging in that most tranquil of all pastimes; fishing. There’s even a lovely side-quest where you have to rehome a stray dog!

Thanks to its laidback pacing, the indie title also has a singularity meditative quality, as it allows you to ignore the main story altogether and just while away the hours at sea. Doing nothing but taking in those sumptuous views and waiting for the right catch to float on by.

Everything changes once night falls, however, at which point Dredge reveals itself to be a covert survival horror in disguise. What was once welcoming and paradisial sours into something far more menacing, like you are on the ultimate vacation from hell. The gentle ocean breeze gives way to tempestuous winds, darkness envelops your periphery, that twinkly piano music is drowned out by ominous whispering, and eldritch creatures begin to emerge from the stygian depths.

It makes for an interesting yin and yang dynamic, as the game cleverly weaves together its outwardly incompatible halves. During those carefree daytime excursions, you get to bask in sunlight and explore without fear, all while preparing for the harsher evenings to come. Conversely, your nocturnal voyages give you a chance to uncover the secrets of the Marrow archipelago and to make real headway with the Lovecraftian narrative, even if you are anxiously counting down every last nanosecond till dawn.

Suffice it to say, the four-person development team at Black Salt Games has pulled off a very tricky highwire act here, delivering something that excels as both a cosy outing and as an effective slice of horror. On paper, this bizarre alchemy shouldn’t work — after all, the two genres aim to elicit contradictory feelings in the player — yet, against all odds, it turns out to be a winning combination. In fact, Dredge might just be Game of the Year material. When we previewed the title over a month ago, we fawned over its hands-off approach to quest-design, the way that all of its systems knitted together, and the emphasis it placed on organic discovery. Now that we’ve gone through the whole campaign (clocking in at around 14 hours, with plenty of exploration), we’re pleased to report that none of these charms were diminished by prolonged exposure. If anything, we continued to find all new reasons to fall in love with the game the more that we played it.

Billed as “an unusual fishing RPG,” Dredge casts you in the role of a down-on-his-luck angler who responds to a mysterious “help wanted” ad. With naught but a minimalist job description to go by, you travel to the remote island of Greater Marrow to learn more, only for your vessel to take quite a beating on the journey over.

When you finally arrive at the coastal town, you are greeted by a suspiciously-charitable mayor who agrees to foot the bill for your boat repairs, on the condition that you reimburse him before you start making any income. That’s the closest you get to a traditional job interview and, before you know it, you’re dispatched to get fresh food for the people of Greater Marrow.

Luckily, the bay surrounding the town is bountiful and you are quickly able to pay off your debts. In the process, you get acquainted with the locals, including a grubby fishmonger (who will handsomely reward you for any catch and will sometimes make special requests as well), the resident shipwright (who can reinforce your trawler and outfit you with better gear, for a price) and an inquisitive merchant (who will buy trinkets that you amass while combing the seabed).

Most intriguingly, there’s the furtive lighthouse keeper. Although she is somewhat cryptic and guarded at first, it is from conversations with this creepy hag that you begin to uncover the truth about Marrow. As it turns out, the archipelago was cursed long ago, and its waters are now home to eldritch leviathans that swallow ships whole and drive mariners insane.

Such a fate befell your immediate predecessor and everyone else is understandably reluctant to hoist anchor and head out for a fishing trip, leaving the piscivore population starved. Which goes some way towards explaining why the lickspittle mayor was so keen to get in your good books earlier.

Equipped with this knowledge, you then embark on a grand quest to rid Marrow of its thalassic scourge: venturing to far-flung coves; bioluminescent lagoons; murky bayous and volcanic atolls. Or not. You could just as easily shrug off this responsibility and devote your time to reeling in trophy fish like a contented retiree. It’s completely up to you.

Therein lies one of the key appeals of Dredge. It never railroads you onto a specific path or explicitly spells out what you’re meant to be doing at any given juncture. Rather, it simply hands you the keys to a ramshackle boat and then lets you chart your own course around its modestly-sized, yet densely-packed, nautical world.

Taking a cue from Breath of the Wild, you’re very much left to your own devices here. The map isn’t smeared with icons, there is no itemised list of side activities for you to dutifully tick off, and the HUD doesn’t point you in the direction of current objectives. Indeed, it’s theoretically possible to head straight to one of the late-game areas right at the beginning, and there wouldn’t even be an invisible wall to stop you.

Because of this hands-off approach, you are incentivised to organically seek out adventure for yourself and it’s all the more rewarding when you find it as a result. For instance, gossiping with an islander could lead you to a beached pirate galleon that was smuggling precious jewels, or make you aware of a marooned sailor in need of a ride home. Elsewhere, a message in a bottle might contain fragments of a treasure map, which you can in turn assemble and decipher at your leisure.

The crucial thing is that none of these discoveries are patronisingly signposted. Even the in-game journal — which keeps a log of rumours you’ve heard and characters that you’ve met— won’t didactically break missions down for you. It only provides reminders so that you don’t forget things, and the onus is still on you to figure out where you need to go and what you need to do once you eventually arrive there.

Wayfinding is an integral part of the experience too, as you’re never given any dotted line to follow or coordinates that pinpoint your exact destination. Occasionally, an NPC might scribble helpful jottings on your atlas but, for the most part, you are expected to memorise routes, keep an eye out for notable landmarks and maintain your own compass headings. Again, it all helps to fully immerse you in the role of a seafaring adventurer, by removing interface clutter that would otherwise ruin the magic.

It’s a credit to Black Salt that Dredge never becomes frustratingly obtuse then. While it certainly doesn’t mollycoddle you (like God of War: Ragnarok did with its infamously bossy companions), sufficient breadcrumbs are left to help you work stuff out with a bit of thought. Whether you are trying to pacify a Sarlacc Pit maw or need to discern the purpose of thermal vents encircling a mountain, the clues give you just enough of a push without doing all the heavy lifting for you.

Piloting the trawler from A to B is naturally how you’ll spend the vast majority of your time here, as you navigate treacherous waters and keep your eyes peeled for safe harbours where you can rest your head. There are also separate fishing and dredging minigames for you to complete (which ultimately boil down to different variations on QTEs) and there’s a fun inventory management system that recalls the therapeutic briefcase puzzle that we all got addicted to in Resident Evil 4.

Each of these mechanics is enjoyable in its own right, yet what’s really impressive is how cohesively they gel once you start to dig a little deeper. For example, you can attempt to pick a region clean of all its aquatic life but, in order to do so, you must procure a number of tools that can only be paid for by hawking valuables.

You see, each species of fish has a corresponding habitat and relevant catching method. So, you’ll want a shallow rod for groupers and stingrays, crab pots for lobsters, trawling nets for jellies, hadal equipment for amphipods, as well as a bottomless line for reaching into the black abyss — where ghost sharks and fangtooths roam.

It’s not purely a question of money either. Granted, you’ve got to be able to afford those instruments in the first place, but you’ll also need to ensure that there’s room aboard your vessel to accommodate them.

And no matter how economically you organise that space, there’s only so much you can feasibly squeeze onto a boat at any one time. To increase this limited storage capacity, you can visit a dry dock and upgrade your hull, but that will in turn necessitate dredging the seabed for building materials.

As you can see, everything interrelates nicely. If you want to make long voyages in a single day (without encountering nocturnal beasties), then you’ll need to cough up the dough for a faster engine. However, buying said motor demands a lot of coin that can only be earned by fishing, and fishing requires gear that can only be upgraded through dredging. Meanwhile, keeping on top of the inventory management side of things allows you to hold onto your precious haul.

Suffice it to say, it is incredibly well-balanced and thought-through. We’ve all played games where the side activities and rewards don’t feel especially worthwhile, but here everything makes an appreciable difference. If you invest enough time into the various mechanics, then you are sure to come a long way from the feeble dinghy you’re given at the start (which can barely travel a league without falling apart) and will soon have a formidable ship that can reach any corner of the map without trouble.

Even if you resolve to plough through the story without indulging in any optional distractions, it is still remarkably easy to get hooked by that fishing minigame (pun 100% intended). Consulting your encyclopedia for the best strategies on luring a desired catch, scouring the ocean for promising spots, and then nailing the QTE button prompts is a truly riveting loop. Completionists in particular will be obliged to fill in every last page of their species compendium, though it’s entirely possible that impulse could spread to more casual players as well.

Of course, should you get too wrapped up in this pursuit, then there is a danger that you could lose track of time. While the clock is paused when you are inactive, the slightest movement of your boat or the simple act of reeling in a carp will accelerate how fast the hours go by.

It therefore behooves you to plan out your days well in advance and calculate how long it will take to perform key tasks, so that you can return to shore before it is too late. Otherwise, you risk being out at night, when the sky is black and the sea even blacker.

No matter how hard you try, you will be forced to brave the darkness at some point —given that certain fish are nocturnal — yet it’s best to avoid that outcome wherever possible. For one thing, the absence of light plays tricks on your character’s psyche and ultimately drains your sanity meter. As you succumb to the madness, hazardous rocks will then materialise out of thin air, your cargo will be susceptible to theft by buzzard, and (worst of all) you will draw the attention of those unspeakable abominations that are said to lurk in Marrow’s depths.

On that note, Dredge uses its monsters sparingly but whenever they do make a random appearance you can guarantee that it will be a thrilling encounter. Whether you are being careful not to disturb a slumbering leviathan, wending through serpent-infested inlets, or pushing your engine to its absolute breaking-point so that you can escape an oversized piranha, there’s bound to be something here that gets your blood pumping.

You don’t really have any means of fighting back, although progressing through the main questline does grant you special abilities that help make evasion a tad easier (including a handy speed-boost). Instead, the focus is more on using your wits to overcome threats, in a variety of ingenious ways that are far too satisfying to spoil.

In short, Dredge is one of the most exciting and unpredictable indie titles that we’ve played in years. It’d be impossible to sing all of its praises in just one review (we’ve hardly mentioned the beautiful graphics or the diverse range of environments it transports you to) but what’s important to note is that it has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of original ideas.

One hell of a calling card for Black Salt, it somehow marries the contradictory traits of survival horror and the cosy game in a way that makes both genres feel fresh again. It’s an unlikely pairing for sure, but one that goes down swimmingly no matter what you’re into.

DREDGE will be released on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch on March 30th. Review code provided by publisher.