Dredge: The Iron Rig

Black Salt Games' Dredge is one of the biggest indie success stories of the last few years. It was the team's first game, but thanks to a unique premise framed by simple but solid mechanics, the game gained enough online buzz to have a self-perpetuating effect. Since then, the studio has insisted on expanding the game with more content, culminating in Iron Rig, the biggest and possibly final expansion to the game to date.

Iron Rig can, in principle, be completed roughly concurrently with the base game, and the relatively divided corners of the world, where you are sent to collect the crucial artefacts used to push the game's narrative forward, quickly become seamlessly symbiotic with the story here.

That story, by the way, is relatively simple; a giant oil drilling platform is finalising the final preliminary drills before lowering the giant drill into the mysterious depths. You show up and offer to help the ferocious Ironhaven Corporation get the rig's several departments up and running. You do this primarily by finding Ironhaven debris around the game world, and eventually these oil drills introduce spills across the world that lure unknown fish species up from the depths.

Narratively, there's not much new under the sun here, and although the tone, lore and approach are very similar to the pre-existing structures we know from the main game, it's a bit thin on the ground. You deliver materials, catch new fish species, deliver more materials, upgrade the drilling platform and finally make a somewhat arbitrary choice about the future of the platform and you're done.

It's not disappointing as such, but given that Black Salt pushed Iron Rig from a launch during Q4 last year to now, it's not taking any significant narrative risks, nor does the expansion add anything to your character or the narrative framework of the base game. This is "just" a DLC - for better or worse.

There are no new mechanics as such. Yes, you catch new fish and you turn in new materials to initiate the development of new departments on the oil rig. It's the same upgrade meta that the base game already mastered - there's just more of it here, and these upgrades actually result in benefits that make the base game itself a lot easier. So what do we think about it? Gee, I'm not sure.

In addition, Iron Rig throws a really, really annoying spanner in the works of your progress, especially if you play this in a save game that has already been completed. In order to fish in the oil, you have to upgrade your fishing rods, which means you basically have to spend time, again, reorganising the equipment you've already worked hard to construct. It's a shame that Black Salt couldn't come up with more creative ways to place hurdles in front of the player than basically asking them to do the exact same thing again. Instead of making sure you can fish everywhere with the gear you have on board, you now have to make sure all your fishing rods can also fish in oil. Cool.

Dredge is a good game, in fact it's a really good game. Furthermore, it's a game that deserves your time if you haven't played it before, and this more complete edition combining the Iron Rig expansion and The Pale Reach only makes this package more robust. But as a standalone expansion, there's not enough ingenuity to require reinstalling for this reason alone.