Dredge is relaxing, almost a cozy game. Almost. Except when it's not! Which is fairly rare and largely under your control. I tend to play games to wind down before bed so I was a little worried Dredge would stress me out. It really hasn't. It's striking a careful balance of "mostly cozy" with a side dish of "creepy, but not horror." Surprising things can happen, but there's not much in the way of jump scares. It's a little repetitive in the way that cozy games tend to be. It leans pretty hard on the fishing minigames, but there's just enough variety to get you through the runtime without getting too stale. (At least, I think I'm most of the way through...) Overall, it's very creative and different and I have had fun. Would recommend. And if you're thinking about it but worried it's going to be too intense, like I was, absolutely give it a go.
There's no way I would ever come upon this by trying to search for a game I want to play on my own. In a certain other water-vapory game store, there's a box on each game's page that says, "this game is like these other games you played," or "This game isn't like other games you've played." I assume that if I were to bring this game up on there, that box would say, "Wait, what?" But I saw something about it on Second Wind that put it on my radar. And I'm so glad that happened. Adorable story, music, and art aside, the voice cast is absolutely to die for, especially if you are at all a fan of actual play D&D. I don't dare list all of the "Oh, it's ______!" for fear of leaving someone out. And that's usually followed by "Wow, they can sing!" That said, this isn't like other games I've played. You've got to be willing to meet it where it's at. And where it's at is absolutely charming.
To be honest, I don't know how they did it. What this absolutely, positively, *isn't* is a remaster of the original Bard's Tale series as it existed in the 80's. Instead, what they have somehow done is remastered the games as they exist in my memory. If I Google up images of the 1985 Bard's Tale, the images that come up are not the game I remember. This. This is the game I remember. How is that possible? I don't know. Even my wife is in on it. "Oh, those sounds, they take me back." But the original, it didn't have these sounds. And yet she's right; that's how I remember it too. They have, if I'm honest, polished a couple of the rough spots and added some nice features from later games that even my rose-tinted memory admits were never in the first episode (like an automap). I'm way too many hours in already and, forget Mangar, I've got an appointment with 99 berserkers, 99 berserkers, 99 berserkers, and 99 berserkers! Really fantastic work, and I can't wait for the whole trilogy to be available!
