Dredge Mobile

Indie darling Dredge, a fishing game with Lovecraftian horror elements from Christchurch, New Zealand studio Black Salt Games, has made the expected move from Dredge PC to Dredge Mobile – and it’s a mighty good time.

Two years on from the original game’s launch, it’s now available on iOS, MacOS and Android and developer Black Salt says the mobile version includes all the downloadable content that appeared on PC and console versions, such as The Pale Reach and The Iron Rig which will be available as in-app purchases. You can read our write-up about it here and an interview I did with the team here.

The devs says the mobile version will allow players to adjust features like reflections, and some Android devices will be able to take advantage of automatic adaptive performance to balance battery life and game play quality.

Different platform, same game.

This is a faithful port of the PC and console versions and visually, it hasn’t changed, offering the same hand-drawn aesthetic as the PC version and where the biggest departure is in its controls. Rather than a physical controller or keyboard and mouse to control your fishing vessel, you use an on-screen virtual joystick, which worked remarkably well on my iPhone 11 (more on my choice of iOS device later). That said, if you’d prefer to use a physical joy pad you can use Xbox, PlayStation 4 & 5, and Nintendo Switch Pro controllers.

The game’s fishing mechanic, too, has remained the same, translating well to the mobile platform, having you tap the screen as the fish is being reeled up rather than tapping a button. It’s all rather lovely. The camera controls on the right hand side are intuitive, too, and work well on the mobile screen.

I mentioned earlier that I reviewed the early release version of Dredge Mobile on my iPhone 11 but this wasn’t what I originally planned. I was planning to play Dredge on my iPad (6th generation).

I downloaded the Test Flight client, installed Dredge and started the game. It launched into its opening cut scene and on completion immediately crashed to my iPad’s home screen. “That’s weird,” I though, as I launched the game again. It played the opening cut scene and again, it crashed to the home screen. I tried again: It played the opening cut scene – then crashed to the home screen. I tried a few more times with the same result.

I reached out to Black Salt’s PR manager about the issue (up until a few weeks ago I lived in the same city as the team) and after she spoke to the dev team, it turns out that the 6th generation iPad doesn’t have enough system memory to play Dredge: It only has 2Gb of RAM. Black Salt told me minimum spec is a 9th generation iPad. I was very sad about this.

Dredge Mobile, still scary fun

So, I had to play the beta on my iPhone 11, which has 4Gb of memory, and it was fine, but my phone’s much smaller screen real estate means that text is absurdly hard to read both from characters you meet as you sail the seas and buttons are small and at times, hard to read. text is really, really, really hard to read. Black Salt have told me they are aware of others having issue with the small text on phones.

Device-specific issues aside, Dredge Mobile is long overdue and a perfect example of a game that is made for the smaller form factor but some may balk at the price: It’s currently $US24.99 for the base game then $4.99, $5.99 and $11.99 for the three DLC packages. It may seem on the steep side but for what you get, this probably isn’t badly priced.

Dredge is perfect for the mobile form factor as it’s great for small sessions of gaming while on the go. Worth a look if you have a hankering for sailing stormy seas and horrors of the deep while you’re commuting to work.