It might spoil my end-of-year round-up, but there is only one game that captured my attention all year. Mostly because it has a sense of dread without actively running up to you and shouting “Boo! Did I scare you?” DREDGE is rightfully one of my games of the year, with fantastic gameplay, a great little story built up around “You don’t want to go out there, it is horrible,” and generally playing Tetris with your inventory like it is Resident Evil 4 all over again. When “The Pale Reach” DLC was announced, I was ‘excited’ to jump back in my boat.

With a new boat in the waters down South, you return to the main island you woke up on a couple of hundred days ago and get told by the Mayor that a Photographer was about. She’s in the far South and there are very few details about exactly why she’s down there. After a few minutes of going south below the Stellar Basin, you’ll find a rather large labyrinthine ice island. A bit of exploring lets you find that there are very few ways into the center, that is until you find the Photographer and the Traveling Merchant.

The Photographer wants to take pictures of a lovely little Narwhal. We’ve all played DREDGE, “Lovely” and “Little” are not words used. After feeding the wet furry unicorn of the deep blue sea, she hightails it out, leaving you to explore the island with your new friend. In the center of the new area you’ve opened up is a camp with new journal entries from a captain explaining the crew went mad and were talking of riches from the stars or something. It’s not like you’re ever going to meet the captain. Just to your right is a person entombed in ice telling you tales of being a captain.

It seems rather quick to get to the point, and this is one of the things I think needs to be said about “The Pale Reach.” This DLC isn’t the meatiest around. Finished in a little over an hour and a half of gameplay, you are guided through the main quest of this DLC fairly quickly and there are a couple of extra things to do beyond that. Being a DLC focused around the ice of this island referred to as The Pale Reach, you turn your lovely little boat (the only thing that is lovely and little) into an ice breaker thanks to the Merchant.

Don’t worry, she’s the same down here as she is elsewhere, just offering a couple of new toys. To properly fish down here you need to buy a new fishing rod which takes up three slots. With that in hand, you can catch all the new fish and their aberrations, almost. While fishing away, adding to your Encyclopedia, and sometimes feeding the Narwhal, you’ll open up new pathways inside this icy hell. Among the corridors of ice, you’ll find more frozen people, the crew telling you their tales of what happened.

Unlike the Captain though, these three want out of their frosty tombs and ask for you to use a pickaxe to break them free. A bit like it is High School Musical: The Musical, or something. While this is one of the main focuses of your new quest line, your job is to find the three pieces to this icebreaker the Merchant wants to strap to the front of your boat. Eventually, you’ll get there and this is where you can break up all those little bits of ice floating about the island. Thus you can get the pickaxes.

Believe it or not, that’s about it for what “The Pale Reach” offers. It is a rather small and short DLC that doesn’t leave much in the way of the story, other than “there is something bad over here, only you can solve this mystery.” The problem I think I have with the mystery is that it never really resolves in a big way. The achievement for completing the main quest in “The Pale Reach,” which was soon followed by the one for side quests. It left me asking “is that all?”

I’m not disappointed, it is just that DREDGE on release felt like a couple of steps forward. “The Pale Reach” feels as if it is just a shuffle forward in what DREDGE could have done. What is probably the bigger issue to me is that while you get a new rod and eventually another new item that’s story-based, that’s about it. Of course, you have the ice breaker on the front and the Traveling Merchant will now sell you ice to preserve fish for longer in your cargo hold, but little to expand on the boat itself. What I’m saying is, can I get extra space?

The floating dock and research are untouched, leaving you with the same maximum slots you have towards the end of DREDGE. Yet you have another type of rod to contend with and there is no longer an all-rounder that lets you basically catch everything without rushing back to the Traveling Merchant for a change of rods. That is my biggest issue here: you are given more to juggle without there being something to, not make it easier, but certainly give you allowances to keep the gameplay flow you have with a fully upgraded boat.

Ultimately, while I like “The Pale Reach” for what it offers, it is rather small unless you spend the extra couple of hours to dredge, crab, and fish all the new fish available and their aberrations. A short and sweet affair, “The Pale Reach” let me return to one of my favorite games of the year with an atmosphere that is nothing but pure, unbridled fishing joy… Unless you go out at night and play the Narwhal.

A PC review copy of DREDGE‘s “The Pale Reach” DLC was provided by Team17 for this review.

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DREDGE "The Pale Reach"

$5.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• More exploration in this beautiful world.
• Horrors from the big blue deep.

Cons

• Could have added more to the overall gameplay.
• The end of the questline is a bit of a let down.