Dredge: The Pale Reach- DLC Review
The Pale Reach is the first DLC for Dredge and it’s a great showing for what an DLC can be in this game (franchise hopefully?) It adds a new area, a ton of new fish, new items and a new hostile creature, the Narwhal. It also adds some juicy new lore to the Dredge universe. So yeah, today we’re gonna break it down a little bit and answer the pivotal question- is this worth my $5? Hint: the answer is yes.
The Pale Reach (the location) will just pop up in the game world once you download the DLC and it’s a bit of a hike (or a sail?) but not bad. There’s actually a lore explanation for this- according to the Traveling Merchant, it’s a place of legend that does actually just pop up in random places. Or maybe it drifts? Either way, it feels like a plausible explanation and this game has a mangrove, a volcano and tropical basin within like 10 miles so it’s not like this is immersion breaking, to be honest.
So, there’s a couple things to know: it’s a big glacier, there’s a lot of ice (which you should avoid) and there’s also the Narwhal which can pop up anywhere at any time. There’s no “ground” to the glacier. In fact, it’s one of the deepest areas of the game. Even the water beneath some of the tight ice-trench areas drops out to like 100+ meters. There’s loose ice everywhere, which can make navigating the area a pain until you get an attachment called the Ice-Breaker, which…breaks ice. The Narwhal can be annoying, but he’s a critical part of the questline and is pretty avoidable for the most part.
When it comes to storytelling, Dredge skews Lovecraftian by a wide margin, and The Pale Reach is no exception. There’s a lot of classic Lovecraft tropes here. Weird ice field, eldritch horror frozen in said ice field, frozen eldritch horror having influence on the world around it despite being frozen. And you can see this mysterious ass creature frozen in the ice. It’s frightening, bizarre and definitely off putting. It sticks out in this icy wasteland like a sore thumb. As it should.
You discover the original crew that explored this place and their sad fate- frozen into blocks of ice, their souls trapped. Your goal is to resolve their fate and hopefully lull the monster back to a full slumber. This will require you to fully explore the new area and find new tools, all while navigating this sketchy glacier.
The pacing of this DLC is slow. It’s not a bad thing. It’s a Dredge thing (the next DLC is even slower.) You slowly unravel what’s going on here, slowly traverse the dangerous, narrow trenches of the glacier, slowly carve new paths through by baiting the Narwhal. It’s not fast, but it’s fun. And this is spaced out by immersing yourself in some of the new content, such as the new fish type: Ice.
The new fish are really cool. The Sleeper Shark and Giant Squid are among my favorites. There’s a good mix of crabs, trawl only fish and normal fish for you to catch and it always felt like whatever I was pulling up was new and different. It did a great job of breaking up the tense exploration that makes up the core of this DLC.
I also appreciated the way they folded this DLC into the main game. The traveling merchant is here, so you can repair and buy things and ports from the main game aren’t too far away. You also get a nifty item that lets you set up portals around the map, which is really useful. In fact, for this reason alone, it’s helpful to play the DLC midway through the base game if you have it.
Overall, I would say The Pale Reach is a great addition to Dredge is exactly what you want from a DLC. It expands the base game, adds some new content that fits right in and has an engrossing standalone story. It’s well crafted and self contained in a way that great DLC usually is and it provides a familiar twist on the Dredge format you probably already loved if you were playing. So, is it worth your 5$? Yes. 100% yes.
