Honestly, I had completely the opposite experience with Dredge.

The first few days in the game feel truly scary, with your terribly slow ship, and strange lights in the darkness are terrifying. Those initial quests with the pulsating wet package are creepy, and you wonder where that’s going to lead, and what storyline will cone from that.

But then, you get a few engine upgrades and there’s suddenly not a single danger in the game you can’t easily run from. You’re invincible and the whole ocean is your oyster. The pulsating package was just a bit of flavour and nothing comes of it at all - in fact the quests in the game are almost entirely plain fetch quests, totally shallow with very little real story. And while the ending gets interesting, it’s all too brief.

Now don’t get me wrong - I loved Dredge, actually. But I loved it as a cosy collect-em-all fishing sim bombing around the ocean in your fun and zoomy boat, rather than the narrative-driven Lovecraftian horror the trailers made it out to be, which it ultimately I felt it wasn’t at all