DREDGE: The Iron Rig DLC

It’s been more than 6-months since I set sail to The Pale Reach, and a mysterious voice has been calling me back to sea. Thankfully, it wasn’t some otherworldly creature of the deep, but the team at Black Salt Games, whose horror-fishing game DREDGE took the world by storm in 2023, and they’re back again with their latest DLC, The Iron Rig. Previously delayed in favour of their icy tale of deception, The Iron Rig finally washes ashore on a wave of dark malaise and corporate wrongdoing.

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Turning the keys in the ignition of DREDGE once again, you’re immediately blasted with the new opening theme for The Iron Rig, which is incredibly catchy. Opening with an accordion ditty that fits the nautical style perfectly, it quickly erupts into some sort of Transylvanian folk epic, and a tsunami of church organs and screeching strings crash over you. The soundtrack to The Iron Rig is just as good as the OST for the original game, with some nuanced ‘retellings’ of the same songs as the urgency and mood changes throughout the tale.

Getting into the game proper, I opened the map to find an imposing oil rig logo now printed firmly in the northern portion of the archipelago, and setting sail, it’s hard to miss the new landmark. The towering research platform stands out as an imposing addition to the skyline, guiding your ship in with a grand column of glittering lights. Upon reaching the platform, you chat to the foreman who explains that the rig is owned and operated by the Ironhaven Corporation, but it’s massively behind schedule due to shipments of materials never arriving. Being the entrepreneurial soul that you are, you volunteer to help, and set back off to investigate the last known whereabouts of the Ironhaven freight vessels.

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At a Glance

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After a little investigation and retrieval, you help get the building works back on track and that’s when things really move into high gear. Once the research platform is operational, the team drops an enormous drill into the seabed, accidentally opening a great fissure in the crust of the earth and releasing a mysterious liquid into the ocean around the archipelago. You’re charged with investigating this dark liquid and bringing back samples of local sea life so that the scientist aboard the rig can check for contamination or other issues. Not looking to give away too much, it won’t come as a surprise to veteran sailors of DREDGE that there is much more going on here than meets the eye, and it doesn’t take too long until you’re at the centre of something much more sinister than a simple environmental check up. 

From a purely gameplay perspective, The Iron Rig introduces a significant new landmark (in the rig itself), a bunch of new quests, and tonnes of new fish for players to catch. It seems that the giant crack in the ocean floor released shoals of prehistoric fish into the waters of the archipelago, and that brings the total number of catchable species up to a whopping 230 (if you also have The Pale Reach expansion)! As you’d expect, the new missions in The Iron Rig are mostly made up of fishing-fetch quests, with a dollop of Greenpeace ocean clean up on the side. While you do get a new spiral-catch mechanic for the new fish, there isn’t much deviation from the core formula in The Iron Rig, so it’s all down to your enjoyment of the original DREDGE to how much you’ll enjoy the newest DLC. If you go in wanting more of the same, and not the reinvention of the wheel, you’ll dig it.

As you complete missions for the employees on the rig, you’ll be able to use recovered Ironhaven assets to improve the research facility, which I found a lot of fun. Being the tech savvy bunch they are, the Ironhaven Corporation have all manner of goodies at their disposal, and it’s in your best interest to build up their labs as best as possible, so that you can outfit your ship with some of their new, swanky tech. The Tech Lab offers upgrades to existing tools like your lighting, telescope (which I’ll admit I used for the first time during this expansion), and foghorn, as well as upgraded rods, nets and winches for pulling stuff out of the fissure. There’s even some entirely new gear that helps speed up gathering materials for the building effort. The Foundry is the other key location on the station, where you can convert materials from one kind into another; you can either manufacture Ironhaven goods out of scrap, or break finished products down to their composite parts if you have more need for the bits and pieces instead. 

I was pretty stoked about being able to farm the flotsam and jetsam for scrap and, more specifically, the ability to use that scrap to make meaningful items like Research Parts. I never completed the research in my playthrough of the main game, mostly because Research Parts were pretty hard to come by, but The Iron Rig changes all that. With only a few bits of new kit I was able to pull together a huge number of Research Parts in just a couple of hours, and I blazed through my remaining itinerary in no time. Now, as a player who’d finished the main game and was just mopping up, this was brilliant, but I also got the feeling that this introduction might significantly change the dynamic of the main game for players experiencing DREDGE with The Iron Rig expansion right from the start. I felt that the original DREDGE set a very deliberate pace, and for better or for worse, being able to farm materials from the get-go is likely to speed things up, at least for those players who commit their resources to the long game right from the off. 

You’re introduced to a few new characters during The Iron Rig, all of whom give off the same shady vibes as the existing cast, and fit nicely into the wider world. The story leans on contemporary views of heartless conglomerates and their unethical business practices, and interweaves those with the sinister and supernatural elements we’ve come to expect from DREDGE. While I definitely enjoyed the new story content, I felt like The Iron Rig came to a rather abrupt ending, and I didn’t find it as engaging as the tale told in The Pale Reach, which is a much more polished storyline.

That said, unlike the Black Salt Games’ last DLC release, the quests in The Iron Rig are not set in a single, new location, but instead send you sailing all over the original map. Not only does this mean that things take much longer to complete than The Pale Reach, but all that getting around also encouraged me to finish off the quests I had missed during my original playthrough. Returning to out of the way landmarks made me take a few sidebars, and with all the new kit from the various updates and DLC, I found those last few frustrating quests much more palatable to complete. I spent about nine and a half hours on The Iron Rig, which dwarfs The Pale Reach (two and a half hours) by comparison, though some of that time was dedicated to finishing off content from the original game that I simply couldn’t pass up this time around. 

The Iron Rig DLC offers that trademark DREDGE spookery, a myriad of new tools, and shoals of extra species to lengthen the overall experience. This new tale isn’t as well told as The Pale Reach, but the extra gameplay content is much broader in scope, encouraging me to even polish off quests from the main game that I had previously consigned to the deep. If ‘more of the same’ makes you want to pull your waders on one more time then you won’t be disappointed, but players expecting vast new experiences may want to give it a miss.

In the interest of full disclosure, VGamingNews was provided with a copy of the game in order to conduct this review.

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