Dredge; or, Capitalism vs. the Queer Mutants of the Sea
Tof Eklund, Contributing Editor and Roger Whitson, Managing Editor
Dredge, the horror fishing game by Black Salt Games, clearly draws on weird fiction. But while the Lovecraftian elements of the game are immediately apparent, it is also deeply indebted to Herman Melville and to the dark and desperate maritime life he drew on as the devastating heyday of global whaling drew to a close. Whaling also brought significant numbers of Pākehā (foreigners) to Aotearoa, New Zealand, where Black Salt Games is located, most on long voyages from London. Human misery was part of the business, as some whaling ships doubled as prison ships, bringing cargoes of deportees to Australia before whaling in Antarctic waters until their holds were once-again full. The iconic sea shanty “Wellerman (Soon May the Wellerman Come)” dates back to the establishment of the first whaling station in Aotearoa by Joseph-Brooks, George, and Edward Weller. The so-called “Wellermen” were supply ships owned by the brothers, who quickly became the most wealthy family in the region. Today, primary school children in Aotearoa are taught to sing the sea shanty, if not also the “tonguing” in the song’s chorus that refers to the gory process of stripping layers of blubber from a whale’s carcass to be rendered into oil. The “Wellerman” chorus is but a single trace of numberless acts of violence perpetrated against organisms and environments unlucky enough to be rendered into commodities by capitalism.
Music and lyrics to “Wellerman”
Dredge contrasts the overwhelming weight of such violence with the degenerate, queer, and sometimes utterly alien variants you catch in your nets. These mutants seem mostly inedible, but they are irresistibly attractive — worth much more than even the prize specimens of the wholesome seafood they deviate from. There is an instance early in the game when the fishmonger of Greater Marrow kicks you out of his shop to consume one of these queer fish: from outside you hear him thrash and scream, but when you see him again he seems not to remember any of it. Some terrible alchemy is implied, wherein your dangerous and uncanny catches are somehow transmuted into value somewhere else — perhaps in some “dark satanic mill” squeezing them for their otherworldly essence or cutting out some hidden treasure.
Fish lie on a board, gory with blood. Two pairs of hands rest on either side, one pushing paper money.
Greater Marrow, the town where you start the game, seems disconcertingly comfortable with all of these transfigurations. You'll sell more aberrations to the Travelling Merchant, a fellow rootless nomad who somehow shows up with her pontoon wet dock and fishmongery at most of your destinations away from the Marrows. Seeing her again and again at all four corners of the map is uncanny even given her moniker. Is there really only one Traveling Merchant? How does she seem to know where you're going next, and how does she beat you there every time? Are the merchants actually selling mutated fish to be eaten? And, given the fishmonger's violent, traumatic reaction, what nefarious purpose might be behind the mass production and consumption of mutated fish?
Like Dredge, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick interweaves the spectacular violence of the sea with the commodified violence of whaling, particularly as nineteenth-century capitalism attempted to transform every aspect of the environment into an engine of surplus value. Chapter 42 of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” can be read as a particular symptom of the stunted nineteenth-century industrialist imagination as it violently confronted natural spaces not easily subsumed within capitalist exchange. Melville’s character Ishmael surmises that the color white is “not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within.” Melville’s novel portrays a world teeming with the queer phenomena of the sea, twitching and thrashing as a counterpoint to the normative exchanges occurring in nineteenth-century whaling. The notorious Chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand,” showed that such exchanges may have been as queer as the lifeforms the Pequod encounters. When describing the massaging needed to keep spermacetti from coagulating, Ishmael mentions that he “squeezed the sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborer’s hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules.”
The so-called supernatural fright Ishmael associates with whiteness, in fact, could be attributed simply to natural phenomena which resist the normative exchanges of capitalism. Ishmael mentions everything from “the heartless voids and immensities of the universe” to the “pallor of the dead” to white bears, sharks, and albatrosses in addition to more problematic comments about albinism in which an “all-pervading whiteness makes them more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.” There is something tantalizingly queer about the anxieties Ishmael expresses in the “Whiteness” chapter — as if this anxiety could potentially form a path to new ways of living and being. Speaking of “nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints,” Melville exclaims that though much of the “visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” Diving deep into the muck uncovers further mystery, further uncanniness - more and more creatures whose queer bodies do not easily fit into the exchange logic embraced by Ishmael and his shipmates who are otherwise so busy processing whale bodies into oil, spermacetti, baleen, and ambergris.
A whale plunges into the sea with a rowboat in its mouth.
Echoes of the violence of whaling life in Aoetaroa are built into the environment of Dredge, where stories of death and destruction can be found entangled in the wreckage you scavenge in order to advance your quest. Crashed WWI-era American fighter planes litter the Twisted Strand, full of broken boards and metal scrap that you collect. The ruins of a lakeside research lab lie on an island along a small Archipelago called the Stellar Basin, where you reactivate a Repulsion Machine to distract a huge kraken-like creature living in the middle of the Basin. Broken, marooned boats litter the Great and Little Marrow, and you eponymously “dredge” up salvage from shipwrecks in order to enlarge and improve your craft — from a worn-out dingy with a fishing rod to a fish-harvesting monster with powerful engines, a reinforced hull, longlines, trawl nets, and ample storage for a large catch.
The tugboat from Dredge approaches a larger, beached shipwreck.
The whole game reads like so many voyages into the polluted afterlives of capitalism as your fishing boat visits each of the islands. In fact, the entangled themes of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism form central aspects of Dredge’s narrative. While dark magic from an unnervingly sinister Silver and Crimson book pollutes the area and causes mutations in the fish you catch with your line in the game, real-life scientific studies have shown that chemical and toxic waste from contaminants have caused the striped ‘mud minnow’ to evolve to become 8,000 times more resilient to such waste than other fish. Pollution and overfishing are still the greatest threats to real-world ocean ecology, but in Dredge ecological catastrophe hinges upon occult forces unleashed underneath the sea. Two kinds of violence show up in Dredge: one of them is spectacular and linked to the sea monstrosities you encounter in the game, while the other could be described as what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” in which the damage of extracting resources and polluting the air occurs so slowly that it is often not noticed. Slow violence is exemplified in the game by your initially humble fishing boat's growing ability to deplete fish stocks. Dredge is relatively forgiving: completely fished-out locations will recover, given time, but when you use the eldritch spell "Atrophy" to harvest a fishing spot's entire stock, you risk losing it forever. The opposition and connection between these two forms of violence shapes much of the game’s narrative.
Such ruins are complimented by the nomadism, rootlessness, and isolation that is at the heart of Dredge. Most of the communities are small, remote, separated by waters or mountains while families struggle with internal strife and estrangement. Characters are found stranded on most of the islands and several quests are devoted to reuniting them with their family or hometown. The “Hooded Figure” quests feature what look like isolated members of a cult, each asking for a specific type of fish. The quests are timed: if you wait too long to deliver the fish, returning to the hooded figure reveals that they have starved. It is clear that none of the characters, least of all you, belong here. You sleep most nights on your small fishing boat, rarely disembarking except when delivering packages or selling fish. All of your belongings are borrowed, dredged, or otherwise scavenged. The loner sensibility found among most of the characters in Dredge is also a classic and enduring trope in Pākehā literature, especially in its depiction of masculinity. The shadow of the restless spirit of whalers like Ishmael hangs over this version of the "man alone": he does not belong here, this is not his home. Unlike the American "self-made man” or the confidently self-sufficient "lone wolf", Ishmael joins the Pākehā man alone, the stranger in a strange land. After traveling halfway across the world, he is cut off from his roots. But he can also find no purchase in the volcanic soil of Aoetaroa. So he stalks it hopelessly or, like the protagonists of Dredge and Moby Dick, he goes to sea.
A sketch of a whaling vessel and whale on lined paper.
Melville based Moby-Dick off of the perilous journey of the Nantucket whaling vessel The Essex, which sank after being rammed by a sperm whale in 1820. Players of Dredge know all-too-well about random encounters with large fish ramming their seacraft. The survivors of The Essex spent months slowly drifting back to civilization, facing inadequate salt-water-drenched supplies leading to thirst, starvation, exposure, and eventually cannibalism. Historians recount that the crew steered clear of nearby Marquesas and Society Islands because they worried that the inhabitants were cannibals, yet many speculate that more of the crew would have survived had they landed on those islands. Whalers were well-acquainted with so-called cannibals. “[I]n New Bedford,” Ishmael recounts in Chapter 6 of Moby-Dick, “actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare”. Likewise, “cannibal savage” slurs are among the most offensive in contemporary Aotearea — particularly amongst whalers. Neither exposure nor cannibalism occur in Dredge, yet the feeling of overwhelming loneliness, the ingestion of clearly unhealthy fish, and the vertigo of being lost in what seems like an endless expanse are common occurrences in the game.
Perhaps the most terrifying of Dredge’s creatures, the Leviathan, patrols the open ocean surrounding the archipelago where the game occurs. The Leviathan appears only after an ominous message warns the protagonist to not venture too far into oceanic waters: “ENTERING UNCHARTED WATERS. TURN BACK.” The sea rumbles and spiny, reptile-like fins appear at the surface of the water before a monstrous jaw engulfs the fishing boat whole. There is no way to “catch” the Leviathan, nor can any of the various magical powers collected during the game affect the creature. The fact that the “Banish” spell fails to ward off the Leviathan caused some fans to speculate that the great whale is a force of good. This observation lends credence to the Leviathan having more of a connection to the theological monstrosities Melville brought to Moby-Dick than the eldritch horrors of Lovecraft. Functionally a mechanic patrolling the borders of Dredge's gamespace, the Leviathan also becomes one of the most direct references of Melville’s novel in the game. Along with frequent references to the Bible and Thomas Hobbes’s notorious book of political philosophy, the word “leviathan” occurs over 122 times in Moby-Dick. The encounter with the Leviathan in Dredge is quite dramatic, lending many fans to create videos of their startled cries as they are swallowed by the beast. Yet the true Leviathan of Dredge is the slow violence of capitalism, whose relentless extraction of profit from the world promises much more radical transmogrifications than any eldritch spell could make to the creatures, the waters, and the climate.
The Leviathan of Dredge emerges headfirst from the water, surrounded by sea foam.
