Dredge was pretty weird to begin with. The indie hit somehow melded fishing with cosmic horror - seamlessly - to create an enthralling adventure where you can never be sure if what you're about to haul out of the depths will have a normal amount of eyes or tentacles. The new Pale Reach DLC gets even weirder, a masterpiece of show-don’t-tell horror that manages to evoke some of the more inspired Bloodborne monsters as well as some of icy, supernatural scares from The Terror. And it's all centred on a big whale.
Spoilers ahead, friends, but in The Pale Reach, a massive icy landscape has suddenly appeared in the southern, well, reaches of Dredge's world, so naturally we’re off to see what that’s all about, ploughing along in our faithful fishing boat to the hostile new climate. Every path into the landmass is barricaded by imposing ice walls. It's a slog.
It’s also a great setup. We're made to instantly wonder what the hell hides in this treacherous ice field, and the answer is equally great: a massive corrupted narwhal with bulbous glowing eyes. The huge beast dwarfs your tiny ship, but mercifully it’s frozen solid in an even bigger chunk of ice, with only those very angry eyes poking out at us. Four angry eyes on one side of its head, to be very precise.