Transcript: Dredge is filled with archaeology. It’s a cozy fishing game, but the layers go a lot deeper. The Lovecraftian themes are all there, with an eldritch monster in the sea chasing the player if they are caught out at night. The game is relatively simple and doesn’t take long to finish, but there are wrecked ruins, a researcher stranded on an island, and mysteries to uncover. The main quest of the game has a shadowy figure named the Collector sending the player to find a group of artifacts that were lost. The player uses their fishing boat to do so, traveling from pool to pool to earn money by fishing, as well as dredging up old shipwrecks to find these older artifacts.

Ocean archaeology in real life is more important and a bigger part of the field than people realize in general. Interesting ethics and complex laws are involved - particularly due to international treasure laws. The most common place underwater archaeology takes place, therefore, is the Mediterranean due to how the laws regulate what kind of treasure can be found and where it goes. More organized archaeological expeditions exist as well, many of which either find ancient shipwrecks or try to recover debris from military operations.

However, underwater archaeology in places like cenotes and caves in Central and South America are one of the main places where underwater exploration has led to some amazing discoveries, including very old human remains. Now, players are not digging up human remains in Dredge, but they are discovering the story of a missing man and woman. They are finding ancient artifacts scattered across the sea floor, analyzing them and determining what happened to the people who last had them.

It’s an interesting narrative in terms of treasure hunting versus archaeology as well. The game has players selling trinkets and fish alike, with only some of the artifacts going to the Collector (or keeping them for yourself). The player slowly uncovers the history of the archipelago, all the while eldritch horrors are chasing them. It’s a fun gameplay loop, that can sometimes be surprisingly stressful, with the archaeological twist.

But back to the treasure hunting. Shows or documentaries focused on a team trying to uncover something underwater or in a remote area are extremely popular. The Curse of Oak Island is one of them. All of them are ostensibly treasure hunters, who care more about the potential monetary value or celebrity status rather than having an archaeological motive. As our character in Dredge is just trying to survive, there is not much in the way of motive for the character to treat the artifacts more like an academic would. However, they sort of do. They keep the more ancient artifacts and attempt to use clues to decipher them. This gives a combination of both treasure hunting and archaeology, although if someone in real life does both, they probably will end up getting fired.

In general, the archaeological community frowns upon treasure hunting, as it typically removes any context an object was found in and rarely if ever ends up in a setting where it can be academically researched and preserved. So this mixture is an interesting one, and at first it would seem innocuous, the protagonist is just trying to survive after all, before the game ends and the player realizes that the Collector has been them all along. It’s a weird time loop, and it turns out the player wasn’t just there to survive off of a fishing income.

The Collector lost his wife to an accident after bringing up an ancient casket from the sea floor - another nod to Lovecraftian archaeology. In this case, however, he was clearly there to dredge up treasure. He did not have an academic interest. However, after that, in an effort to bring his wife back, he did develop an academic desire in the artifacts, wanting to learn all he could. He even has a Book of the Dead, a fairly clear reference to the Necronomicon.

This is a change in the way he approaches it, but it still doesn’t change the fact that it is purely for personal gain. While that was true for a large portion of time where it concerned archaeology, modern standards are different, and recording as much context and as much information as possible are now the way dig sites are run. All in all, Dredge presents an interesting and unique way to look at archaeology, particularly within the Lovecraftian genre.