Dredge is an eldritch fishing adventure that succeeds in feeling both serene and deeply unnerving thanks to some smart design choices by developer Black Salt Games. Taking to the stage at GCAP 2023 to explain how the team achieved that feat, the studio's 3D art director Michael Bastiaens says they intentionally sought to make Dredge "unsettling" rather than leaning into full-blown "jump scare" horror.
"We wanted to leave things to the player's imagination more than anything else, because it felt like people came up with the weirdest conjurations in their own mind before we'd even introduced the monsters or any of the scary events," explains Bastiaens. "Once you actually start seeing the monsters, they almost lose their impact. So we had to do a lot of things to keep those experiences fresh or put a twist on them."
Read our write-up of the full talk, which goes over the techniques the team used to maintain the game's sense of mystery, over at Game Developer.