ENTRY 23: THE DREDGE
"A twisted abomination too disturbing to bear, The Dredge's malevolence is palpable. All light slowly drains in its presence, surrounding Survivors in darkness. Using lockers as map-wide gateways, it can emerge at any moment, seemingly everywhere at once."
LORE SUMMARY: The Fold was a private community created on an island in the 1960's, intended by its new-age founders to be a peaceful utopia "free from dark thoughts." Its leader, Otto Stamper, enforced a daily regiment of meditation and positive thinking, while ruthlessly "banishing" anyone who didn't fit his perfect vision.
The harder they tried to weed out the undesirable, the more a mysterious darkness began to encroach into their spiritual subconscious, and residents began to disappear one by one. Blaming the hypothetical presence of "malcontents," Otto only escalated his totalitarian control, convincing them that they were under attack from a dark entity known as the Druanee, confining them to their homes and even forbidding them from sleep until the threat would supposedly pass.
While his followers went mad with fear and exhaustion, it was an outsider Journalist who finally attempted to expose the truth: that Otto was in fact part of a far larger, far more ancient cult, one that sacrificed people in droves to its alien deity. He had in fact never "banished" anyone, but had them all tortured and killed.
Otto slaughtered the journalist in front of his gathered followers, assuring them that she was a dangerous liar working with the secret evildoers in their midst. The supernatural darkness that had been building within them reached a boiling point, and they erupted into an orgy of violence that left no survivors, except for Otto, who had fulfilled his service to his god. The Druanee had never been real, but the mass sacrifice brought the entity to life, and within moments of emerging from the aftermath, the new being disappeared to some other, unknown realm...
LORE SUMMARY: The Fold was a private community created on an island in the 1960's, intended by its new-age founders to be a peaceful utopia "free from dark thoughts." Its leader, Otto Stamper, enforced a daily regiment of meditation and positive thinking, while ruthlessly "banishing" anyone who didn't fit his perfect vision.
The harder they tried to weed out the undesirable, the more a mysterious darkness began to encroach into their spiritual subconscious, and residents began to disappear one by one. Blaming the hypothetical presence of "malcontents," Otto only escalated his totalitarian control, convincing them that they were under attack from a dark entity known as the Druanee, confining them to their homes and even forbidding them from sleep until the threat would supposedly pass.
While his followers went mad with fear and exhaustion, it was an outsider Journalist who finally attempted to expose the truth: that Otto was in fact part of a far larger, far more ancient cult, one that sacrificed people in droves to its alien deity. He had in fact never "banished" anyone, but had them all tortured and killed.
Otto slaughtered the journalist in front of his gathered followers, assuring them that she was a dangerous liar working with the secret evildoers in their midst. The supernatural darkness that had been building within them reached a boiling point, and they erupted into an orgy of violence that left no survivors, except for Otto, who had fulfilled his service to his god. The Druanee had never been real, but the mass sacrifice brought the entity to life, and within moments of emerging from the aftermath, the new being disappeared to some other, unknown realm...
We're finally here! Released in 2022, the Dredge was actually the very first Killer with a completely non-human design and the first to ever really pique my interest in playing the game myself! It still took me three more years to actually get around to that, during which the Singularity and Unknown were also released, so it's good to know I wasn't the only one who wanted more bona-fide creatures to play with. When I first set to do these reviews, in fact, the Dredge was still my undeniable #1 favorite addition and would have been the final day...but one more cutie patootie was added in September that just narrowly took over the top spot.
I've still been a little more prone to pick the Dredge when I play, because I really like both of its abilities; scattered around every map in the game are lockers that survivors can use as hiding places, but the Dredge is the first killer that can not only hide in these itself, but teleport between them across any distance! What's more, these and other Dredgely activities build up a special charge for Dredge's exclusive "nightfall" effect, which plunges the whole map into near darkness for survivors, but lights them up like shiny beacons for you, the Dredge, because why wouldn't you be the Dredge? Look at its FACE!!!
That lovable fetus-lamprey visage really completes what is otherwise a more grimdark and chaotic design; its body is just a big, sopping heap of bloody skulls, broken bones, twisted limbs and mangled flesh with a couple of asymmetrical, elongated claw arms, all sitting atop a billowing cloud of pure black smoke.
Also intriguing are the additional limbs that emerge from Dredge's shadow-body, specifically during its "mori" animation (the special opportunity to kill a survivor yourself, rather than sacrifice it to the entity). These include a number of stretchier human arms that mercilessly stab its victim with multiple knives, but the prey is ultimately dragged inside by two chunky, raptorial Arthropod limbs, a visual connection to the entity itself or a hint of what a "Druanee" actually looks like beneath the outer form it's adapted?
The backstory is also just epic enough for the game's first playable Cosmic Horror, but like the Trapper, there's a "generic" quality here that only works in its favor. It's the physical manifestation of an entire community's collective fear, terror and madness, born from the fresh carrion of their final brutal frenzy, and that is 100% what it looks like. A living embodiment of scariness that lurks in the dark is the most fundamental monster there could ever possibly be, the original real-world starting point for Spooky Critters who used to get names like "bogeys" and "spookums" hundreds of years ago. Dredge's "lore" concept may go into highly specific detail, yes, but its role as a character is more or less to represent the very dictionary definition of "monster."
BEST SKIN(S):
"MEMORY OF MAURICE:" So Maurice is a three-eyed horse you can find sitting around in The Clown's caravan map, evidently adored by the player base. When the Dredge was released, Maurice disappeared, and every so often one can see a horse head pop out of Dredge's mass. The idea that it absorbed Maurice is creative, but fans were not having it. Maurice was eventually restored, but Dredge also received an all-Maurice horse-headed skin. Now, technically, you guys have more Maurice than ever.
"MYCELIUM NIGHTMARE:" a lovely fungus-themed skin, with all sorts of different mushrooms and puffballs replacing Dredge's various skulls and tumors, as well as some sundews, which are plant life and not fungi, but they certainly look nice, and sundews are seldom ever acknowledged in our media! I'm not as personally big on the humanlike corpse face as I would have been a more "alien" or even faceless mushroom head, but that's just my personal tastes talking; it's objectively gorgeously designed and cool as heck. CLOSEUP:
"CRUSTACEAN THREAT:" I love the idea of this skin, completely made of crab parts, seaweed and other oceanic flotsam with basically an entire adorable crab for a head! I will say the final model for this one, when compared to its original fan-submitted concept art, feels a little muddled and hard to read, but a pile of crabs is a pile of crabs, and a pile of crabs are welcome in all non-medical contexts.
"UNWANTED TOY:" playing with Dredge's "nightmare entity" aspect, this design is comprised of colorful, cartoony, googly-eyeballed monster anatomy to resembling something more out of a child's imagination. The "mouth" also seems to be nothing but a shallow socket containing one smaller, more natural looking reptilian eye, so one wonders if any of the other eyes are real or functional at all.
"FROSTY THE NIGHTMARE:" a cheerful winter frostsmases skin! Dredge becomes a chaotic mess of sticks and snow to make Calvin proud, and I really like the originality of the head, with nothing but two black twigs protruding just about its saw-toothed mouth, as if its eyes were "stabbed out" by its sculptor, or perhaps the Dredge doesn't know how a snowman is supposed to work and just needed a couple of horns or antennas more than it needed a couple of coal or pebble eyeballs. It's such a simple design choice, but it goes a long way to make a Scary Snowman unlike any other Scary Snowman I've ever seen! GREAT job!
"TWISTED PLAYTHING:" one of Dredge's most striking and unsurprisingly popular outfits is made entirely of baby doll parts! The body is the expected mish-mash blob of doll limbs and heads, the eyes of which look around and blink by the way, while the main head is more carefully designed for optimal weirdness:
MY SUGGESTIONS:
An Insect Skin, Dredge Edition: even more obvious than it is for Hux, and an excuse to go all out with different insects or other Arthropoda. A mantis claw, a scorpion's tail, a hornet's abdomen, hairy tarantula legs, maybe even fringes of beautiful butterfly wings? I'd nominate an entire (very hungry) caterpillar for the head... lobster moth larvae practically look like the Dredge already!
Enlarged Human Facial Features: it's made of bloodied corpse-chunks by default, but how gnarly would it be if it were a mass of warped, exaggerated "living" body parts? Huge ears, noses, tongues, fingers and glistening eyes with a patchwork of perfectly healthy skin tones would honestly be much more upsetting than the gore.
A Giger Tribute: yes, Giger's xenomorph is already in the game, but the Dredge is begging for an oily biomechanical exoskeleton of its own, isn't it?
Stuffed Toys and Puppets: the "Unwanted Toy" evokes colorful plushes already, yes, but this would be more like a mass of different cute, colorful stuffed animal parts, like a bunch of muppets sewn together, and then the head, stay with me here, is just a giant sock puppet. Tell me Dredge's head isn't already begging for a sock over it.
