Just like with the narwhal itself, what your mind creates to fill the gaps between what is shown is worse than any concrete truth. There’s never any grand revelation as to what the sailors actually heard beneath the ice, leaving your imagination to do the work - which is why showing instead of telling is so powerful. ![]() Once you've tracked down the requisite hatches and hacked them free, they disappear into a wisp-like form, and purge one of the narwhal’s threatening eyes. it senses"), maybe answering some of your questions but creating as many more. The trapped mariners whisper strange fractions of sentences to you ("do not. Normal things from a normal fishing game. The DLC's larger plot, such as it is, is anchored around freeing four trapped souls from their own ice crystals, each of which heard a mysterious voice whispering to them from underneath the ice itself. There were never any immediate answers about Bloodborne’s horrific monsters like the Blood-Starved Beast, and The Pale Reach does that perfectly, too. You could stare for hours at The Pale Reach’s encased narwhal and similarly be at a loss for what’s happened to it - and because it’s unlike anything we’ve seen in the base game, it’s immediately fascinating and captivating. It’s really boring, and dispels any mystery - which Dredge thankfully preserves by withholding all the finer details.īloodborne had you looking up to the sky to see a creature with six spindly arms and spidery eyes on its head just perching on the side of a church, or mangled body parts congealing into one moaning boss in The One Reborn’s fight. Just look at the finale of Resident Evil Village, for example: the final hour includes a room that contains heaps of documents from the game’s villain, all of which spell out in crystal clear detail how and why everything happened in the game. Recently horror games, and arguably games in general, bloody love spelling everything out to you, in some cases literally. Abrams subscribed to with Lost, setting up more unsolved questions than he ever planned to answer by the time the final credits rolled (your mileage may vary with the Smoke Monster, but you can't argue with Lost's results re. How long has it actually been frozen there? The eyes seem unnatural, almost like a parasitic growth, and if so, what did the whale do to get infected? The Pale Reach purposefully doesn’t answer any of these questions, because, of course, the mystery is more intriguing than the answer - something J.J. Part of the fun of Bloodborne’s brilliant cosmic horror was running smack into some new monstrosity and muttering “what the fuck is that?”, and The Pale Reach captures that feeling sublimely via the big old narwhal.Īs you look at it, you wonder what the narwhal did to end up effectively beached on a giant ice platter in the middle of the ocean. The creature looks almost as beautiful as it is intriguing, gross at the same time as you're drawn to understand it. If you showed me artwork of the big narwhal and said it was a cut Bloodborne feature, I’d probably believe you. It calls to mind some of the best game design of the last decade. ![]() Four angry eyes on one side of its head, to be very precise. 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. 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. Every path into the landmass is barricaded by imposing ice walls. ![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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.
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