Dredge did something most horror games don't dare: it scared people while they were doing chores. You fish, you sell, you upgrade your boat — and the fear creeps in at the edges of an ordinary work loop, in the dark water and the things that move in it. That's a rarer and harder feeling than a jump-scare, and it's why "games like Dredge" is such a specific request. This list, from the team at Tyrian Games, is twelve games that deliver Dredge's particular flavour of quiet, patient, folk-horror dread.
We pay close attention to Dredge because it's one of the games we name when we describe our own. HAWKER is a land-based cousin to it — different loop, same texture — so we've studied what Dredge does about as carefully as anyone outside Black Salt Games. If you specifically want the "Dredge but on land" angle, we wrote that up separately in games like Dredge on land. This piece is the wider folk-horror net.
TL;DR
- Dredge's magic is quiet dread during a work loop — the horror arrives while you're busy, not in scripted scares.
- The closest matches in tone are Mundaun, Pathologic 2, and Darkwood.
- For Dredge's mystery-and-discovery half: Return of the Obra Dinn and The Excavation of Hob's Barrow.
- For the resource-survival-in-an-eerie-place half: Pacific Drive and Darkwood.
- HAWKER (September 2026) takes Dredge's "something is watching you work" feeling onto land, with a day-night cycle where the dark is both your power and your threat.
The twelve
1. Mundaun (Hidden Fields, 2021). The closest tonal sibling to Dredge on this list. Swiss alpine folk horror, hand-pencilled in stark greys, quiet to the point of unnerving. A grandfather's death pulls you into a valley with something wrong in its history. Short, strange, and unforgettable. If you loved Dredge's restraint, start here.
2. Pathologic 2 (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2019). The most uncompromising folk horror in games. A Russian steppe town dying of plague, a clock you can't beat, and systems that punish you for being human. Harder and grimmer than Dredge, and the game that shaped much of the current folk-horror wave. Not comfortable. That's the point.
3. Darkwood (Acid Wizard Studio, 2017). Top-down survival horror where day is for scavenging and night is for surviving whatever comes for your shelter. The day-night split and the dread of the dark make it the structural cousin to both Dredge and, frankly, to us. One of the most genuinely frightening games of the last decade without a single cheap scare.
4. Saturnalia (Santa Ragione, 2022). Sardinian folk horror in a remote village where the streets rearrange and a masked thing hunts you. Roguelite-adjacent in structure — lose all your characters and the map reshuffles — wrapped in a striking ink-and-neon art style. Underplayed and exactly the right tone.
5. The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (Cloak and Dagger Games, 2022). British folk horror in classic point-and-click form. A Victorian antiquarian is summoned to a moorland village to dig where she shouldn't. Slow, literary, and deeply committed to its dread. For the Dredge fan who wants the folklore foregrounded.
6. Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope, 2018). Maritime mystery with a creeping wrongness, told through a logic puzzle aboard a doomed ship. Shares Dredge's sea-dread and its trust that the player will sit with discomfort to solve something. One of the most original games ever made. Our full Obra Dinn list goes deeper.
7. Signalis (rose-engine, 2022). Survival horror on a dead planet, inventory-constrained and bleak. Sci-fi rather than folk, but it shares Dredge's patience and its willingness to let atmosphere do the work. For when you want the dread colder and more clinical.
8. Iron Lung (David Szymanski, 2022). A tiny, claustrophobic horror about piloting a submarine through an ocean of blood on a dead moon, navigating blind by a grainy camera. Sixty terrifying minutes. It distils Dredge's "what's out there in the dark water" feeling into its purest, smallest form.
9. Pacific Drive (Ironwood Studios, 2024). Run-based survival where you scavenge an anomaly-haunted exclusion zone in a station wagon you have to keep repairing. The eerie-place resource loop is pure Dredge energy on the road instead of the sea. See our games like Pacific Drive piece for more.
10. Dredge: The Pale Reach & The Iron Rig (Black Salt Games, 2023–2024). The honest answer to "more Dredge" is more Dredge. The two paid expansions add a frozen north and an industrial rig, both extending the base game's dread into new waters. If you finished the main game and want the same thing slightly colder and stranger, it's right there.
11. Inscryption (Daniel Mullins Games, 2021). Begins in a cabin with a folk-horror menace across the table and becomes something else entirely. Shares Dredge's instinct for dread that hides inside a familiar activity — here, a card game. The less said the better, but folk-horror fans should not miss it.
12. HAWKER (Tyrian Games, September 2026). Ours, and our debt to Dredge is on the record. HAWKER is a folk-horror shopkeeper roguelite set in the fallen Duchy of Ysward, drawing on Breton and Celtic myth. You scavenge ruins by day and survive a combat system that inverts at night, with a debt to Death — Ankou, in the folklore — hanging over a thirty-day clock. Where Dredge put quiet dread on the water, we've tried to put it on land, in the act of stocking a cart and selling to people who may not survive the week. Wishlist on Steam.
What Dredge actually does
It's worth naming the trick precisely, because a lot of games aim for it and miss. Dredge doesn't scare you instead of giving you a loop. It scares you through the loop. The fear and the fun share the same activity. You want to fish one more spot because the upgrades are satisfying, and the wanting is exactly what pulls you out past dark into the water where the dread lives. The game weaponises its own compulsion loop against you. That's the design at the centre, and it's much harder than a haunted-house ride.
The second thing Dredge understands is that dread is a function of restraint. The horror works because the game withholds. You glimpse things. The water suggests rather than shows. A game that resolves its threats — that lets you fight and kill the monster — converts dread into action, and action isn't frightening, it's empowering. Dredge keeps you slightly helpless on purpose, and the helplessness is the horror.
The third is folklore. Dredge's specific creatures and rules feel local, like they belong to that coast and that culture. Generic monsters don't frighten; specific ones do. The most effective folk horror — Mundaun's valley, Pathologic's steppe, Hob's Barrow's moor — is rooted in a real place's myth. That rootedness is what separates folk horror from horror that merely happens outdoors.
Two halves of the Dredge audience
People who loved Dredge usually loved one of two things, and sorting yourself helps.
You loved the dread-during-work loop. Darkwood, Pacific Drive, and HAWKER are your picks. All three put resource survival inside an eerie place and let the fear leak into the routine.
You loved the mystery and the folklore. Return of the Obra Dinn, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, and Mundaun are your picks. All three foreground discovery and place-specific myth over moment-to-moment survival.
If you loved both equally — and Dredge is rare in delivering both — then Mundaun and HAWKER are the two on this list trying hardest to hold the dread loop and the folklore at once.
A first-hand Hawker example
The most important thing Dredge taught us was something we had to remove from HAWKER.
For a long stretch in 2024, our night phase had a jump-scare. When the light meter dropped and the Fallen closed in, we had a creature lunge at the camera with a stinger of sound. It tested fine in the sense that people jumped. It tested terribly in the sense that, after the third or fourth time, people stopped being afraid and started being annoyed. The scare had a shelf life, and once it expired the night just felt like a nuisance instead of a threat. We'd built a haunted-house ride when we wanted a haunting.
We went back to Dredge and Darkwood and tried to articulate why their nights stay frightening for hours. The answer was that they never resolve the fear into a single moment. The dread is ambient and continuous — it lives in the not-knowing, in the edge of the light, in the sound of something moving that you never quite see. So we cut the lunge. We replaced it with a slower, quieter pressure: as you push deeper into the dark for more power, the readability of the world degrades, sounds layer in that may or may not mean something, and the only honest information you have is your own dwindling light. Nobody jumps anymore. Everybody tenses. A tester last winter described the new night as "the feeling of working late in a building you're not sure is empty," and that was the exact sentence we'd been chasing for a year. We owe that correction to Black Salt Games and to Acid Wizard, who understood before we did that the scariest thing a game can do is simply refuse to tell you you're safe. Wishlist HAWKER if a night like that sounds like your idea of a good time.
Why folk horror is quietly thriving
It's worth a short note on why this list could be twice as long now and couldn't have been a decade ago. Folk horror as a games category has grown commercially without ever being marketed as a category — Dredge sold over a million copies in its first year and effectively proved the business case for patient, atmospheric, place-rooted horror. That success pulled investment toward smaller, stranger, more specific projects, which is exactly the soil folk horror needs. You can't make folk horror at blockbuster scale; the genre depends on a specific place's myth told with restraint, and restraint doesn't survive a hundred-person committee. So the category lives where it should: with small teams who can afford to be peculiar. That's good news for players, because peculiarity is the whole point, and it's good news for studios like ours, because the audience for the strange has never been easier to reach.
FAQ
What game is most like Dredge?
Mundaun, for tone — quiet, hand-crafted folk horror with the same restraint. For the dread-during-a-work-loop structure specifically, Darkwood and Pacific Drive are the closest.
Is there a game like Dredge but on land?
Yes — that's exactly the niche HAWKER aims for, and we wrote a dedicated list of land-based Dredge alternatives.
Is Dredge scary?
It's dread-based rather than jump-scare-based. The fear is atmospheric and continuous rather than sudden, which many players find more unsettling and more lasting.
Is HAWKER like Dredge?
In texture, yes — quiet folk-horror dread arriving through a resource loop. HAWKER differs by being land-based, combat-forward, and built around a thirty-day debt rather than open-ended fishing.
Are there folk-horror games with co-op?
Most of the best folk horror is single-player by design, because the genre depends on isolation. Darkwood and a few others offer limited multiplayer mods, but solitude is part of the effect.
The bottom line
Dredge proved that the scariest place a game can put you is inside your own compulsion loop, out past dark, doing one more bit of work you know you shouldn't. The twelve above each capture a piece of that — the restraint, the folklore, the dread-during-routine. Several are short. All are worth a quiet evening with the lights low.
And if you want that feeling on land, with a cart to stock and a debt that won't wait, we're building it for September.
Next read: Games like Dredge on land, or Best grimdark games on Steam 2026.