Dave the Diver (2023)

Expected to the seafood filler between other games, Dave The Diver instead became its own wondrous haven from the world - and most importantly, a haven whose wonders I could share with my son.

DTD is emblematic of what can be done when independent designers are given faith and funding. Many of the game's systems are simple - quicktime events, spamming one button, endless minigames - but there are so very many of them, and all in harmony.

Most of all, DTD is just a vibe. The designers have captured the awe-inspiring complexity of the ocean, the importance of conserving it, and the realities of fishing itself (i.e. killing). Yeah, you gotta kill the fish to eat 'em, but Dave's form of fishing is the video game equivalent of pole-and-line fishing. The soundtrack is a comforting pulse under your deep sea explorations and battles with oceanic leviathans.

Sharing this with my son really enhanced the experience, but even when he wasn't there to ask questions about the animals, I loved being in the moment. The photography aspect is pretty special, nestling a mini-Pokemon Snap into the larger game. And the end-game content? Seemingly endless.

Love this, love the team, can't wait to see what's next.

El minijuego de pesca se revela y tiene su propio juego, y como venganza se llena a su vez de sus propios minijuegos. Es un juego que está bien, es disfrutón y es bastante gracioso por momentos. Lástima la duración que es algo exagerada y se acaba haciendo monótono hacia el final, junto que a mi me ha parecido que te exige un farmeo excesivo. A destacar la gran cantidad de mecánicas, minijuegos y vídeos que aporta, todas muy fresquitas pero que te acaban agobiando por la cantidad y el continuo chorreo de las mismas.

Words can't describe how much fun i had playing Dave The Diver. It's a very unique and charming game filled with lots of activities that won't let you get a feeling of it being repetitive, some of these mini-games will probably surprise and catch you off guard. Characters are very likable, story is quite intriguing. Sound design and visual presentation are also on point.

Dave The Diver turned out to be so much more than just a cute pixelated game about diving that i expected it to be, and i would love going back in time just to experience it again. Highly recommended pretty much for anyone, you won't regret it.

Enjoy shooting fish underwater? Ever wanted to open up a sushi restaurant? Keep a bunch of fish in an aquarium? Dave the Diver scratches a lot of unique itches....

I don't think I should get dunked on calling this an indie game because it's designed like one, but no, this is no homebrew. IT is however, a game that encapsulates pretty much every kind of indie sort of design, gameplay feature, and aesthetic and art style you I can imagine. Dave the Diver has a surprisingly large amount of content and stuff bolted into it as you make your way through it and unlock everything in the usual roguelike fashion. I absolutely loved this game just about down to every detail.

The cutscenes in this were some of the best ever I thought. You'll also enjoy occasionally learning facts and info about sushi and fish via dialogued scenes

However, a lot of the stuff in the game still needs some work. Seahorse races need some improvement. The gameplay loop also does get repetitive. The balance and economy feels good, but it's tough to actually math out the optimal R&D-to-cash stream without just maxing out everything and then even. its not clear what you should focus on. There are way more guns and weapons that you can research than you'd use... Playing this without a guide will take you a LOT longer than to complete it with a guide. I'm not sure if that's something to fault a game for, but that's about my only complaint.

Loop Hero is very similar to this game in it's repeat-and-go-again design and resource burning upgrade system (and would recommend one if you like the other (though the genre/gameplay is different)

I have a friend who enjoyed this as well and stated that there is a trend of emerging Day/Night Management cycle games like this. Cool.

I picked up a bunch of stuff from the steam sale. A couple of weeks ago this was the first one I decided to try.

Narrative

You are Dave, you are a diver. You are roped into a scheme by a guy named Cobra to open a restaurant next to an ecological miracle called the blue hole. This patch of water changes everyday and has a dense variety of fish. Your job is getting fish to use in the sushi restaurant.

Gameplay

This game consists of you diving during the day into the blue hole. Catching fish and other sea creatures, and at night you help run a sushi restaurant. You are the server and you set the menu. You manage the restaurant and can later hire additional staff and decorate the place etc.

Besides this you meet a lot of new friends. Some of these can help you upgrade equipment, others are obsessed with catching all fish, and another one wants you to make pictures of rare fish.

Then there is a big adventure you embark on that has nothing to do with sushi. There is minigames as well. Not going into too many spoilers, the gameplay of this game is extremely varied. It does nothing exceptional, but it does everything well and the variety makes it really fun.

Setting

You are next to the blue hole, most of the time on a boat. There is a sushi restaurant you can decorate yourself. I really enjoyed the underwater scenery, I think the pixel art is really well done. It also has some amazing cutscenes. There is a lot of variety, a lot of different things to see. I really enjoyed it. The music is also quite memorable. I hope they put it on Spotify, would be great as background music for working.

Other

This game did almost lose me. At the beginning the variety is not really there yet, and I started to get a bit bored. But just in time a new mechanic was introduced, a new place as well. From this point on I was hooked (hehe, get it?).

Conclusion

This was a really fun experience I finished within a week or two. I didn't 100% it, there is still a lot to collect, but this is usually not something I do. But for the collectors out there, still plenty to do post-game. It took me about 25 hours to finish the main story and get to the ending credits. I think a decent length. It kept me entertained throughout all of it.

This was a really nice (and surprisingly long) experience.

What started as a kinda simply fishing game mixed with a restaurant minigame ended as a mix of elements of a dozen genres: roguelite, RPG, stealth, survival, resources management, minigames, farming sim and Tamagotchi. Does that sounds like a nightmare? Worry not. Dave the Diver knows what's really important and keeps the focus on the submarine exploration and fishing, making everything else kinda easy to manage.

That said, not all the elements it has really work. Do we really need a Tamagotchi in this game? Not at all. That's a ridiculous filler.

Anyway, here's my full review in spanish.

I have to complain about something tho. I HATED the way other characters misjudge Dave because of his body shape and mock him. The stereotypical otaku and the villains being an shady ecological organizations sucks too.

I am definitely not the target audience for this game. I rarely play RPGs, sim/management games, or roguelites. I decided to give it a shot after seeing amazing reviews, and I was really blown away.. at first. The game does many things perfectly, and yet the longer I played it the more I lost all interest.

The entire concept is great, deep sea exploration that’s perfectly integrated into a restaurant sim, with tons of mini games and missions. It kept feeling like “what new mechanic is the game going to introduce?” Everything has a ton of polish, between the sweet smart phone UI to the humorous cut scenes punctuating every upgrade and event.

Yet, these systems grow extremely stale. The underwater exploration is really cool for a couple days, but gets increasingly mind numbing. The restaurant was one of my favorite parts, but you’re only there 10% of the time. The missions and mini-games and puzzles feel geared towards children, there’s rarely a challenge. It just felt like, after getting drip-fed all the cool mechanics and polish, there’s nothing left to the game. No real sense of challenge, a monotonous story, and just nothing to keep me going.

I stuck through to the end, and came to this conclusion: the game masterfully showed how to bend and combine genres. It weaves together roguelite exploration, management sim, RPG, and warioware gameplay into a cohesive story. But the parts themselves? Pretty boring.

Again, I’m not the target audience. Maybe people will feel the mechanics are perfectly fine, but I didn’t get much out of them. I still think it’s a groundbreaking game, but I hope it will inspire a more fruitful and rewarding experience by another dev in the future.