Just like an actual ocean, Dave The Diver is beautiful at first glance, but then you dive into it to find a vast, wonderful world to explore just beneath the surface. This waterlogged adventure manages to exceed the expectations of an already hilarious premise with some of the most irresistible exploration, sim management, and minigames I’ve seen in a long time, and which kept me completely glued to my seat for far more hours than I’d ever intended. With characters and a story that are deceptively substantial and more content packed into it than I could have anticipated, Dave The Diver never stopped surprising me. If you would have told me that one of the best games I’d play this year, standing alongside juggernauts with mega-million-dollar budgets, would end up being a retro indie RPG where you play as an obese SCUBA diver who runs a sushi shop…I would have believed you, actually. That sounds awesome. And it is.
Dave The Diver’s story focuses on a loveable group of coworkers turned friends who open a sushi bar near the mysterious Blue Hole: a seemingly magical stretch of water known to change its terrain and aquatic ecosystem every day. You play as the titular Dave himself, a rotund, soda-chugging diver who begrudgingly caters to the whims of everyone in his life, including the occasional bossy sea creature. What follows is an endearingly silly tale involving a secret society of merfolk, some really aggressive wildlife-protection enthusiasts, and dozens of people making very rude comments about your character’s weight.
But while it comes off a bit shallow at first, the story shockingly develops into something more substantial, with characters that are far more complex than their pixelated faces initially suggest. Even after more than 30 hours I still find myself eager to spend time with the likes of Bancho, the stoic, fearless sushi chef, and Duff, the anime-obsessed, neck-bearded gunsmith. It certainly helps that many characters are given extremely amusing and memorable cutscenes every time you interact with them, like one where Bancho traumatizes a fish with his knife-sharpening skills or where Duff elegantly dives into a swimming pool to test out a newly crafted weapon. I’ve seen them all dozens of times at this point, and yet I refuse to skip them – they’re just that good.
But this is not just an amusing adventure RPG; it comes with a surprisingly deep restaurant-management sim baked into it. You’ll split your time between diving into the dangerous depths of the Blue Hole to hunt for fish and supplies, battle wet foes, and complete quests while also managing a sushi shop by crafting recipes, cooking, hiring and training employees, and dealing with an extremely fussy clientele.
Diving into the Blue Hole is where the literal and figurative meat of the adventure happens: you’ll use a harpoon, guns, and nets to capture and kill fish to be turned into sushi, and explore ever deeper, inevitably leading to action-packed confrontations with aggressive sharks, navigating ancient ruins filled with simple puzzles, and fighting off over-the-top bosses like a massive hermit crab using a monster truck as a shell. Tracking down and collecting all manner of sea life is a compelling and Zen-like game of hide and seek where you’re rewarded for bringing your quarry down with as little brute force as possible by mastering Dave The Diver’s simple but satisfying combat.
Swimming around with guns blazing like a savage brute will get the job done quickly, but your shoddy work yields minimal usable resources for your restaurant. Using your harpoon – or better yet, nets or tranquilizer darts – to bring fish in alive is much more beneficial, but trickier. That tradeoff gives you plenty of ways to succeed, depending on your preference and what you think you can pull off with the tools you’re given.
Sometimes you’ll get swarmed by a whole school of small, hungry biters, while other times a lone narwhal will come barreling at you to impale you on its spiral tusk; you never know what vicious wildlife lurks in the Blue Hole’s depths. Dodging out of the way and fighting back is usually easy enough, so long as you aren’t an overburdened sitting duck, but mastering the angles, navigating the environment, and choosing which weapon to bring with you (you only get one per dive) will significantly impact your options.
You might prefer an awesome long-range sniper rifle that does high damage but has extremely limited ammo, or you might prefer to get up close and personal with your prey using a shotgun that requires less of that overrated aiming. Or, if you’re feeling particularly brave, you might try to bring down your enemies with a tranquilizer dart gun and extract a giant shark to your boat while it snoozes for a few moments – a tall order that requires some serious finesse and can get you killed fast. There’s lots of different ways to play, and although it always amounts to the same pattern of dodging, shooting, and swimming away from your pursuer, it allows for quite a bit of creativity and usually leads to some pretty amusing hijinks.
Fighting silly, enormous bosses and solving simple press-that-switch-to-open-the-path puzzles offers a nice change of pace from spearfishing, even if both are too easy to provide any kind of meaningful challenge (and no difficulty options are available to bump it up). There’s definitely some very cool novelty in taking down a giant squid at the bottom of the ocean, but since nearly every boss can be killed (very quickly) by learning their pattern and hitting them three times, the break from the norm is usually short-lived. Similarly, while the plot developments that are usually involved in story-heavy puzzle sections are usually worth the trouble, the actual puzzles are mostly effortless busywork, like a few sections where you redirect beams of light off of mirrors but the solutions become obvious literally the moment you see them.
In between dives you’ll make worthwhile upgrades to your gear that make your excursions more profitable and improve your combat effectiveness. There are tons of useful stuff like making your oxygen tank bigger, refining your swimsuit so you can dive deeper, increasing your inventory space, and crafting and upgrading your weapons to deal more damage and apply status effects like poison and, nonsensically, fire to your underwater foes. All of these require increasing quantities of resources generated by capturing fish and driving up profits from your sushi business, and it creates a loop that is truly hard to walk away from. I can’t tell you how many times I promised myself “One more dive,” before then rationalizing to myself, “Well, I gotta wrap up the day at the sushi stop, then I’ll stop,” then repeating those empty promises for hours on end.
Throughout all of your exploration you’ll need to keep a close eye on your oxygen tank, which smartly doubles as your life bar and your carry load limiter, drastically slowing you down when you bag too many fish and other treasures to easily carry back to the surface. Early on, that meant I often found quite a bit of challenge when faced with fish of prey, as one or two false moves could leave my oxygen nearly depleted as I desperately tried to get to the surface in time. Meanwhile, my greed for rare fish and supplies often forced my encumbrance beyond my maximum, leaving me sluggishly floundering around and jeopardizing my entire run – being spotted by a giant shark while over-encumbered is always a bit dicey.
When you run out of oxygen you don’t actually drown, but you return to the surface with only a single measly item from your haul that you are allowed to choose to take with you. This makes failure quite high-stakes – especially since you (annoyingly) can’t save in the middle of runs, which could mean you lose a half hour of progress with a single death due to some rookie mistake you should have known better than to make. The limitations of your oxygen tank and carry load also ensure that you’ll regularly need to emerge from your watery paradise, but that’s not annoying at all because it leads to interactions with the other fantastic half of Dave The Diver’s world: restaurant management.