Dave the Diver is the kind of title where you have to be careful as an editor: To describe this game – currently still in Early Access on Steam – exactly along the bones of its features would result in a long list that nobody would want to read. It’s a simple, yet layered game of lots of nice, uplifting little things. Discovering these is actually your job, not mine. I’m just here to tell you if it’s worth jumping in the water – or maybe to give you the last kick.
And I’m very much inclined to do so here, because Dave the Diver is an incredibly likeable title – if you don’t find the pixelated, stylized harpoon fishing of exotic sea creatures for gastronomic purposes too cynical. This genre mix is particularly surprising in that it is constantly changing, shifting your focus and thus keeping you in the dark as to where the journey is going at all. But where it starts is already enlightening…
As obese diver Dave, you get a call from your buddy Cobra, who has taken up residence at the Blue Hole, a patch of sea that seems to change with every dive. On the lagoon beach, he has opened a restaurant with sushi master Bancho, to which you are supposed to deliver the ingredients. So you dive with underwater rifle and harpoon in the side view, pay attention to your oxygen supply and load of fish and lost property and – if you run out of air – drag everything onto the boat.
The tank on your back serves as life energy, attacks by dangerous sea creatures cost air instead of health and so a dive that is considered safe suddenly becomes a tremor (eel) when your breathing apparatus suddenly sounds the alarm. If the canister is empty, you will pass out and have to be rescued. You lose everything you have collected up to that point, except for one item. Quest items and discoveries that advance the story are wisely exempt from this.
In places, there are very short QTEs when it comes to triggering a specific weapon ability, catching a stubborn fish faster, or dodging a shark’s jaws. But that’s all done quite nicely and actually loosens up the action a bit. Because it’s always different depending on the situation, it actually doesn’t seem obtrusive in the slightest, even though I haven’t liked QTEs for a long time. You can do two dives a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, before diving into the remaining third of Dave the Diver.
And that is the management of the restaurant and the management of the guests. You hire waitresses and cooks, put together the menu fresh every day, send people to training courses, buy new equipment and so on. All in a simple manner, a few clicks, little thought, but with enough depth that you wouldn’t wish it could be automated. And then you unlock the doors and play a service mini-game that’s extremely simple, but sweaty.
Serving tea, delivering ready meals, clearing plates, grating wasabi and above all: keeping track of what needs to be done first and what is feasible. Everything is kept fairly flat, of course, but it rarely lasts longer than two minutes. And the better you do it, the more money goes into the till, which you can use to buy upgrades for diving again. It’s very cleverly structured how the different parts of the game challenge and encourage each other.
And so the spiral starts to rotate better and better. Every few minutes you can complete a task, improve something and thereby earn more money. Or finally get enough good reviews on Cooksta to hire a second chef. You can even like visitors’ posts. And again and again, strange characters come to you with requests, new tools or fresh story arcs.
It’s extremely addictive and hard to put down because you keep hitting small milestones. Especially since the game isn’t stingy with details either: The fish themselves have different rarities, but how brutally or gently you catch them also seems to have an impact on the quality of your catch. And I’m not entirely sure if that’s true yet, but I’d be surprised if the weather didn’t have an impact on certain things as well. Why else would Dave have a weather app on his interactive phone?
Another component that keeps the game interesting is the story, which has a few wild twists and turns and is presented in a visually very pretty and sometimes even impressive way. What begins as a game of skill increasingly invites you to adventurous exploration, paddling along and wondering what else you’ll see. But I don’t want to reveal too much here. All in all, the style is particularly captivating, which combines colourful, early 3D with handsome sprites for the human characters and simply exudes a sunny holiday feeling. The music, from relaxed to tense, is a compliant accomplice. Everything is relaxed above water, but things get pretty mysterious under water.
You may have noticed: I like Dave the Diver. A lot. Diving and exploring the blue depths itself has always been one of my favorite mechanics anyway, and how this is mixed with a mystery story and sleek, humorous restaurant management is fresh and great. Despite early access, the title is already playing very well and feels relatively complete after a good five to six hours. If the mix sounds energizing to you, I encourage you to take the plunge.
Dave the Diver is available on Steam for $19.99
