"Dave the Diver" Review

Publisher: MINTROCKET

Developer: MINTROCKET

Available for: MacOS, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

I don't want to seem too predictable...but given that my favorite Far Cry game is Far Cry 3, my favorite Assassin's Creed game is Black Flag, and that I gave Dredge a 10/10, would it be any surprise to say that I absolutely adored Dave the Diver? I love my tropical settings, I love my ocean adventures, I love the fish/shrimp in the 6 aquariums I own, so it's perhaps an easy call to make. So, yeah. I like Dave the Diver a lot. Let's get into it!

In Dave the Diver, you step in the rotund diving boots of the titular Dave: a morbidly obese diver who is called to a mysterious location called the "Deep Blue Hole" in an ambiguous Asian locale by a friend. This location, for unexplained reasons, is home to vastly diverse swaths of marine wildlife from all locations, temperature preferences, and overall environmental details. What's more, the layout of the blue hole and the denizens dwelling therein never seem to be the same in any given dive. For this reason, Dave's friend decides to open up a sushi restaurant on the shore to make the most of this variety. With a world-class chef already lined up, Dave takes up not just the responsibility of catching fresh fish to feed the restaurant's hungry customers, but also managerial duties such as hiring staff, training staff, selecting the menu for dinner service each night, researching new dishes to supply, sourcing fresh produce, procuring seasonings, basically everything other than the actual cooking. But the contradictory fish species coexisting in the blue hole is the least of the mysteries on display here. In this area, there are also unpredictable seismic events, and beyond that, there's evidence that an ancient race of sea people dwell within these depths. It's in the investigation of these mysteries that our overall plot takes shape, but the plot really isn't the point here!

The point, as is the case with many games, is the gameplay. As you may or may not have been able to infer from the previous blurb, gameplay is split between two worlds: the ocean and the restaurant. The gameplay loop is day-based, with each day containing two daytime segments and one nighttime segment, and the ocean side of the gameplay loop takes place during both daytime segments, with dinner service at the restaurant taking up the nighttime slot. During the daytime segments, you dive into the blue hole to accomplish as much as you can before you run out of oxygen. What you accomplish obviously involves catching large amounts and large varieties of fish, but beyond that, you can also: retrieve containers of seasoning from pots on the ocean floor, discover blueprints for new equipment, retrieve weapon crafting/upgrading materials, take pictures of certain specimens of marine life, and fill out a fish pokedex of sorts. In terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, here's a little overview of how it goes.

You have a certain amount of oxygen and can carry up to a certain amount of weight (the capacity of both can be upgraded as the game progresses), and it's by managing these two resources that you're able to stay in the ocean for longer and gather the most resources possible. See, your oxygen basically serves as your HP. It drops gradually as you move, as you'd expect, but if you get attacked by hostile marine life or run into spikes, you'll lose a chunk of oxygen that way as well. What's more, you can carry more weight than the amount you'll see on your screen, but if you carry .01 pounds beyond that up to the actual maximum amount you can carry, you lose oxygen even faster as you move. This is also true of when you make yourself swim faster. If you run out of oxygen, the segment ends and you can only retrieve one thing you picked up underwater. So if you picked up 10 packs of seasoning and 100 small fish (a 100% possible scenario), then you get to retrieve exactly 1 of 110 things you worked hard to get if you run out of oxygen. But it's worth noting that the oxygen you enter the ocean with isn't the only oxygen you have access to. For instance, there are single-use barrels of oxygen scattered around the environment that you can draw from in a pinch. These are sometimes located near key areas where hostile wildlife live, but if you find yourself running low on oxygen anywhere else, you're going to have to go out of your way to find these barrels. On the other hand, you can also find smaller, portable oxygen canisters to use in a pinch. Around the ocean, you'll find yellow toolboxes containing a random bit of equipment. In any given dive, you have two equipment slots that can be filled with what you pick up from these toolboxes. As I've already said, one such item is a portable oxygen canister, but you can also get underwater scooters for increased mobility at no extra cost to oxygen, traps, location-specific key items, and alternative melee weapons to temporarily replace your survival knife. All chests are randomized, so there's no telling what you'll get. So if you plan to avoid hostile wildlife as much as possible because you have a specific objective in mind for a given dive, let's say you open up 3 chests. The first two chests yield an oxygen canister and a scooter, then the third chest contains another scooter. In such a case, you might choose to replace the oxygen with the second scooter to get in and out of hairy encounters with marine life and get to your objective asap. On the other hand, you might want to hold onto that oxygen canister just in case getting away from a shark proves to be more difficult than you anticipated. When it comes to melee weapons you unlock from these chests, you sometimes get weapons that deal more damage, you sometimes get more contextual melee weapons like shovels and pickaxes, and sometimes you get one of the most unironically excellent melee weapons of all time: the sleepy hammer (which I'll let you experience yourself). However, these melee weapons aren't the only weapons you have, and these yellow chests aren't the only chests you'll find.

Your primary weapon (other than your knife) is a harpoon, which is pretty par for the course for divers. But like with the equipment, you have two slots for weapons, not including the knife. So, on any given dive, you get to choose a secondary weapon to take with you. To give a baseline example, an underwater rifle might do more damage than a harpoon, but killing wildlife that way yields less valuable meat. On the other hand, a tranquilizer dart gun or a net gun aren't necessarily guaranteed to succeed in catching your quarry, but if you do succeed, you get higher quality meat. There's a LOT more to it than that, and there's a lot of upgrade and customization potential, but those are the kinds of decisions you'll end up making. In any case, at the start of the game, your only options will be the harpoon and the basic underwater rifle. That's where the weapon caches you find in the ocean come into play. When you open up one of these caches, you'll get one of the game's 6 weapons at random, and if it's a new one, you'll get a blueprint piece for that weapon in addition to being able to use it for the current dive. You can't take a weapon out of the blue hole that you didn't bring into it, so until you get all blueprint pieces for a given weapon and craft it, the use of any new weapon you pick up is limited to the current dive. 

So that's a high-level overview about the nuts and bolts of ocean gameplay, but is it fun? Well, if you're like me and you just love yourself a good old time in the ocean, you're probably already set. But beyond that, it's still satisfying! There's just something relaxing about thinking about what resources and fish to prioritize, going through your tools to determine what loadout might be best for those goals, then finally delving into the water to make it happen. There is some stress involved of course, but just enough to keep you on your toes. 

I do have some qualms with the gameplay, but here's the thing...a lot of them have been patched quite recently. I still have to take off the same amount of points because I judge games at the time that I play them, but I won't be mentioning the specifics since they don't actually exist anymore. So let's just go over the two big ones that haven't been patched: lack of full 360 aim ability and what I consider to be the cardinal sin of game design. This being a 2D game, you can aim your harpoon or weapon to your left or right at whatever angle you wish...unless the angle is too close to your head or your feet. This means that part of combat with hostile wildlife that chases you down is positioning yourself in such a way that the wildlife is at the exact right angle. To some, that may be totally fine as a strategic mechanic...but for me it made the combat slightly too finicky (Ha...finicky). This isn't helped by that aforementioned cardinal sin: getting hurt when you make contact with an enemy. I never, ever forgive that design choice unless there's some logical reason for it (such as an enemy made of fire or spikes). Thankfully for Dave the Diver, sharks are known to have either sharp or sandpaper-style skin, and jellyfish obviously hurt to touch. Not all the hostile wildlife featured here can have their contact damage justified like that (titan triggerfish, for example, or anglerfish, or the non-pointy bits of a narwhal), but enough of the enemies can be justified with logic that I won't be taking the full point off that the cardinal sin normally warrants. As I've already implied, there were initially more qualms, but because these developers are passionate and listen to fans, every little thing except for those things I've listed have been fixed in a patch that has been universally praised by fans (and even had entire articles from gaming outlets outlining how excellent the changes are). So, if you've been on the fence about this game, I can at least tell you that you have less reasons to be hesitant these days!

But as I've already said, the ocean is only one part of gameplay. When the sun goes down over the blue hole, it's time for dinner service at the restaurant! After wrapping up your underwater business, you make your way back to the restaurant and select the menu for the evening based on your current stock of meat. There are hundreds upon hundreds of dishes you can make as the game progresses, and you'll decide what to serve based on that aforementioned meat stock, but also based on what you can charge for the dish and the overall taste. What you can charge obviously impacts the money you make, but the overall taste drives your online presence, which in turn drives up the amount of customers you'll attract and, if memory serves, increases the amount you can charge ever-so-slightly. 

Now, a restaurant can't operate without staff! You and the head chef are the only staff members initially, with you acting as server and the head chef doing what he does best. But pretty soon, you're able to hire additional hands. Of the hands you hire, you can assign two to the dining area and two to the kitchen to increase the speed at which food is cooked and the speed at which orders are delivered. In the meantime, other staff who are waiting in the wings can be sent out to procure condiments and spices, giving you a second method of procuring these things if you don't want to go out of your way to locate cooking pots on the ocean floor. Obviously, you'll want to fill up those aforementioned two slots on each side of the restaurant, but more staff means more operating costs, so you'll need to balance money with spice availability, for example. And, for reasons I won't get into, you'll want to have excess staff on hand as the game progresses. Now, you may wonder how you would make the choice as to what staff members to appoint where, and the answer lies in stats and perks. Any given person (or dinosaur...I refuse to elaborate) has four stats: cooking, serving, procure (not a typo on my part, that's what it's called), and appeal. The first three stats are, I feel, self-explanatory. A high cooking stat means a staff member will work best in the kitchen, serving will work best in the dining area, and procure will work best being sent out for spices and condiments. Appeal, then, is the little x factor that is often called "luck" in rpgs. Appealing staff can pull in more customers in the future, after all! Beyond these point values for stats, there's also the perks. Stats are going to be the biggest factor in determining where you appoint staff, but perks can often be the deciding factor. For instance, one server might have a perk that has them seek out people wanting beverages and provide those beverages so you don't have to do it. Another perk might guarantee a tip from every customer the staff member serves. So, those two factors will be what determines your staffing choices.

So now that we've gone through what goes into a dinner service and how your staffing choices play into it, let's talk about the moment-to-moment of your typical night! Customers come in at their leisure over the course of the evening, naturally. Some will order a cup of tea or a cocktail before requesting food, others will get to ordering their meal straight away. I make that distinction because only you and staff who have a specific perk for drink-serving can serve drinks, so whether or not a customer orders a drink has an impact on the flow of the service. But disregarding that, as customers order, the kitchen cooks the food in the order that orders are received, and it's up to you and whatever serving staff you have to deliver that food to the customer. No duh, right? But customers aren't just going to sit there and wait all night, and that's where the staffing choices and their stats/perks come in to play. As the third member of the serving staff, you'll do things like help out with drink serving (unless your staff can't do it, in which case you'll be responsible for all the drink serving), refilling the wasabi stock for the kitchen, cleaning up messes for tip money (which is something other staff with the correct perk can do too), and picking up the delivery slack for your employees if the customers are coming in too fast for them to handle. All of those potential scenarios come and go at approximately a million miles an hour, and dinner service lasts maybe a minute at most in terms of real-world time. So it's a bite-sized but nonetheless balls-to-the-wall gameplay loop. 

And the thing about Dave the Diver is that everything I've just described in these past two sections is just the tip of the iceberg. You also run a small farm to get vegetables for your dishes as well as a fish farm to passively generate extra fish meat, and there are several other minigames, side quests, and other things to do. Does the wealth of content ever get overwhelming? Well....possibly, but I didn't ever feel that. Just know that if too much stuff gets in the way of your enjoyment, then this isn't quite the simple, straightforward gaming affair you might be expecting.

From a technical standpoint, Dave the Diver is fairly impressive given the wealth of content and amount of systems at play, but fairly impressive isn't perfect. While the game's pixel artwork is well-done and the framerate is rock-solid, there's a non-trivial amount of screen tearing no matter where you go. In addition to that, there have been rare occasions where the zoom-in that happens during a harpoon shot knocked the camera out of whack entirely, causing me to have to have to blindly shoot my harpoon around until another successful shot reset the camera and fixed the issue. In addition to that, there were several instances where button presses simply wouldn't register if I pressed the button too fast. This game features button prompts that require both singular presses and button holds, and this issue applies to both of those types. I have technical qualms other than those I've already listed, but the rest of my qualms have evidently been fixed in that aforementioned patch! To break it down as swiftly as possible, before this patch, quicktime events were unforgivably hard and going through your inventory mid-dive was about 1000% too difficult. The patch has evidently name-dropped both those problems, so neither of them are problems anymore according to the internet. So if you're a disabled gamer with concerns about quicktime events, I can't tell you if the game is going to be entirely accommodating to you at this point...but during some of the pre-patch quicktime events, I legitimately thought "this would be literally impossible if I were even a little bit disabled"...so I can say that the developers are working hard on it and the game might be worth checking out...but again, I can't confirm. With those (evidently) patched concerns out of the way, again, I'll be taking off the same amount of points, but I bring this up as a way of adding context and being consistent in my policy of reviewing games based on their state at the time I played them.

Dave the Diver has been yet another indie darling in a year full of massive AAA disappointments. Seriously, right now one of the items on my plate is to write a catch-up article talking about Jedi: Survivor, Final Fantasy XVI, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and others to talk about how lackluster they are, so it's really the indies that are carrying this year. It's far from perfect even after an excellent quality-of-life patch, but you'd be far pressed to find a better value for money proposition from an indie studio this year!...well, except for one, but that's a topic for another day! In the meantime, Dave the Diver is another relaxing ocean gameplay experience that I'd recommend to just about anyone.

Let us review:

Cardinal sin - 0.5

Gameplay qualms - 1.0

Technical flaws - 0.5

The final score for Dave the Diver is...

8.0/10 - Great

Awesome work, Mintrocket, awesome work!