TL;DR - Dave the Diver is a charming, genre-mashing experience with endearing characters, diverse gameplay, and beautiful art direction. There's so much here to enjoy, and this game is an easy recommendation to anyone looking to kick back and have some good, old-fashioned fun.

Review:

I find it difficult to describe what Dave the Diver is. It is one part underwater fishing experience, one part restaurant management sim, all interlaced with rewarding and surprisingly deep RPG systems. It's a farming game, a Pokemon-style collect-a-thon, and about a dozen other things. It is a jack-of-all-trades approach to game design that will have you bouncing between wonderfully diverse activities in a single session of play. In one moment, you're dashing between customers, frantically filling drinks and serving them food; while another will have you carefully maneuvering between fish as you locate the correct angles to fire off your harpoon gun; and yet another will find you crafting and leveling new gear and weapons which facilitate deeper and more dangerous dives. And there's much, much more. As you progress deeper into the story, you'll solve puzzles, unlock a farm to harvest crops, play a dozen wickedly fun minigames, and run side quests for your friends and acquaintances. Dave the Diver continuously builds on itself, introducing new features and mechanics even up to the final hours of the story. The variety of activities sustains the game up to the very end, and I delighted in mastering each portion of its addicting gameplay loops.

In Dave the Diver, you play the titular character, Dave, a man who would prefer to be left alone but doesn't know how to say "no." As such, he's begrudgingly convinced by an old friend to open a sushi restaurant, with Dave shouldering the daily task of collecting the food they'll need to feed their clientele. In the weeks that follow, Dave will uncover the secrets of a hidden underwater civilization, battle shady ecological activists, and forge relationships with all sorts of interesting people.

The meat of the game takes place in the ocean during dives. Underwater, Dave must use his harpoon gun to spearfish to stock up for dinnertime at the restaurant. He brings a small knife with him for close encounters, as well as an additional weapon, like a sniper or shotgun, to assist him with more dangerous prey. While killing fish might be the easiest way to harvest them, there are more fruitful and effective methods, like a net launcher and a tranquilizer dart. Using these tools is harder, but you'll get much more meat and a three-star rating in the MarinCa (Pokedex) for doing so. The concept is simple, but the challenge increases when facing aggressive hammerhead sharks, barracudas, and other predators. Steady aim and optimal positioning are key. The fishy boss fights are a hoot, with each encounter requiring quick thinking and tight reactions to overcome. Their designs are memorable and absurd, including a mantis shrimp toting boxing gloves and a shark with a tooth-covered buzzsaw for a lower jaw.

The writing is silly and light-hearted but can be surprisingly poignant, and the many characters that Dave encounters have personalities that shine. There's Cobra; a grizzled, tattoed, cheerful man who convinces Dave to accept this new business venture. Bancho is the self-serious, incessantly passionate head chef of the restaurant. One of my favorites, Otto, has a new, harrowing story of adventure from his youth to tell you at nearly every interaction. What starts as silly caricatures gives way to deeper emotional beats that endear you to the growing cast of friends Dave meets during his adventures in the deep, especially if you pay attention to the gorgeously animated cutscenes. The main quest has a few pacing issues, and I occasionally felt like the game was going out of its way to slow me down. Thankfully those moments are few and far between what is otherwise a story filled with heart.

Art direction shines in Dave the Diver, taking full advantage of its simple, pixelated 2D art style. The ocean itself is a joy to look at, and it's made better thanks to a photo minigame that asks you to capture the Kodak moments of an aquatic paradise. As you tread deeper beneath the waves and enter new biomes, you'll discover a host of new fish to capture and bring back to the restaurant. Some fish like to school together, others you'll find floating lazily by themselves, and some are large and intimidating, but all are unique and distinct in their designs.

Even after the credits have rolled, there is still a LOT left over for me to tackle in the future. I'm desperate to earn three-star catches for every fish, beat the optional bosses I missed, and level up all my gear and weapons to the maximum. Also, the restaurant portion of the game is my favorite, and I could extract hours of fun from that progression alone. Dave the Diver is excellent. It's one of those games that almost anybody would have a good time playing, and I wholeheartedly recommend you give it a try. I think you'll be captured by the charm and the heart it wears on its sleeve.

TL;DR - Surviving the Aftermath is a city-builder simulation game set in the apocalypse. Despite a few resource bottlenecks that can cause headaches, the game's satisfying progression and clever intermingling of the gameplay and atmosphere make for an enjoyable and engaging journey as you rebuild civilization amidst disaster.

Review:

Surviving the Aftermath took me by surprise. I've never played a city-building resource management style game before, but none of the games I've been working through were hitting the spot for me. So, I found myself scrolling through my library in the mood for something relaxed but engaging enough to stimulate my brain. Thankfully, Surviving the Aftermath turned out to be an excellent representative of its genre and an accessible introduction for newcomers, and it completely consumed my attention for several days and just under 30 hours of playtime.

The core of Surviving the Aftermath's gameplay loop entails building a colony by sending your colonists out into the world to gather the resources necessary to construct new buildings. On a more fundamental level, this is a game about making the numbers go up. As your resources increase, you can support a larger population which, in turn, allows you to harvest even more resources. The features that set this game apart from its peers are the disasters and catastrophes that frequently hinder your progress and require quick thinking and adaptation to endure without losing a large chunk of your population. Nuclear fallout, ice storms, heat waves, and pandemics are a few of the obstacles you can expect to see. In addition, certain colonists (known as specialists) can be sent to an overworld map to scavenge locations for resources, build outposts for permanent resource boosts, and discover new settlements to trade with. As your colony grows, you can spend Research Points to invest in new buildings and technology to improve your colonist's happiness and optimize your resource generation. The game handles its tutorialization well - I never felt overwhelmed or confused with how to interact with its systems or menus. The progression systems in place are so satisfying, to the point that I'd tell myself to stay up for "just 10 more minutes" to unlock the upgrade that would push my colony to the next level.

The story of Surviving the Aftermath didn't really do anything for me. Told primarily through still screens with a bit of art, a text block, and a solid voice performance, the story, unfortunately, wasn't interesting enough to keep me engaged, and I skipped through most of it. The art direction is simple but evocative of other post-apocalyptic settings. The music does a good job of establishing tone but doesn't do anything special to stand out. Ultimately, all those little details that make or break a gaming experience do just enough in this game to support the gameplay and systems. They are simply good enough, and I think that's okay.

I only have two complaints about my playing experience. The first has to do with the way the game notifies you that a colonist is sick or afflicted in some way. Anytime a colonist catches a disease, becomes irradiated, or is injured, an alert sounds, and a small banner appears in the corner of the screen. While your population is low, this isn't a problem. However, as I entered the later stages of the campaign and the colony's numbers entered the triple digits, this alert sounded nearly every second. I built enough hospitals to comfortably care for my sick colonists, but there wasn't a way to completely prevent the illnesses from occurring as far as I could tell. Instead, I was forced to listen to the same annoying alarm for hours. It was unbearable, and I couldn't locate a setting to turn off the alert, so I resorted to playing without sound.

My other complaint has to do with some frustrating resource bottlenecking that occurs in the latter stages of the game. The limited availability of some of the rarer resources combined with the slow crafting time to create new components slowed my progress down to a halt and, at one point, caused the death of over 50% of my colony because I wasn't able to build enough structures to support my ballooning population. I'll also add that the advanced resource-gathering technology I unlocked didn't feel any faster or more efficient than just sending out my colonists to gather instead. Instead of continuing to upgrade and improve my colony, I had to sit back and wait, which isn't exactly the definition of fun gameplay. Thankfully, this isn't the case for most of the game, and once I overcame this bottleneck, my experience became as enjoyable as it had been at the beginning.

Surviving the Aftermath does a lot right. It's taken full advantage of its setting to create diverse and dynamic challenges that make it unique in the genre. Its progression systems are accessible, well-paced, and impactful to the experience. It isn't perfect, but the imperfections weren't significant enough to peel me away from an otherwise addicting loop. Surviving the Aftermath has opened me up to a new genre of video games, and I'm excited to explore more of what the genre has to offer.