Dave the Diver has an incredibly fun core gameplay loop that is drowning under the weight of a dozen other minigames, mechanics, collectibles, and side activities that make it occasionally difficult to fully enjoy the truly great bits of the game.

Within my first couple of hours playing Dave the Diver, I had recommended the game to several friends. Diving to catch fish so you could then manage your sushi restaurant in the evening is an incredibly fun loop that had me hooked. I loved exploring, finding new fish, running my sushi restaurant to get money, and then taking that money back to the boat so I could upgrade all my gear. It’s a really tight, satisfying loop. And then comes the feature creep.

It starts off slow - research tasks, an app to manage your restaurant, collectible fish trading cards, weapon crafting, a social media progress tracker, photo-taking quests, a weapon skill tree. And then it eventually escalates to racing, gambling, fish farming, and literal farming with plants. It started to feel like a running gag when the game would interrupt me every few days to introduce a new mechanic or minigame. And when you think it’s done, it introduces water drones or something else. None of the features are necessarily bad, it’s just all incredibly distracting and they don’t really add much value to the game.

The biggest bummer about all of these distractions is that the core game is actually really good! I love it! It’s a hybrid roguelite management sim but instead of fighting you’re diving and catching fish. The upgrade loop is solid and satisfying. The exploration progresses in meaningful ways. The story is silly but fun. The cutscenes and tone are hilarious. The sushi restaurant progression is great. Actually running the restaurant is a fun thing to do every night. I genuinely love the main chunk of what Dave the Diver is, but it reeks of the modern game design problem of “we need to pack this game full of features and fluff so it’s a better value for gamers!” Please, I am begging you - it is OK to make short games. Dave the Diver could’ve been a 5/5 20-hour game that left me wanting more. Instead, it’s a 4/5 40-hour game that had me feeling restless at times. I still loved the game overall, I just wish it had more focus. The main gameplay mechanics that Dave the Diver commits to, it delivers on strongly. But most of the minigames or side activities it halfheartedly dumps on you don’t feel particularly good and end up being more of a distraction or a funny bit than anything worthwhile. Admittedly, I found some of the gameplay gimmicks to be pretty fun, but it only ends up hitting a handful of those wild shots it takes.

+ Extremely solid core loop of diving and managing restaurant
+ Both the diving and restaurant management gameplay are fun
+ Satisfying progression loop
+ Fun, lighthearted tone
+ Incredible cutscenes
+ Good music and chill vibes
+ Some of the gameplay gimmicks are fun, silly breaks from the main game

- Drowns under the weight of random side content
- Feature creep
- Lacks focus resulting in the game feeling too long
- 95% of the characters in the game are men for some reason
- Finding the last couple fish to complete your collection is tedious
- Frequent crashes on Switch

Rubber Bandits is the anti-Smash Bros in good and bad ways.

The gameplay is not really at all similar to Smash but it’s a good point of comparison for this kind of multiplayer experience. While Smash Bros is high-skill, highly competitive, highly customizable, and not very forgiving of skill gaps between players, Rubber Bandits is designed to be simple and easily-accessible so that players of all skill levels can jump right in and play without getting totally smoked. It makes for a fun experience with friends. I just wish there was maybe a bit more to it - like the ability to do custom games. All you can really do is pick from 8 different game modes that sometimes have fun, random modifiers and then you’re thrown into a random map. Custom modes and settings would do wonders for this game.

+ Great, easily-accessible game for players of all skill levels
+ Decent progression system that has you constantly unlocking more ways to customize your bandit
+ Fun visuals and animations

- No custom game modes or settings
- “Story” mode is pretty bad
- Frequent online MP connection issues

A neat mystery puzzle game wrapped up in a spooky plant lady vibe that sadly doesn’t always execute on some of the cool ideas it attempts and is burdened by poorly-designed UI/UX.

Strange Horticulture is, at its core, a deductive reasoning puzzle game that has you solving clues to identify plants and seeking out new plants to expand your collection. Most times, that loop of looking for a plant based on a vague description and trying to narrow it down using context clues or sketches can deliver a familiar satisfying rush that comes from puzzle games like this. Other times, “solving” a puzzle is just reading through 60 plant descriptions until you find one key word like “stranger” or “smokey” buried in the text. That’s not a puzzle, it's just tedious. The story, told through the visits of customers, is neat and the choices along the way (that set up multiple endings) made me feel invested in the twisty tale that was being told. After finishing the game, I enjoyed going back and seeing how some of the other endings played out.

Later in the game, once you’ve identified most of the plants, occasionally a customer will ask for one specific plant of the 77 unorganized plants on your shelf. So you’ll slowly scroll left to right looking for the one plant you need, but if you scroll too quickly, the label open/close animation won’t react in time and you’ll miss the name. Some method of auto-sorting your plants would have been a welcome addition to the game.

When not identifying plants to help customers, you’re following clues and solving riddles to visit specific locations on a map and find new plants to add to your collection. It’s a pretty fun idea in theory, but the map is quite large and the writing on it is often difficult to read, requiring constant use of the game’s dedicated magnifying glass button - a baffling game decision.

Searching for plants in your massive collection, reading too many descriptions, navigating around a map, and just interacting with your inventory are all things that shouldn’t be annoying but are due to the game’s poorly designed interface that is only made worse on consoles. I can only assume that this game was designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard on a 40 inch computer monitor that your face is 4 inches from at all times, because nothing else really makes sense. The script-like font is small, requiring frequent use of the magnifying glass just to be able to read literally any of the text in the game. There is an “easier to read font” option, that makes all the text more legible, but the interface does not adapt to the new text size, so conversations with NPCs constantly fall off the screen as you’re trying to read them which results in battling the scrolling dialogue. Additionally, while the “legible text” option does improve most of the menus, the map does not benefit from the cleaner text, so that continues to be difficult to read without the magnifying glass. Even with the magnification, the rivers are actively impossible to read due to the weird font choice. Controlling the game on console is a nightmare as the cursor is mapped to the left analog stick with a set cursor speed of “excruciatingly slow”. There are labels in the game so you can make notes of all the items you’re finding, but that feature is predictably a pain without a dedicated keyboard to use.

The thing that makes these pain points more frustrating is that I actually really enjoyed most of my time with Strange Horticulture, but it constantly felt as though I was fighting against the game to find the fun. Underneath the poorly-designed UI and weird design decisions is a pretty great game! Finding that game, however, takes some work. And maybe a lot of work if you’re playing on console.

+ Satisfying deductive puzzle solving
+ Great spooky vibes
+ Fun, creative plants with interesting descriptions
+ Great story choices throughout the game that set up multiple endings

- Terrible UI that often feels anti-player for the sake of “theme”
- Console/controller support is all around terrible from UI adaptation to controller use
- Some puzzles are more tedious reading than actual puzzle-solving