OVERVIEW
"Dave the Diver" is a buffet of micro gameplay experiences served at a constantly compelling pace without a single lull in the experience. The scope of gameplay loops packed into a single game is nearly unparalleled. Watching the trailer, one might expect some exploration, fishing, and restaurant management, but these core loops are paired with what feels like an endless introduction of new minigames and additional mechanics over the course of 30-40 hours. The only thing holding the game back from being a 10/10 experience is that the team's ambition begins to bite them as it wears on. Having a new mechanic introduced every hour or two means there's no way these mechanics were all thoroughly tested and polished to equal measure, and they become increasingly flawed as the game goes on. Another thing weighing the game down is the introduction of more difficult combat encounters without increasingly versatile player tools in combat, leading to many frustrating and unfun scenarios by the end of the game. In spite of the flaws, it perfectly scratched the itch of what I specifically want as a player out of something on the boundary of "cozy management games," as its overall gameplay and UX design allowed for an intense, efficient, and fast-paced engagement rather than the tedious/slow feeling I get out of many similar games.
OVERALL: 8/10
Combat Design: 5/10
Exploration Design: 8/10
Management Design: 8/10
Minigame Design: 8/10
UI/UX Design: 8/10
Story / Narrative Design: 6/10
Art / Animation: 10/10
Audio / Music: 9/10
HUNTING MECHANICS
Much of the gameplay time is devoted to "fishing," but this game loop is actually better thought of as "hunting." The player's main tool is the harpoon, which remains quite satisfying to use from the start to the end of the game despite being the weakest option available. Beyond that, there is a large variety of...(checks notes)...GUNS...that Dave uses to shoot his prey. Both the harpoon and guns can be finicky to get used to with the game's restrictive cone aiming (meaning the player cannot aim straight up or straight down, but only in a cone to their sides). It's not immediately clear what the optimal way to use some combat tools is in the first third of the game, as the ocean is as full of as many predatory fish and sharks as it is normal fish to collect. These predators will hunt Dave to the end of the ocean and KILL him easily if he doesn't run away or kill them first.
The game leaves it up to the player to decide what hunting strategies they'd like to use, though it does introduce a three-star rating mechanic which requires a small handful of specific tools (nets and tranquilizers) if the player is interested in chasing a collectathon of the highest-rated fish. As the game goes on, more tools are dolled out, and the progression here is decently handled, but ultimately there is an overabundance of weapons most players will likely never use (this is one of the several ways one can see the branding of Early Access on the game design, as some progression depth was probably added solely for players who were grinding in an unfinished game). It is worth noting that the aggressive fish and sharks kind of ruin the entire experience of just trying to hunt for normal fish or do more relaxing side quests a lot of the time, as the player literally MUST kill these threats if it's not an option to just run away.
COMBAT DESIGN
As mentioned above, many of the fish in the sea want to kill Dave, and one of the game's first big surprises is that this escalates to...BOSS encounters. In the first half of the game, these are relatively easy, well-designed, and a fun time. As the game goes on, however, the designers start wanting to make the game "harder," and their only method to do this is with incredibly rude design choices that mean the player will take an immense amount of damage and die multiple times in an effort to understand where they're allowed to swim in order to avoid damage in the (very simple) combat arenas.
The main reason for this clunky combat experience is that there is no way to "dodge" in this game. Dave can "sprint," but this is quite slow compared to the rapid attacks of many of the later bosses, and the player WILL just get hit over and over again in many of these encounters until they figure out how to just hide like a coward and get shots in from as far away as possible. Ironically, the last boss fight DOES give the player a dodge mechanic, as the designers finally realized that's the key to fun combat design. Unfortunately, this is a one-time thing. These frustrations percolate down to late-game sharks and other threats, which can move so fast and attack so chaotically that Dave, again, literally can't avoid them, which leads to a singular ideal play pattern against them (equip a tranquilizer rifle, shoot them until they fall asleep, use the drone to carry them away OR...just desperately run away from them).
RESTAURANT + MANAGEMENT MECHANICS
The restaurant management gameplay loop is quite satisfying. It is just as challenging and deep as necessary given that it's only <15% of the playtime -- it is essentially just a minigame that expands in difficulty as the game goes on. A player might think there's not enough depth to it early in the game, but it turns out that the longer the game goes, the more time Dave spends doing other things. The player comes back to the restaurant so infrequently by the end of the game that it becomes a rewarding respite that one deeply looks forward to after doing so many other chores (and fighting a giant prawn that can punch Dave at the speed of sound). The restaurant phase is also periodically punctuated with VIP guests and special events, and these often provide amusing cutscenes and rewarding animations when a dish is served, which gives satisfying goals to constantly strive towards.
The longer the game goes on, the more mechanics are served, until the player eventually has a literal farm as well as a fish hatchery. These are, however, the weaker elements of the management mechanics, but...they're fine. The fish hatchery could REALLY use a button to "sell/use all but 2 fish of each type" so that the player doesn't have to go through every fish manually to accomplish that. The farm feels like something that would be nice to let it manage itself, because adding "water the plants, pick weeds, and harvest the vegetables" to every day's list of things to do on top of diving and pursuing many other quests wasn't an addition that I personally wanted to deal with.
MINIGAMES / MICRO GAME LOOPS
This game is loaded with constant servings of so many other mechanics that are either literal minigames or more like what I'd call "micro game loops." The latter category is things one might expect to do multiple times in any other game, but the player actually only does them once or a few times in this one.
Actual minigames include:
- Pouring beer or cocktails for customers.
- Taking photos of various fauna in the ocean.
- Using a welding torch to break into a sunken shipwreck.
- Participating in a cooking competition where the player prepares a meal using well-timed quick-time events.
Micro game loops include:
- Sneaking through the base of an eco-terrorist organization to steal their diving technology.
- Stealthing past a maze of underwater monsters.
- Solving simple puzzles while in underwater ruins.
- Literal micro games on Dave's cellphone, including a rhythm game and a fish Tamagotchi.
The quality of these moments varies wildly, some are satisfying and really well-designed, some are just a serviceable change of pace, and a few are tedious and feel like an early design draft rather than something put in a production-ready game. The reality is that if a team is going to put literally dozens of micro game loops and minigames into a single game, probably not all of them are going to be good!
STORY / NARRATIVE / FLUFF
While I can't say the story is particularly GOOD, let alone great, it is...cozy, it's satisfying, and it does what it needs to keep the game moving forwards at a good pace. The best attributes are the animations and character designs, which are immensely expressive and constantly littered with micro-cutscenes that capture the essence of the characters perfectly and always feel rewarding to watch. Many moments of systems progression or story beats are highlighted with a cute and funny animation -- such as a character tasting a meal Dave prepared just for them and transforming back into their childhood self. The constant cadence of small moments like this does a lot of work to define the game's charm and make it easy to get invested in the experience. As of writing this review, I actually finished the main story but still have some remaining quests to do, and I plan to go back to do them just to see how many more moments like this the game has left outside of the main story experience.
CONCLUSION
It's a great game, one I hope the devs consider expanding on with future DLC or doing similar games in the future. I spent a good amount of the time wondering if this would be my game of the year for 2023, and I'm quite bummed that it got more and more rough around the edges as it went on, but I still struggled to put the game down in spite of that and loved the time I spent with it.
"Dave the Diver" is a buffet of micro gameplay experiences served at a constantly compelling pace without a single lull in the experience. The scope of gameplay loops packed into a single game is nearly unparalleled. Watching the trailer, one might expect some exploration, fishing, and restaurant management, but these core loops are paired with what feels like an endless introduction of new minigames and additional mechanics over the course of 30-40 hours. The only thing holding the game back from being a 10/10 experience is that the team's ambition begins to bite them as it wears on. Having a new mechanic introduced every hour or two means there's no way these mechanics were all thoroughly tested and polished to equal measure, and they become increasingly flawed as the game goes on. Another thing weighing the game down is the introduction of more difficult combat encounters without increasingly versatile player tools in combat, leading to many frustrating and unfun scenarios by the end of the game. In spite of the flaws, it perfectly scratched the itch of what I specifically want as a player out of something on the boundary of "cozy management games," as its overall gameplay and UX design allowed for an intense, efficient, and fast-paced engagement rather than the tedious/slow feeling I get out of many similar games.
OVERALL: 8/10
Combat Design: 5/10
Exploration Design: 8/10
Management Design: 8/10
Minigame Design: 8/10
UI/UX Design: 8/10
Story / Narrative Design: 6/10
Art / Animation: 10/10
Audio / Music: 9/10
HUNTING MECHANICS
Much of the gameplay time is devoted to "fishing," but this game loop is actually better thought of as "hunting." The player's main tool is the harpoon, which remains quite satisfying to use from the start to the end of the game despite being the weakest option available. Beyond that, there is a large variety of...(checks notes)...GUNS...that Dave uses to shoot his prey. Both the harpoon and guns can be finicky to get used to with the game's restrictive cone aiming (meaning the player cannot aim straight up or straight down, but only in a cone to their sides). It's not immediately clear what the optimal way to use some combat tools is in the first third of the game, as the ocean is as full of as many predatory fish and sharks as it is normal fish to collect. These predators will hunt Dave to the end of the ocean and KILL him easily if he doesn't run away or kill them first.
The game leaves it up to the player to decide what hunting strategies they'd like to use, though it does introduce a three-star rating mechanic which requires a small handful of specific tools (nets and tranquilizers) if the player is interested in chasing a collectathon of the highest-rated fish. As the game goes on, more tools are dolled out, and the progression here is decently handled, but ultimately there is an overabundance of weapons most players will likely never use (this is one of the several ways one can see the branding of Early Access on the game design, as some progression depth was probably added solely for players who were grinding in an unfinished game). It is worth noting that the aggressive fish and sharks kind of ruin the entire experience of just trying to hunt for normal fish or do more relaxing side quests a lot of the time, as the player literally MUST kill these threats if it's not an option to just run away.
COMBAT DESIGN
As mentioned above, many of the fish in the sea want to kill Dave, and one of the game's first big surprises is that this escalates to...BOSS encounters. In the first half of the game, these are relatively easy, well-designed, and a fun time. As the game goes on, however, the designers start wanting to make the game "harder," and their only method to do this is with incredibly rude design choices that mean the player will take an immense amount of damage and die multiple times in an effort to understand where they're allowed to swim in order to avoid damage in the (very simple) combat arenas.
The main reason for this clunky combat experience is that there is no way to "dodge" in this game. Dave can "sprint," but this is quite slow compared to the rapid attacks of many of the later bosses, and the player WILL just get hit over and over again in many of these encounters until they figure out how to just hide like a coward and get shots in from as far away as possible. Ironically, the last boss fight DOES give the player a dodge mechanic, as the designers finally realized that's the key to fun combat design. Unfortunately, this is a one-time thing. These frustrations percolate down to late-game sharks and other threats, which can move so fast and attack so chaotically that Dave, again, literally can't avoid them, which leads to a singular ideal play pattern against them (equip a tranquilizer rifle, shoot them until they fall asleep, use the drone to carry them away OR...just desperately run away from them).
RESTAURANT + MANAGEMENT MECHANICS
The restaurant management gameplay loop is quite satisfying. It is just as challenging and deep as necessary given that it's only <15% of the playtime -- it is essentially just a minigame that expands in difficulty as the game goes on. A player might think there's not enough depth to it early in the game, but it turns out that the longer the game goes, the more time Dave spends doing other things. The player comes back to the restaurant so infrequently by the end of the game that it becomes a rewarding respite that one deeply looks forward to after doing so many other chores (and fighting a giant prawn that can punch Dave at the speed of sound). The restaurant phase is also periodically punctuated with VIP guests and special events, and these often provide amusing cutscenes and rewarding animations when a dish is served, which gives satisfying goals to constantly strive towards.
The longer the game goes on, the more mechanics are served, until the player eventually has a literal farm as well as a fish hatchery. These are, however, the weaker elements of the management mechanics, but...they're fine. The fish hatchery could REALLY use a button to "sell/use all but 2 fish of each type" so that the player doesn't have to go through every fish manually to accomplish that. The farm feels like something that would be nice to let it manage itself, because adding "water the plants, pick weeds, and harvest the vegetables" to every day's list of things to do on top of diving and pursuing many other quests wasn't an addition that I personally wanted to deal with.
MINIGAMES / MICRO GAME LOOPS
This game is loaded with constant servings of so many other mechanics that are either literal minigames or more like what I'd call "micro game loops." The latter category is things one might expect to do multiple times in any other game, but the player actually only does them once or a few times in this one.
Actual minigames include:
- Pouring beer or cocktails for customers.
- Taking photos of various fauna in the ocean.
- Using a welding torch to break into a sunken shipwreck.
- Participating in a cooking competition where the player prepares a meal using well-timed quick-time events.
Micro game loops include:
- Sneaking through the base of an eco-terrorist organization to steal their diving technology.
- Stealthing past a maze of underwater monsters.
- Solving simple puzzles while in underwater ruins.
- Literal micro games on Dave's cellphone, including a rhythm game and a fish Tamagotchi.
The quality of these moments varies wildly, some are satisfying and really well-designed, some are just a serviceable change of pace, and a few are tedious and feel like an early design draft rather than something put in a production-ready game. The reality is that if a team is going to put literally dozens of micro game loops and minigames into a single game, probably not all of them are going to be good!
STORY / NARRATIVE / FLUFF
While I can't say the story is particularly GOOD, let alone great, it is...cozy, it's satisfying, and it does what it needs to keep the game moving forwards at a good pace. The best attributes are the animations and character designs, which are immensely expressive and constantly littered with micro-cutscenes that capture the essence of the characters perfectly and always feel rewarding to watch. Many moments of systems progression or story beats are highlighted with a cute and funny animation -- such as a character tasting a meal Dave prepared just for them and transforming back into their childhood self. The constant cadence of small moments like this does a lot of work to define the game's charm and make it easy to get invested in the experience. As of writing this review, I actually finished the main story but still have some remaining quests to do, and I plan to go back to do them just to see how many more moments like this the game has left outside of the main story experience.
CONCLUSION
It's a great game, one I hope the devs consider expanding on with future DLC or doing similar games in the future. I spent a good amount of the time wondering if this would be my game of the year for 2023, and I'm quite bummed that it got more and more rough around the edges as it went on, but I still struggled to put the game down in spite of that and loved the time I spent with it.