The Shallow Depths of ‘Dave the Diver’
Dave the Diver is a game that garnered enough word-of-mouth praise that I, someone who genuinely despises both fishing and swimming around fish, voluntarily purchased a copy as my next “relaxing” podcast game. While I’m happy to report that Dave the Diver was far more engaging than I would have expected, I have some worries about the overall inherent design that carried through my dozen hours with it. And after reaching the depths, I ultimately didn’t find this game to contain enough substance to keep me hooked enough to finish it.
The appeal of Dave the Diver is largely in its pixel art aesthetic, but what keeps you engaged is the almost mobile-game-like loop of game design. While largely a game about, well, diving, the game is broken into three main daily components: a morning diving session, an afternoon diving session, and then an evening shift at Bancho sushi, a collaboratively run restaurant dictated by an eccentric investor and a cantankerous chef. Just when you become comfortable with a mechanic, the game throws a little more on top, whether that’s new characters, new diving equipment, new sushi recipes, or new staff to help run the evening restaurant.
Overall, I like Dave the Diver, and I was quite frankly obsessed with it for about the first four hours when I picked up the game. That obsession wore off quite quickly, however, which felt like a direct response to how the game is designed. For example, as you upgrade your diving equipment, you will expand your oxygen capacity and your diving suit, which directly translate to how long you can survive underwater and how deep Dave is able to dive. While initially exciting, what originally took the form of maybe 15 minute dives evolves into hour long undersea expeditions, which becomes rapidly exhausting as a player. I enjoyed Dave the Diver for its tight feedback loop, not for the sheer pleasure of diving and hunting fish. In that sense, this game works against itself as it progresses.
Dave the Diver promises a lot more story than you’d expect from such a simple and mechanically consistent premise. The game introduces plenty of side characters who can provide you with expedition upgrades and small tasks to earn you money. There is an entire civilization of mermaid-ish people with a rich history to explore. The game almost inexplicably introduces boss battles, including some genuinely bizarre designs and mechanics. There’s just, dare I say, a trench of things to discover if you’re willing to take the plunge. It just takes forever to reach the bottom.
Everything in Dave the Diver wears very thin very quickly, at least for me. The sense of humor strikes me as one of the biggest misses in that regard, with too many jokes about Dave being overweight and Cobra, the investor, not-so-half-joking about exploiting the environment and his compatriots for ruthless profit. The aforementioned elongated diving segments stop feeling like they are worth authentically doing, and instead become tied to silly side plots. And even serving at the sushi restaurant, once a delightful reprieve from the tedium of the dives, overburdened me in terms of setting a menu, researching recipes, managing an Instagram clone app, and assigning staff every night. While independently not exhausting, having to proverbially “set the table” each evening before the restaurant could open became more annoying than interesting, and once I bulked up my staff to be completely self-sufficient, I was bewildered that I was still required to pour tea and glasses of beer to astonishingly impatient customers.
There are even some wonderfully crafted pixel art scenes that accompany some of the mechanics like researching a new sushi recipe. But they, too, run out of steam by about the second time you’ve seen Bancho furiously chop away like the kitchen is his dojo. These cutscenes are over-the-top, given the tone of this game, and primarily exist to inject humor into the gameplay loop at the restaurant. And to be fair, there is a surprising variety of these cutscenes as you unlock the remaining restaurant management mechanics. But after about the second time I’d seen these cutscenes, I found myself holding down the skip button, a design mercy I was grateful for.
It’s a shame to speak this critically of a game that initially had so much charm for me, especially because Dave the Diver is far from a “bad” game; I still pick it up for half an hour here and there. But after the praise this game received, I can’t help but wonder what I’m missing. Again, this feels like a mobile game – and perhaps it would have maintained a stronger life on a platform like that, given the simplistic art style and repetitive mechanics. The only reason I’m glad this game isn’t a mobile game is because I worry about the types of egregious microtransactions that could have happened here – extra time diving, equipment upgrades, bonuses for Bancho Sushi, you name it. It’s nice, at least in theory, to organically upgrade and unlock everything just by playing the game faithfully – but I can’t get that fishy taste out of my mouth when I think about why the design soured on me so quickly.
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