Dave The Diver Overview – Overview

Dave the Diver appeared to have all of the markings of this 12 months’s summer season sleeper hit. Initially launched following a profitable kickstarter, the sport hit PC earlier this 12 months and was praised loudly as a refreshing indie recreation that labored significantly nicely on platforms just like the Steam Deck. Fortunately Swap homeowners didn’t have to attend lengthy and now Dave has cannonballed onto Nintendo’s hybrid machine. Combining a number of genres into one implausible bundle, Dave the Diver had me hooked from the very starting and is an expertise that I might suggest to anybody in a heartbeat.

Dave is an previous diver popping out of retirement on the behest of his enterprise accomplice Cobra, who has arrange store close to the Blue Lagoon–fairly actually, as a result of he has opened a sushi restaurant that prides itself on solely utilizing domestically sourced elements. After all, the one who has to catch the meal of the day is Dave. As you plunge into the Blue Gap, you’re armed with a harpoon gun and an oxygen tank. Your purpose is easy: catch all kinds of aquatic wildlife throughout the day that may be chopped up and served to prospects at evening.

Let’s give attention to the diving facet first. This a part of the sport has a fairly simple loop: every in-game day you get to go on two diving excursions and gather fish and different objects from the seafloor. You both efficiently come again up with a big amount of fish and collectibles otherwise you run out of oxygen and solely get to carry a single merchandise again as much as shore with you.
Controlling Dave begins out feeling fairly sluggish, however fortunately you’re shortly in a position to improve and enhance your gear over time or discover useful objects in underwater containers. Fish are both caught by reeling them in together with your harpoon-gun, or by truly dealing injury to them with a wide range of weapons. There are melee weapons like tennis rackets, baseball bats, and your trusty knife, however you’re additionally capable of finding and buy shotguns, tranquilizer darts, and pistols. The catch–pun supposed–is that damaging your fish with these conventional weapons makes them much less helpful for cooking. Which means there’s at all times a fragile steadiness between deciding to both take a fish out as a result of it poses a menace, or attempting your hardest at reeling them in.

Whereas being underwater there’s in fact far more to find than simply fish. It’s not lengthy after you start together with your diving expeditions that you’re contacted by researchers. These characters need you to exit and discover relics from an historical civilization, or particular fish to put in writing their papers on. In flip, this additionally causes different characters to reply to your actions, akin to a wildlife safety group exhibiting up if you appeal to their consideration after blowing up a cave to seek out extra relics. What is especially spectacular right here is that the dives you go on aren’t randomly generated, however the gap at all times follows an identical sample. You’d assume this might get repetitive, however what makes and retains Dave the Diver so intriguing is that each milestone you go both rewards or surprises you. For instance, for those who occur to go on a profitable dive that gives lots of gold, you possibly can spend it to improve your swimsuit and kit for higher dives. However even after unsuccessful dives, specifically as a result of sharks could be fairly aggressive, there are normally new character interactions or mission goals launched that may nonetheless be accomplished. This retains the sport feeling contemporary, particularly when you get to go to deeper ranges of the Blue Lagoon. The perfect comparability might be a recreation like Steamworld Dig 2, the place you might be intrinsically inspired to maintain exploring the depths beneath and experiment with new weapons and navigational instruments.

However the true secret to Dave the Diver’s addictive nature is that your purpose isn’t simply being a nebulous fish-collector. On the finish of every day, you come back to your sushi restaurant and choose the fish that might be served as meals to paying prospects. The extent of customization right here is astounding, since you aren’t simply adorning your restaurant or hiring employees; you might be actively chargeable for creating the menu. Sure fish are value far more than others, however even the small fry could be enhanced with further elements like soy sauce, sea salt, and spices. Enhancing these meals prices fish, which means that you should have a small amount accessible on the menu and must resolve whether or not you wish to serve many shoppers or wring the less paying prospects dry. And that’s not all: you might be additionally required to help in serving the restaurant. You might want to hold observe of pouring drinks, which supplies a tipping bonus, it’s a must to hold grinding up wasabi, and it’s essential to clear up the bar itself. You may rent further employees to help with the cooking and serving, however they do eat into your earnings. It makes for a simple, however accessible administration recreation that has lots of depth to it.

The balancing act on show right here, with each the diving and the restaurant segments, makes Dave the Diver tremendous rewarding to return to. Whereas different scavenger-likes akin to Subnautica, Rust, and even Minecraft can really feel overwhelming of their endlessness, Dave the Diver has an unbelievable focus. And even when its construction is one thing that you would be able to respect over time, what is instantly putting is its beautiful visible model. Mint Rocket has crafted an interesting look that by some means is ready to steadiness pixel-art and what appear to be 3D-models subsequent to 1 one other. It’s as if the art-style from pixel video games like Pokémon Black and White has been perfected within the animation of its creatures and characters in addition to in differentiating the totally different depths within the Blue Gap. However above all are the exceptional cutscenes. Mixing a love of excessive anime montages with a extra conventional pixel-art model that made me at all times wish to watch them, even when the skip button was proper there. That is the spice that actually makes Dave the Diver stand out from the gang of different pixel-art impressed indie video games.

That doesn’t imply that each one is nicely underneath the ocean. Load occasions on the Swap are fairly noticeable, particularly going between the diving and the restaurant sections. I additionally discovered that the sport does take somewhat bit to essentially get you to grasp its diving and serving mechanics. It may be fairly overwhelming as 4 totally different mechanics are launched one after one other and also you solely understand how they work collectively a number of hours later. There are many collectibles, however conserving observe of the Pokédex-like system, the “analysis these fish”-app and the missions-tab can all mix collectively, particularly within the menu-interface, which is designed to resemble a smartphone stuffed with apps. I needed to take a little bit of time to get accustomed to the way in which through which you intend a purpose for your self. I had truly grown fairly skilled with diving and exploration lengthy earlier than I even made it out of the primary chapter, as a result of I didn’t understand I needed to discover a particular merchandise and full a quest.

However even throughout dives the place the sport wasn’t giving me correct route, I nonetheless was enthralled by the expertise and needed to plunge again into the sport many times. I’ll always remember the moments the place I used to be clinging on by single digits on the oxygen tanks and barely made it out alive, over encumbered with fish, or the moments the place I used to be abruptly jumped by a predator and needed to evasively dive away and shoot my gun in blind panic. Dave the Diver retains you in your toes, however the rewards after a profitable dive at all times make me wish to play “only one extra spherical.” My sushi restaurant is at the moment thriving, and I’m nonetheless wanting ahead to leaping again in lots of extra occasions after this evaluation is revealed.