Dave the Diver

Dive during the day, run a sushi restaurant at night. That loop is one of the best in years — everything you catch has a use, every night's service tells you what to hunt tomorrow, and the transition between the two halves is genuinely satisfying in the way a good work day is. For about twelve hours this is a nine.

The loop is excellent and the game does not trust it

By hour eighteen the game has also given you a farm, a fish breeding facility, a weapons research lab, a photography contract, a party of tribal allies with their own progression track, a rhythm minigame, a card game and a plot involving ancient civilisations. None of these are bad. Almost all of them dilute the thing that worked.

There is a version of Dave the Diver that is fifteen hours of diving and cooking with three upgrade paths, and it is a better game than this one. The bloat is generous rather than cynical — you can feel the team having ideas — but generosity is not the same as focus.

Fish species catalogued

Most

Side systems actively ignored

4

Best night's takings

Around 12,000

The presentation carries a lot

The pixel art is exceptional, the animation is funny without being smug, and the restaurant sequences have a specific escalating panic that translates perfectly to a handheld. The writing is light and mostly lands, which in a genre full of quirk-by-numbers is worth noting.

Where it slips

The story missions increasingly override the loop with linear underwater sequences that are mechanically weaker than the free diving, and the last few hours are almost entirely those. The endgame also introduces a difficulty spike in the form of an escort mission that is out of keeping with everything preceding it.

Inventory management stays fiddly throughout, and on a handheld the cursor-based diving controls never stop being slightly imprecise.

The verdict

Thirty-one hours, twelve of them excellent, twelve good, seven spent wishing it would stop introducing things. Worth playing, and worth stopping when you feel it turn.

The restaurant is the game. Everything else is a bonus that occasionally charges rent.