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 notably nicely on platforms just like the Steam Deck. Fortunately Swap house owners didn’t have to attend lengthy and now Dave has cannonballed onto Nintendo’s hybrid gadget. Combining a number of genres into one incredible package deal, Dave the Diver had me hooked from the very starting and is an expertise that I’d suggest to anybody in a heartbeat.
Dave is an outdated diver popping out of retirement on the behest of his enterprise associate Cobra, who has arrange store close to the Blue Lagoon–fairly actually, as a result of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 regionally sourced substances. In fact, 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 straightforward: catch all kinds of aquatic wildlife in the course of the day that may be chopped up and served to clients at night time.
Let’s deal with the diving facet first. This a part of the sport has a reasonably simple loop: every in-game day you get to go on two diving excursions and accumulate 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 convey 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 along with your harpoon-gun, or by truly dealing injury to them with quite a lot 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 meant–is that damaging your fish with these conventional weapons makes them much less helpful for cooking. Because of this there’s all the time a fragile stability between deciding to both take a fish out as a result of it poses a risk, or making an attempt your hardest at reeling them in.
Whereas being underwater there’s after all rather more to find than simply fish. It’s not lengthy after you start along with your diving expeditions that you’re contacted by researchers. These characters need you to exit and discover relics from an historic civilization, or particular fish to put in writing their papers on. In flip, this additionally causes different characters to answer your actions, equivalent to a wildlife safety group exhibiting up once 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 all the time follows an analogous sample. You’d suppose this could get repetitive, however what makes and retains Dave the Diver so intriguing is that each milestone you cross both rewards or surprises you. For instance, if you happen to occur to go on a profitable dive that gives lots of gold, you may spend it to improve your go well with and kit for higher dives. However even after unsuccessful dives, specifically as a result of sharks might be fairly aggressive, there are often new character interactions or mission aims 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. One of the best 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 will probably be served as meals to paying clients. The extent of customization right here is astounding, since you aren’t simply adorning your restaurant or hiring employees; you might be actively liable for creating the menu. Sure fish are price rather more than others, however even the small fry might be enhanced with further substances like soy sauce, sea salt, and spices. Enhancing these meals prices fish, which means that you’ll have a small amount accessible on the menu and have to resolve whether or not you need to serve many shoppers or wring the less paying clients dry. And that’s not all: you might be additionally required to help in serving the restaurant. It’s essential to hold observe of pouring drinks, which supplies a tipping bonus, you must hold grinding up wasabi, and you have to clear up the bar itself. You possibly can rent further employees to help with the cooking and serving, however they do eat into your income. It makes for an easy, 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 equivalent to Subnautica, Rust, and even Minecraft can really feel overwhelming of their endlessness, Dave the Diver has an unimaginable focus. And even when its construction is one thing you can respect over time, what is straight away putting is its beautiful visible model. Mint Rocket has crafted an interesting look that someway is ready to stability pixel-art and what seem like 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 completely 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 all the time need to watch them, even when the skip button was proper there. That is the spice that really 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 instances on the Swap are fairly noticeable, particularly going between the diving and the restaurant sections. I additionally discovered that the sport does take just a little bit to essentially get you to know its diving and serving mechanics. It may be fairly overwhelming as 4 completely 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 protecting 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 crammed with apps. I needed to take a little bit of time to get accustomed to the best way wherein 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 path, I nonetheless was enthralled by the expertise and wished to plunge again into the sport time and again. 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 out of the blue 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 all the time make me need to play “only one extra spherical.” My sushi restaurant is presently thriving, and I’m nonetheless trying ahead to leaping again in lots of extra instances after this overview is revealed.