Dave the Diver review score of 9: Vivid, playful, and memorable

* This article is compiled from IGN US related content, the original author Travis Northup, translated Zoe, edited by Kamui Ye, unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.

Just like the real ocean, Dave the Diver feels beautiful at first sight, but when you dive in, you can discover the huge and wonderful world hidden beneath the sea level. This water-themed adventure exceeded my expectations, with some of the most irresistible exploration, business simulations and mini-games I've never experienced in a long, long time, and kept me going deeper enough to keep me unnoticed the passage of time.

The characters and plot of "Dave the Diver" are very rich, and the content is beyond my expectations, and I continue to be surprised. If you had told me before, the best game I've played this year would be a retro indie RPG in which I would play as a chubby diver who runs a sushi restaurant... Then I believe you now. This game looks great. The gaming experience is also really good.

"Dave the Diver" focuses on the story of a group of lovely colleagues who slowly become best friends, and they open a sushi restaurant near the mysterious Blue Hole. This giant blue hole is a rather magical sea area that changes its landscape and ecosystem every day. You play as a diver named Dave, a chubby, soda-loving diver who always half-pushes and half-satisfies everyone's whimsy, including the ferocious sea creatures he encounters.

A cute and nonsensical experience awaits you, with a little-known Terran civilization, some very radical wildlife conservation enthusiasts, and dozens of rude judgments on your protagonist's weight.

Although the plot seems simple and straightforward at first glance, it can unexpectedly develop into something quite connotative, and the characters in it are far more complex than the pixel faces they first appeared. Even though I've been working for more than 30 hours, I still find myself eager to spend time with people like Bancho (the stoic, intrepid sushi cook) and Tatsufu (the two-dimensional, stubble-faced gunsmith).

I think one of the reasons is that whenever you interact with most of the characters, the game presents you with very interesting and memorable cutscenes, such as Bancho sharpening his knife and eating fish, or Duff elegantly testing a newly crafted weapon. Even though I've seen it dozens of times so far, my reluctance to skip these animations shows how well they portray.

But Dave the Diver isn't just a fun adventure RPG, it's packed with incredibly deep restaurant simulation elements. Every time you dive into the treacherous depths of the Blue Hole to find fish and supplies, battle enemies in the water, and complete missions, you'll have to manage the sushi restaurant by making recipes, cooking, recruiting, training staff, and handling extremely discerning customers.

Diving into the Blue Grotto is the real theme and meaning of this adventure: you'll use harpoons, guns, and net guns to catch and kill fish, make them into sushi, and explore deeper, inevitably pitting aggressive sharks, swimming through ancient ruins filled with simple puzzles, and battling oversized bosses like giant hermit crabs that use trucks as their shells. The process of tracking and collecting all kinds of sea creatures is an engaging Zen experience, and you can outwit your prey with as little brute force as possible by mastering the game's simple and highly responsive combat gameplay.

While traveling around with a gun like a barbarian can make you productive, your extreme behavior will only make the restaurant less and less available resources. Making good use of your harpoon (or preferably with a net gun or anesthesia gun) to catch fish alive is more beneficial, but also more technical. This trade-off gives you plenty of ways to complete your mission, depending on your personal preferences and how you want to use the tools at hand.

Sometimes, you'll be surrounded by a large school of hungry fish, and sometimes a narwhal will rush towards you and pierce you with its spiral tusks; You'll never know what evil wildlife lurks in the depths of the Blue Hole. Dodges and counterattacks are usually easy to do as long as you're not too heavy to move, but mastering the angle, your surroundings, and the weapons you choose to carry with you (you can only carry one weapon per dive) will greatly affect your play.

You may prefer a long-range sniper rifle with high damage but extremely limited ammo, or you may prefer to use a rifle to hunt prey up close, as it doesn't require much to aim. If you feel like you're feeling bold, you might be able to try using a silenced dart to numb your enemies, such as a giant shark, and then drag it to your boat while it's sleeping, which is a difficult task that requires relatively smooth and high maneuvering, and you will die if you are not careful.

There are many different gameplay, and although the modes are all similar: dodge, shoot, and swim, it gives players considerable room to create, and often leads to some very interesting programming effects.

The game also offers a number of gameplay that can be adjusted to the pace, such as fighting huge and bulky bosses and solving puzzles as simple as "open the path at the touch of a switch", but both gameplay are too simple to provide any meaningful challenges (and there is no difficulty to choose from, and you can't play high difficulty yet). Encountering a giant squid at the bottom of the ocean does bring a lot of novelty to the adventure, but considering that almost all bosses can be killed (very quickly) by learning their behavior patterns and hitting three key points, this novelty is also usually fleeting.

Similarly, while the narrative-focused puzzle section also has an intriguing plot development, the actual puzzles are mostly effortless, such as in one of the puzzles where you need to redirect the beam of light on the mirror, but the solution is so obvious that you can see what to do at a glance.

Before each dive, you can make valuable upgrades to your equipment, making subsequent excursions more profitable and improving your combat effectiveness. The game has a number of useful upgrades, such as increasing the amount of air in the oxygen tank, enhancing the wetsuit to dive deeper into the sea, increasing the weight rating of the loading box, crafting and upgrading weapons to deal more damage, and you can also inflict status effects such as poison and flame on underwater enemies.

All of this requires more and more resources to be obtained by catching fish and increasing the profits of sushi restaurants, creating a cycle that is difficult to escape. I can't tell you how many times I secretly decided to "dive one more and stop" and then thought, "Well, I'll have to wait for the sushi restaurant to finish the day, and then I'll really rest," but then I repeated this empty determination for hours on end.

Throughout your expedition, you'll need to keep an eye on your oxygen tank, which is both your life bar and your weight limiter, and your speed is reduced when you're carrying too many fish and other treasures to swim back to the surface with ease. In the early stages, the oxygen tubes that had not yet been upgraded meant that I often struggled with carnivorous fish, because one or two mistakes could nearly exhaust my oxygen levels when I was desperately trying to swim back to the surface.

At the same time, my greed for rare fish and resources often leads to carrying more weight than my maximum load, and finally I can only paddle slowly through the water, which adds great hidden dangers to the whole trip, after all, when you meet a large shark, it must be dangerous to swim fast.

When your oxygen runs out, you don't actually drown, but you can only choose to take something of less value with you when you return to the surface. This makes failure very costly, especially if you can't save during gameplay (which is really annoying), which means that you're likely to lose most of your progress due to some low-level mistake that could have been avoided.

Your oxygen tank and weight limits also ensure that you'll need to refresh yourself from your enjoyable diving trips on a regular basis, but that's not a big deal, as you'll also experience the other half of Dave the Diver – a restaurant simulation.

As a true business simulator dreams, running an exotic sushi restaurant requires you to master many business skills, such as collecting raw materials, recruiting and training employees, running farms and farms, learning recipes and upgrading menus, and more. Every time I watch the sales chart rise or open a more profitable business, I get great satisfaction, especially when my hard work brings me more branches, the scope of the store expands to the point where I can't stop, and this positive feedback drives me to play late into the night and return to the ocean countless times to collect raw materials.

To prepare a night of sushi, I needed to do deep planning, which awakened the entrepreneurial soul inside me, something few games are able to do. Slowly, should I open a sushi in real life? Wow! It seems that there can really be?!

Perhaps the best quality of Dave the Diver is its ability to consistently throw new and ridiculous things at the player. If spearfishing and restaurant management aren't enough fun, you can also play some gambling games, deep-sea photography, seahorse racing, pet ownership, concert rhythm tours, plus at least 20 nonsensical elements that I don't intend to spoil.

Whether you're exploring the Blue Cave in search of elusive sharks or hanging out with mackerel, Dave the Diver lives up to its name as an adventure game because the whole adventure is so unpredictable.

The most impressive thing was that even in the final hours of the story, I was able to unlock new gameplay mechanics, some of which opened up new depths for established gameplay habits. Some plots will even throw you into a visual novel to further flesh out the backstory of some characters. What a treat to have such an experience!

Not all experimental gameplay in Dave the Diver will lead to success (if you try everything, it's not called experimentation!). Sometimes you'll play quilting games and feel as if you've been thrown on the floor of the tailoring workshop. For example, at one point in the story, you suddenly play an apparently half-finished 2D stealth game where you hide behind a crate or hide in a freezer and wait for the braindead guards to walk by. Thankfully, there are very few such mistakes, and even if there are one or two mini-games that I don't think is very fun, at least they will be considered a curious experience.

Finally, it's important to note that while Dave the Diver already has an excellent level of optimization in its early stages, it still has some bugs that need to be addressed. Sometimes my UI disappears and I can't manage my farm, sometimes enemies or objects in the environment slip invisible, and a few times when I wander around a particular area (like a village of mackerels), I get random frame drops.

The game is still fascinating, and the questions aren't so frequent that they make me abandon the pit, but whenever they do, I get annoyed because it really compromises the experience, like when a boss suddenly becomes a bloodlocked god in a encounter, I have to quit the whole process of rebrushing.

summary

Dave the Diver is an RPG adventure that I will never forget. The plot and characters are appealing, the underwater exploration and restaurant management sections are time-consuming, and the 30-hour adventure is packed with quirky mini-games and surprises to ensure that the journey doesn't get boring. Despite its vulnerable bosses, simple puzzles, and tons of bugs, it's still packed with fun content that easily makes it a place in the great games I've played this year.

merit

Stunning pixel ocean views

New and engaging exploration + adventure + management hybrid gameplay

A storyline with depth and connotation

Characters with a lot of personality and very cute

shortcoming

The difficulty of fighting and solving puzzles is too low

The gameplay of the mini-game is too simple