Dave the Diver is absolute peak indie gaming and I’m not sure what else needs to be said.
You take control of Dave who gets recruited by his friend Cobra to catch fish and run a sushi restaurant. As you unlock upgrades to your diving gear, you can explore the deeper regions of the blue hole and unravel various mysterious surrounding it and the fabled sea people. There is a plethora of different sea critters you can catch and serve in your restaurant and some of them are required to please various different restaurant critics. The characters are quirky and kept me chuckling to myself the whole time with how outrageous they can be. One in particular, Kato, is supposed to be a reference to Ash Ketchum from the Pokémon series, except here he is collecting all Fishmon and you are to help him on his quest to catch them all. This game doesn’t take itself too seriously and it is all the better for it, as you can tell the developers had a blast coming up with concepts and pop culture references. This game is filled to the brim with charm and is an absolute love letter of indie gaming and the great hits that can come from smaller teams and tighter budgets. I found the environments to be varied enough to hold my interest and new animals around every corner to experiment with in my restaurant. Once you get deep enough you may even run into some less than friendly critters that were supposed to have gone extinct millions of years ago. I have been searching for a game like this for ages that mixes the rogue lite genre with management and the closest I could find was Moonlighter, but nothing quite fills the niche that Dave the Diver does. This was absolutely my game of the year for the year of 2023
Achievement Section.
The achievements are fairly straightforward and only has one missable achievement called “Ration Eater” to keep an eye out for. The rest of the list you will get through natural gameplay and progression. I found the list to be well crafted and has the player explore various aspects of the game while not being overly grindy or cumbersome. Overall I give the achievement difficulty about a 3/10 with nothing being overly difficulty except the initial moments you run into ocean predators for the first time.
Pros
+Fantastic Characters
+Beautifully Crafted Environments
+Well Composed Soundtrack
+Engaging Gameplay Loop
Cons
- I Need More Achievements Please
