Dave the Diver has an incredibly fun core gameplay loop that is drowning under the weight of a dozen other minigames, mechanics, collectibles, and side activities that make it occasionally difficult to fully enjoy the truly great bits of the game.

Within my first couple of hours playing Dave the Diver, I had recommended the game to several friends. Diving to catch fish so you could then manage your sushi restaurant in the evening is an incredibly fun loop that had me hooked. I loved exploring, finding new fish, running my sushi restaurant to get money, and then taking that money back to the boat so I could upgrade all my gear. It’s a really tight, satisfying loop. And then comes the feature creep.

It starts off slow - research tasks, an app to manage your restaurant, collectible fish trading cards, weapon crafting, a social media progress tracker, photo-taking quests, a weapon skill tree. And then it eventually escalates to racing, gambling, fish farming, and literal farming with plants. It started to feel like a running gag when the game would interrupt me every few days to introduce a new mechanic or minigame. And when you think it’s done, it introduces water drones or something else. None of the features are necessarily bad, it’s just all incredibly distracting and they don’t really add much value to the game.

The biggest bummer about all of these distractions is that the core game is actually really good! I love it! It’s a hybrid roguelite management sim but instead of fighting you’re diving and catching fish. The upgrade loop is solid and satisfying. The exploration progresses in meaningful ways. The story is silly but fun. The cutscenes and tone are hilarious. The sushi restaurant progression is great. Actually running the restaurant is a fun thing to do every night. I genuinely love the main chunk of what Dave the Diver is, but it reeks of the modern game design problem of “we need to pack this game full of features and fluff so it’s a better value for gamers!” Please, I am begging you - it is OK to make short games. Dave the Diver could’ve been a 5/5 20-hour game that left me wanting more. Instead, it’s a 4/5 40-hour game that had me feeling restless at times. I still loved the game overall, I just wish it had more focus. The main gameplay mechanics that Dave the Diver commits to, it delivers on strongly. But most of the minigames or side activities it halfheartedly dumps on you don’t feel particularly good and end up being more of a distraction or a funny bit than anything worthwhile. Admittedly, I found some of the gameplay gimmicks to be pretty fun, but it only ends up hitting a handful of those wild shots it takes.

+ Extremely solid core loop of diving and managing restaurant
+ Both the diving and restaurant management gameplay are fun
+ Satisfying progression loop
+ Fun, lighthearted tone
+ Incredible cutscenes
+ Good music and chill vibes
+ Some of the gameplay gimmicks are fun, silly breaks from the main game

- Drowns under the weight of random side content
- Feature creep
- Lacks focus resulting in the game feeling too long
- 95% of the characters in the game are men for some reason
- Finding the last couple fish to complete your collection is tedious
- Frequent crashes on Switch