He might just be the greatest Dave to ever do it. Dave the Diver is a game that succeeds in blending a very fun sea diving adventure with a cool restaurant simulator that, for better or worse, is constantly trying to expand on itself.

The gameplay mainly revolves around diving into the vast sea and gathering materials and ingredients during the day, and then using what you acquired to create dishes for your sushi bar which you operate during the night. This day/night loop hooked me from the very beginning and it stayed that way for a good chunk of my playtime. Exploring the ocean and discovering/catching all the aquatic life was very fun and you're given a lot of tools and upgrades to work with. The restaurant management section of the game starts out very slow but quickly picks up once you start building up your rating and more things are opened up to you. I honestly ended up enjoying it more than the diving section by the time I was done with the main story.

Speaking of the story, I ended up really liking that as well. It's silly, endearing, and pretty well-paced for the most part. I think what really makes it shine though are the characters. The main cast is really cool and each of them have their own little quirks that make them stand out. The way they interact with Dave, whether helping him out in some way or just simple banter, is really nice. I ended up liking a lot of these characters more than I originally assumed I would. Trust me when I tell you Bancho is the coolest character in the game.

The game is also really good-looking. The 2D-pixel art is really appealing to look at and the cutscenes are really over the top in the best way possible, they fit each character perfectly, and I rarely ever skipped them.

Remember when I said this game constantly tries to expand on itself for better or worse? Yeah, that's my main issue with it. This game constantly introduces new mechanics, features, minigames, etc.(especially in the 2nd half) in what I assume is to try to keep the gameplay loop fresh. While some of the things they introduced are nice, how they went about it and the sheer amount of stuff brought in is almost overwhelming. By the end of the game, a lot of it just felt like I was just doing busy work. Getting overloaded with a constant flow of new information...now I know how Jogo felt.

Despite the issues, I really enjoyed my time with Dave the Diver and I do recommend it. Not sure if I would call it a "cozy" game like a lot of other people do tho.

I will start with the good. The art style is very nice and the animations are very charming. The main loop of diving and running the restaurant is nice, although it gets quite repetitive.

Now let's talk about the bad. There are just too many systems that get thrown in that are barely fleshed out. It's a mile wide and an inch deep. Much of these systems just feel like busywork, such as the farming. I think the game would have benefited from having less systems, but refining the core diving and restaurant loop.

For me, the thing that made Dragons Dogma special was how raw it was. In a world of incredibly user-friendly high fantasy narratives and safe, padded RPG systems, this extremely unorthodox approach to design and Capcoms weird lil brand of combat behavior made for a surprisingly engaging experience (even when it kind of sucked). Something sort of accidentally brilliant, a diamond in the rough.

Things like user-sourced NPCs to populate the world and community-pooled boss fights are obviously avant garde on the network side, but I have a fondness for even the much-aligned Portcrystal system. Personalized fast travel means making decisions about where /you/ care about going and nesting in these parts of the game world. I would put Portcrystals inside tents next to merchants and it was almost like taking ownership of those places.

É definitivamente um dos jogos já feitos

Eu sei, você provavelmente viu muita gente falando bem a beça de Last Epoch e se você é da bolha de ARPG tu já tá ligado ou ligada que a galera não tira esse jogo da boca

Mas assim, infelizmente nem tudo o que o pessoal fala acaba batendo com nossos gostos e pra mim Last Epoch é uma dessas obras "superestimadas"

Eu achei o jogo legal pra caramba ele tem um combate viciante e um endgame bem legal de se fazer, sobre sua história eu não entendi nada achei muito confusa, mas isso é as vezes o de menos nesse gênero então não me incomodei tanto com isso.

O meu problema com Last Epoch é que pra mim, ele aplicou muito bem o conceito de ARPG tanto é que tudo o que citei acima já são coisas do gênero, esse jogo pra mim não falhou em nada nessa questão. Mas teve alguns pontos no Last Epoch que infelizmente não clicou muito bem pra mim, a começar pela ambientação e a imersão fraca do jogo.

Volta e meia eu andava pelo cenário do jogo e sentia que faltava alguma coisa, era como se aquele mapa (mesmo que repleto de inimigos) estivesse vazio quase sempre sabe uma coisa meio sem alma, eu não tenho conhecimento técnico até então pra apontar a solução pra isso no jogo, mas sinto que o que também contribuiu pra essa falta de imersão no cenário, foi a baixa presença de uma trilha sonora impactante.

Sabe as trilhas sonoras não são ruins, mas são esquecíveis e as vezes parece até que ela nem existe quando tu tá lutando, isso me deu muito sono e eu tive de jogar last epoch escutando alguma música de fundo pra conseguir manter o pique.

Os personagens apesar de alguns serem bem carismáticos, parte dos diálogos confundem muito e você acaba se perdendo no meio do caminho caso se importe muito com diálogos, mas como eu disse acima não vou pesar a mão nessa parte da história porque de fato eu não crio tanta preocupação em ARPG a respeito das historinhas, mas caso você esteja interessado em entender por completo a história do last epoch, sugiro que depois que terminar o jogo você de uma olhada nos arquivos ou sane suas dúvidas em alguma Wiki, sim.. da mesma forma que os jogadores de Souls like fazem..

E é isso eu gostei do jogo mas eu não recomendaria ele pra muita gente, achei uma experiência esquecível mas pode ser que no futuro valha mais a pena joga-lo, já que assim como grim Dawn tenho certeza que esse aqui vai receber muitos mods e expansões (ao menos espero)

Having now played a second ARPG in Grim Dawn, as well as having checked out this Path of Exile biz, I can now say that this genre might eventually someday turn out as one of my favourites.

Grim Dawn in particular is amazing: the pacing is almost immaculate, the story and worldbuilding is fun videogame shlock, and the gameplay is cool at how it insentivizes experimentation. The two-class system, specifically, was great. I thought it was a dumb gimmick at first, but as I moved through the two skill trees I developed a playstyle that seemed unique to what I've seen people do with other classes, and it helped me immerse myself in the world, where I was a grenadier-spellcaster freeze-shocking chtonic demons, cultists and outlaws into stunlocked hell. I also loved the customizability of your character, being able to tweek almost every aspect of your guy to perfection, from resistances to how your gear looks (the latter thanks to a DLC, but still). Probably the biggest stand-out feature of this one has got to be the Constitution system, whereby moving out of the way and not attacking for a bit restores lost HP up to a certain point. That made my biggest issue with other games of this kind - the fact that they're potion-chugging simulators without a foot in either offensive or defensive gameplay - gone entirely. Now I can just kite around the trolls and the demons, continuously dealing damage and actually paying attention to the micro gameplay, not just looking at the skills' cooldowns.

Of course it all doesn't help too much that the art-direction is bland and that the final boss (an emissary of a dark cosmic deity here to consume the world) is easy as shit, but the game is still fun. Definitely doing another playthrough after the DLC is done

I love class systems, building my character however I want, being able to synergize several effects into one devastating result, and having this all in action game system. Well... be careful for what you wish for.

Ok ok, it's not as bad as that comment may imply. This game is... Diablo. It's a isometric action RPG with random loot drops, tens of hundreds of hours of increasing difficulties to allow for stronger loot to appear, facing against hundreds of enemies a minute (I got an achievement for killing 25,000 enemies, it's that crazy), as well having four-player co-op. Hell it even shares a designer who actually worked on Diablo itself. This whole game, as well as its expansions, were created by a relatively small team, about 13 people or so. That's honestly really impressive considering how content filled this game is.
You have six classes in the base game, and three more added with DLC. Unlike in Diablo (as far as I'm aware, I've not played them) you can multiclass once you reach level 10. That doesn't take long to reach, and when that happens your options get borderline overwhelming. Each class is distinct enough from one another, and with how earning class skills works in Grim Dawn you need to carefully distribute points earned from leveling up. So maybe you only want the second class for a few specific skills and stat ups, or maybe you'd rather distribute points more evenly. Do you want a lot of different types of skills, or only have a select few but invest more points in the existing ones to make them stronger? But you also have attribute points to distribute which gives basic stat ups to your character, however higher level equipment is locked via attribute stats. You could simply increase that stats you need, but perhaps your armor will make the difference depending on the random modifiers they have. Is your armor not enough? Then add components to them which gives small bonuses including brand new skills exclusive to equipment and added components only. Still not enough?! Find and restore devotion shrines to add points into one massive, yet open ended skill tree that, yet again, can earn you exclusive abilities and stat ups.
This is why I said "...be careful for what you wish for". It is so much to take in, not helping how one piece of equipment can have a laundry list of modifiers. It can be difficult comparing different types of equipment to the point that they have an in-game search system where, say, you want more fire damage equipped; so simply type in "fire" and it'll narrow down the list. It's a really helpful tool, but you're still doing a lot of comparing since it may have more fire damage, but it has less armor or maybe your helmet you have on now gives you a fireball spell. There's so much time spend on menus, doubly so if you're as compulsive as I am when it comes to wanting to do as much damage as possible but then "Oh this benefits my lightning spell but now my chaos attack is weaker. Oh god what do I do?"
What you do is say "fuck it". You got to fight the urge to be as perfectly optimized as possible. It's a game based on randomness, at least in terms of equipment. The challenges aren't designed around one build, it's designed for every build. I started to relax more when I came to grips with that. Maybe I'd have an easier time if I continued to pay stricter attention to what I was wearing, but veteran difficulty is perfectly fine with a "good enough" attitude. I then came to realize something else about Grim Dawn, it is a fantastic "podcast game". The act of fighting is simple, but you won't make it far if you aren't moving your character out of harms way. You have to do just enough maneuvering that it isn't a mindless game, but it's no fighting game that requires your undivided attention. It became nice to wind down with Grim Dawn after work while listening to a video in the background.
To go into some of my last scattered thoughts on this game: it actually doesn't do random dungeons for the most part. At least for its main campaign. It came as a surprise since I've heard that random dungeons is a staple for the Diablo franchise. I'm honestly unsure if that's a point in Grim Dawn's favor or not. In case you were curious, I rocked a dual pistol build where my character was upgrading their shooting skills till it got to the point that every shot had, like, five separate 15% to 60% chances of a different effect occurring ranging from lighting to knockdowns to splitting into fragments to piercing straight through enemies. Sometimes they happen all at once. And lastly, don't be like me and not knowing that there's a storage area where you can have a universal box that is shared by all your characters. This helps a lot when making a new character as you can provide some starter gear, maybe give them components or materials, or maybe you found rifle that is useless for your solider but your demolitionist would more then appreciate it.

So to summarize: it sure is a loot-based RPG. I'm definitely more of a Monster Hunter person when it comes to how to create a compelling loot system while not going too crazy with a shopping list of modifiers. Then again, I can't create a army of skeletons, rotting flesh golems and demons in Monster Hunter now can I

Ride Lero Lero.
Life good.
Lero Lero fight back.
KILL LERO LERO.
Lero Lero gone.
Think about Lero Lero.
Regret..