"I Dive." -Dave

The surprise Indie* Hit Of The Year, Dave the Diver is a game that's occupied a strange space for me, as I've seen endless praise for it from vidja insider types but I have seen literally nobody actually talk about it. Maybe I just live under a rock but I heard nowhere near as much talk of this thing compared to something like Pizza Tower or Fear and Hunger, which dwarf this thing in cultural footprint despite apparently being less successful. Surely, something was amiss here.

There wasn't, the game's just a perfectly adequate AAA puppeting the skin of an indie game. The cycle of diving to restaurant managing is fun enough for a time, but after a while too many features creep their way in and I decided to hop off the ride before I knew I'd get bored n overstuffed. Wish the game had a smaller scope, it's definitely trying to do too much at once. I just want a game where you hunt for fish and serve them at a restaurant, I don't wanna do farming and gambling and shit! Dave's got too much dip on his chip!

The real thing that sinks the experience for me is just how soulless everything feels. The pixel art is nice but lacking in any real character or personalty, the dialogue has no wit or charm to it, and the ocean environments are largely vacant and bland. How anyone was convinced this was an actual indie game is beyond me, this has the "buffered and polished down all the edges and gnarly bits that leave the product with nothing to latch onto" vibe that basically all big budget games have now. just in 2D. One of the characters is just a weeaboo trope from 2013. It just ain't got no sauce to it!

The game's two main halves are diving and managing a restaurant. The diving is based on Proc-Gen that changes everyday, you hunt fish and items for quests and running the restaurant. The restaurant is about supplying and enlarging your menu while occasionally handling special requests.

The loop fails to hide its repetitiveness except for ebbs and flows of showering you with side content and checklists then leaving you on your own for a few days.
It might be comfy for people who like occasionally picking up this type of games, but I found it too dull and honestly meaningless. I can take a dive and grab the item for the main quest and still have a lot of time left, I see the same types of fish back and forth and my kitchen is brimming with stock. Its last bastion is an index which fills up as you get new fish, but these completionist incentives don't work for me.

The art is beyond boring. This may sound like a personal ick but since this is a deep marine setting and they went for sprites that should've afforded them a better looking game. Yet it's bland, the characters, the "story", the art and the music. This isn't good at all for this type of game since you'll be staring under the sea for +20 hrs.

até agr n achei grandes coisa:/
esperava mais
o combate é chaaato
os boss pior ainda
tudo é mt chato
os personagens sao sla
unico q presta é o chef
as animações são boas pelo menos

Let's get the good out of the way - the art is very nice, both the environments and the cutscenes. The core diving-restaurant servicegame loop is also pretty well done, although not for long.

Not content with being competent, Dave the Diver decides to try and stand out by shoving ever more management systems for the player to keep track of, cluttering your options interface and pestering you with notifications. It sprinkles the storyline every mechanic it can think of from other genres for a guest spot. Expect rhythm sections, stealth sections, rail shooter bits, temple-run style obstacle avoiders and more. This wouldn't feel half as egregious if it didn't explicitly describe almost all of these as "new content", making it feel like a conscious checklist to keep the dopamine flowing.

The pacing is atrocious. It loves to pull you out of the water before allowing you to progress, possibly as a way of dealing with the fact that the core diving is frictionless. I suspect this might be why it has otherwise inexplicable mild procedural generation as well.

This is the kind of game that could have just been content with looking pretty and saying nothing, but along with everything else it shoves in it decided it needed a completely pointless "environmental activists are hypocrites" subplot. The Sea Shepherd parody could have been cut entirely, with no consequences on the story. Mewling about how small fishing operations aren't the problem seems like an ill fit for a game about mass hunting vulnerable shark species to turn into sushi that gets thrown in the bin because a diner didn't like the speed of their service.