Dave the Diver
by Aethyna
Sep 28, 2023 |
1
Votes |
48
Played |
0
Reviews
10
rate
Genres:
Simulation , AdventureGraphics:
2DLabels:
Animals , Collectathon , Adventure , Pixel Art , Restaurant/ Cafe , Fishing , Time Management , UnderwaterPlatforms:
Publishers:
Mintrocket Dave the Diver made headlines with its charm and addictively fun gameplay where you play as (obviously) Dave the diver himself! Work with your friends, Cobra and Bancho, and help make the sushi business venture a success by diving into the Blue Hole to gather a variety of ingredients and managing the restaurant itself. Play Now Similar Games Played
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Summary
Dave the Diver made headlines with its charm and addictively fun gameplay where you play as (obviously) Dave the diver himself! Work with your friends, Cobra and Bancho, and help make the sushi business venture a success by diving into the Blue Hole to gather a variety of ingredients and managing the restaurant itself. Will you be able to survive the nasties that lurk in the deep while making sure your customers’ voracious appetite is satiated?
Plotline
In this game, you play as Dave. He is a diver who is enjoying his well-deserved vacation... that is until he receives a phone call from a dear friend, Cobra.
With the promise of all-you-can-eat sushi, he managed to get Dave to a place called the Giant Blue Hole, where, oddly enough, the terrain and ecology change constantly. This meant that they would be able to gather fish from all around the world in this one, single spot.
And what are they going to do with all those fish exactly? Well, with Cobra’s other friend who also happens to be a sushi master, they are planning to set up a sushi bar right next to the Blue Hole. This is, as Cobra puts it, “the business opportunity of a lifetime”!
As you progress, you’ll encounter a whole lot more characters, all of whom are interested in the many sea creatures that you can find within the Blue Hole, or at least in the unique range of sushi that Bancho can whip up. Each of them offers a different storyline for you to follow and complete.
Gameplay
Dave the Diver primarily consists of two kinds of gameplay – the fishing aspect and the restaurant management aspect. The game starts off with a handy interactive tutorial to guide you through the basics of both aspects, and you’ll get more guided tutorials later on as you unlock more and more game features as you progress.
The fishing part is likely the most entertaining part of the game since it’s more action-based. Here, you’ll dive into the Blue Hole and use a variety of weapons, be it your melee weapon (the default knife, usually), your harpoon, or your gun, to hunt and gather a variety of sea creatures for the sushi master, Bancho, to turn into delicious sushi. The variety of sea creatures you’ll encounter in this game is astounding, from timid yet colorful Clown Fishes to the more hostile Barracuda, to even sharks like the Tiger Sharks, squids, and jellyfish.
Aside from sea creatures, you may also find chests or sealed pots where you can get rarer sushi ingredients like sauces or salt, weapon caches that contain a random weapon, weapon upgrade, or even a harpoon attachment, such as giving a shock effect to your harpoon, allowing it to temporarily stun a fish. You may find starfishes, seashells, various seaweeds, ammo for your guns, and various crafting materials (ores, wood, rope, etc) that you’ll need to craft new guns in the Blue Hole as well!
Note that in this game, you can’t just buy guns directly from a vendor. Instead, the game will have you dive into the Blue Hole, open weapon caches to get new guns that you don’t have, and bring them back to the surface, in which case, the gun will be dismantled by Duff and turned into a blueprint. Once you have all the blueprints needed, you can then craft the gun using crafting materials you’ve gathered and equip the gun for your next run. There’s a nice variety of guns here, and not all are designed for lethal means, such as the net gun or the stun pistol.
As you may expect, oxygen is crucial in a dive. Without it, Dave will die. This is even more important because 1. Oxygen works much like a health bar in this game and will get reduced quickly if Dave gets injured, be it by being attacked by an aggressive sea creature or getting pushed into a patch of particularly spiky corals, and 2. Dashing (or swimming super quickly) underwater consumes extra oxygen as well, but it’s a vital way you could use to quickly avoid danger.
If Dave does die, you’ll lose everything in your inventory except the one item the game will let you keep – you get to choose which one. Thankfully, the game does give you plenty of ways to replenish your oxygen during a dive. You could use the many oxygen canisters or sealed clams that you may find while diving to restore all of your oxygen levels.
There are also portable O2 canisters (consumables) that you can bring along and use for emergencies, or you could simply upgrade your oxygen tank capacity by investing in the corresponding upgrades via the iDiver app. Note that you can upgrade other diving equipment here as well, including your wetsuit, which will allow you to dive deeper, your inventory so you can carry more items (in terms of weight, at least), or have a much stronger harpoon.
Making it back to the surface is made easier as well with many strategically located Escape Pods. By using one of these, you can get Dave and anything he has in his inventory back to the boat within seconds without having to lug everything all the way from the depths to the surface.
The goal here is to gather as many sushi ingredients as you can before returning to the boat before your oxygen runs out, but there are plenty of side and main missions that you can complete as well. All of these missions are conveniently tracked via a To-Do app on Dave’s phone. You’ll also unlock more features as you progress, including the card-collecting Marinca app, the Ecowater app, and more. There are also minigames if you want to take a break from the cycle of fishing and restaurant management.
From time to time, you’ll need to battle a boss in order to progress. Bosses in this game usually have a trick to them and must be approached strategically. For instance, the very first boss you’ll encounter – the giant squid – can only be harmed if you can attack its eye. You only have a very narrow window to do it since it’ll spew ink to push you away if you get too close. At one point, the boss will use one of its tentacles to cover its eye, making it even harder for you to target it.
Plus, you can’t just use your shorter-ranged harpoon to do it – you’ll need to rely on a gun with a much longer range, and well, guns have limited ammo in this game. Once you’ve exhausted all the ammo pickups, you’ll need to abandon the boss fight attempt, return to the boat, and try again. That said, it’s good that the game lets you exit from the instanced boss fight area and reattempt the boss fight at a later time/date. It’s tricky, to say the least, and may take you a few attempts to get right.
Now, that’s the fishing aspect covered – let’s take a look at the restaurant management aspect instead! You can only fish during the day (morning and afternoon) and will have to pick up the night shift at the sushi restaurant by helping to serve sushi to customers. Eventually, you’ll even be able to go out for a late-night fishing session after your shift at the restaurant ends.
The gameplay for the restaurant management aspect is very similar to a typical cooking-themed time management game, albeit in 2D form. The goal here is to serve food to your customers as fast as you can, preferably before they leave the place in anger. There are other stuff to do too, like serving drinks (there’s a mini-game here where you need to pour just the right amount of green tea/beer), grinding fresh wasabi for Bancho to make his sushi with, and cleaning dirty dishes that are sometimes left behind by customers.
Similar to diving, you can dash to serve your customers faster, but you have limited stamina. There’s a trick, though – don’t completely drain your stamina since recovery is much slower that way. Ease up on the dash button when your stamina is just low enough so it can recover faster.
Managing a sushi restaurant isn’t just about serving the customers. You’ll have to set the menu for the night, for instance. You’ll start off with a limited number of slots at first, but as your restaurant’s fame and rating increase on the social media app, Cooksta, you’ll get to unlock new slots. Don’t offer too much on the menu either since any leftovers will be thrown away.
Each dish has a taste rating and a cost, and it’s good to offer a variety of these, so you cover all bases – you could never really know what kind of sushi tickles your customers’ fancy for that night… unless it’s an event, for instance, a jellyfish sushi-oriented event, which in this case, going all out on jellyfish-based sushi will net you the most profits. You can also upgrade your sushi dishes to increase their taste rating and hence, their prices. It will cost you ingredients to upgrade a dish, and the upgrade cost will increase as the dishes level up.
To spruce things up, you can even add various furniture and décor to your restaurant’s interior. It doesn’t seem like these items have any purpose or use, however. It would definitely be better if they do, much like the upgrades you can get in a typical time management game, like increasing customers’ patience or increasing the productivity of hired staff, etc. Even a slight boost would be helpful overall.
Eventually, more and more customers will flock to your sushi restaurant, making it impractical and impossible to manage everything with just Bancho and Dave. This is where hiring comes in! You can send out job ads, and depending on how much you’ve spent, you’ll get a list of potential candidates in return.
Each candidate has their own set of stats, and you’ll want to hire the right individual for the right job, say a person with a high Serving rating for the waitressing job. Note that hired staff can be trained, at a cost, to improve their stats as well in this game, and it’s wise to do so, especially as your restaurant grows in fame.
Dave the Diver is definitely one of the more unique indie games that I have had the pleasure of playing. It blends various gameplay elements and genres perfectly, adds in a dash of witty and engaging storylines, and generously seasoned it with plenty of stuff to unlock and collect – the kind of game feature that collect-athon fans would literally drool over! As a bonus, the price is also perfectly reasonable for the amount of content and playtime the game can offer. It is just the perfect package!
Graphics/ Sound
Like most indie titles, Dave the Diver opted for a pixel art look that is both gorgeous to behold and incredibly detailed, as far as pixel art can go. The game inserts plenty of cutscenes as well to help amp up the hilarity of some of the characters, such as Bancho’s many cutscenes during certain restaurant upgrades. In terms of sound, the game features a selection of techno-themed music that, oddly enough, matches well with the game’s underwater theme. There are plenty of sound effects as well that fit perfectly with the many actions you can make in the game, whether it is dashing through the ocean in pursuit of an elusive fish or harpooning another fish that enters your sights.
Conclusion
Dave the Diver is truly a masterpiece in its own right! Focusing on the essence of fun, Dave the Diver has everything that makes a game both addictively fun and intriguingly engaging, from a challenging (enough) gameplay where you get to harpoon an insane variety of underwater creatures so Bancho could turn them into delicious sushi, to managing your very own sushi restaurant, time management-style. There are so many to collect and unlock, interesting encounters that have their own mini-storylines, and even thrilling boss fights to overcome in an epic fashion.
This is a game that we can’t recommend enough. So, give it a shot and play it - You can thank us later!
Dave the Diver Blog
New Game Added: Dave the Diver
by Aethyna
Sep 28, 2023
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