3.5/5 ★ – DrakeM's review of Dave the Diver.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Dave The Diver. As someone who enjoys water levels in games, I was initially enamored with the gameplay loop of going on procedurally generated diving excursions during the day and running a sushi bar at night, but over the next 35 hours this loop slowly ran out of steam as I realized how little variance there actually was from dive to dive, day to day, and night to night. The game tries to remedy this by constantly introducing new things to you, but this does not solve the underlying issue. Although the story of Dave The Diver is charming, full of cute animals and likable characters, the pacing of it was all over the place. I think this stems from the fact that it tries to shoehorn meaningful, handcrafted story beats into a choice-driven, semi-rougelite formula. This combination lead to lengthy periods of time where very little story development happened and other periods of time where a lot did. Apart from the main storyline, the game piles on layer after layer of other objectives and missions, such as 3 different kinds of farming, multiple lists of fetch quests, and even mobile phone minigames; none of which were very deep or fun to engage with. At times the game feels at odds with itself by creating annoying problems and then solving them in unsatisfying ways. Some examples include introducing you to a very large hub area and then charging you a special currency to move around it a little faster, upgrades for certain tools making different otherwise necessary tools completely useless, and some timed events not being able to happen on the same day as others. This felt like sloppy game design via creating speed bumps that didn’t need to exist in the first place. All in all, there are cutscenes, boss battles, craftable and upgradable weapons, minigames, resources and people to manage, character questlines, ever-changing (kinda) level designs, various different crossover collaborations between other games and celebrities, and more. This has left me wondering what Dave The Diver is actually trying to accomplish; is it a management sim? Is it a rougelite? Is it single-player story game? A bullethell? An old-school stealth game? A simple puzzle game?… Unfortunately, the answer is that it’s a little bit of all of these things, leaving Dave The Diver to be a jack of all trades and master of none.