Picture this: you’re on the beach, enjoying a well deserved vacation. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, the drinks are flowing, everything is perfect. Then, your… friend? Business associate? Whatever he is, he calls you with the opportunity of a lifetime: help him open a sushi restaurant in a hot new locale. He’s got a cook lined up already, he just needs someone to supply the fish. It’ll be fun! You’re a trained diver in your own right, and the restaurant is right next to a stunning dive spot. Win-win, right? Well, restaurant ownership and management turns out to be a little more complicated than you thought, and the Blue Hole has more secrets to uncover than what can be seen from the surface…

You are Dave, and Dave is a diver! But don’t be fooled, you’ll end up doing a lot more than just diving as the game expands to restaurant management, fish farming, regular farming, photography, wrangling deep sea monsters, rescuing merfolk, and more as the story progresses. The game features a wide array of eccentric characters, from the stoic sushi chef Bancho to the sleazy Cobra, to the excitable Dr. Bacon, as well as a host of underwater encounters to be unearthed. Discover the lost Sea People village, and help solve the host of troubles that plague them, while balancing profits and food competitions on the surface. 

There’s a lot to collect and do throughout the game, with regular rewards of gear or upgrades to encourage players to do a little bit of everything, slowly introducing mechanics as they go. It almost verges on too much to juggle and do at some points, but seeing as the game has very few time sensitive missions, it all balances out. If you miss out on maximizing profits here or there, or fail to get the materials needed for a challenge, that’s just a missed opportunity, not a game over. And while the game does have a couple tense chase sequences and tricky boss fights, it’s pretty generous with its save states, allowing players to quickly retry a sequence if they fail, without being too punishing. 

The late game also starts introducing some level of automation to help lighten the workload and encourage players to focus on exploration and expansion. With minigames galore to get distracted by, players are forced to decide on where they spend their time, if they want to sacrifice time at the sushi bar to go night diving, or risk the long dive to the ocean floor for a specific kind of fish or resource. 

With delightfully animated cutscenes and over-the-top character reactions, Dave the Diver is definitely a game to sink your teeth into if you’re looking for a wide range of game mechanics to keep you engaged, or a collect-a-thon to spend your time on. With fish both real, fictional, and/or ancient, there’s a lot to catch out there, and several fun references for game lovers to enjoy. There’s also several allusions to real life aspects of diving, such as nitrogen decompression on coming to the surface, and the dangers of large corporate fisheries. And guns underwater. A lot of guns and explosions underwater. So if you’ve ever dreamed of defeating the shark from Jaws in underwater combat during a lightning storm, give the game a try!