Dave The Diver is ostensibly a game where you dive for fish by day and sell sushi of your catch by night. There’s a light restaurant management sim thrown in there to support the selling of said sushi, and a fish farm to, uh, farm fish for the restaurant. There’s also a basic farming sim — ala Harvest Moon — to grow ingredients.
Dave The Diver is also a game with merpeople, a game with seahorse racing, a game with numerous sidequests (including two different underwater stealth mechanics), with a bevy of mini-games (one of which is, yes, stealth based), and a tamagotchi game. Oh, and in one boss fight it becomes a bullet hell game.
There’s a lot going on.
Too much, perhaps.
I don’t mind gameplay variation but by the umpteenth gameplay shift it started to wear on me. The thing is, Dave The Diver does its core gameplay loop so very well that I didn’t want to leave it. Infiltrating a bad guy base or controlling two characters at once to solve a puzzle are well and good, sure, but what I really want to do is more diving and making my restaurant thrive. That dream of a concert will advance the plot, yes, but how will it directly affect my restauranteering?
More than that, the core gameplay loop is so excellently executed: you dive during the day, sell the fish you catch, use that money to upgrade your restaurant and gear, and repeat. The next upgrade you can get is always just out of reach; there’s always something to strive for. Having to forgo that for chunks at a time is a drag. I want to dive in Dave The Diver, not do a half-baked side-scrolling stealth mini-game.
I’ve finished the main plot of the game — all that’s left is now running the restaurant until I tire of it. I’m looking forward to this part. The mini-games and all that are done with (I think), now it’s just diving and sushi-ing. I think if Dave the Diver had centered itself around that, instead of trying to do as much as it did, it may have ended up a stronger game. As fun as the variation is, it may have been better to drill down on the thing the game does so well. It’s the master of one, why try and be the jack of the others?
Essays, Not Rants! 