I’m supposed to be playing a lot of other things for work right now. Like Exoprimal. When I fire off our daily email newsletter and close my browser tabs at the end of the day, I should be playing Exoprimal. Or one of the three other games I’m currently playing under embargo. I should be using my time productively, ensuring I can churn out a take or two in between all the editing and admin I have to get through in an average day around here.
But I’m not. I’m doing that. I’m just playing Dave the Diver.
Dave the Diver is a fairly straightforward game. You play as Dave, a diver by trade who specialises in harpoon fishing and hauling lost waste up off the sea floor. By day, he frolics about in the sea. By night, he works a part-time job at his friend’s buzzy new sushi restaurant.
Dave craves only a simple life of swimming about during the day, collecting fish for his friend to cook in the restaurant that night. However, things keep coming between Dave and his tranquil existence. Things like uncovering the fate of a lost, sea-faring society beneath the waves, for instance.
The game loop is incredibly simple. Each day, the game randomly picks one of a handful of seafloor maps. Days are broken up into mornings, afternoons, and nights. Your mornings and afternoons are spent in the ocean, hunting fish or completing odd jobs for people you’ve met. At night, you need to run about the sushi restaurant as a server, ferrying meals to paying customers before they become impatient and leave. The money you make at the sushi restaurant is funnelled back into your diving operation, upgrading your equipment to make you a more efficient fish hunter, or into the restaurant to maximise your profits.
The reason you get two bites at the diving apple is that you’ve often got to split your time fairly cleanly between tasks and more generalised fishing. While you might use the morning to tick off a few objectives and explore the map, the afternoon must be used for fishing, lest you have nothing to cook in the evening.
As the story progresses, so do the challenges Dave must overcome. As a mirror to Dave’s rapidly complicating situation, the game throws new mechanics into the mix every few days. They start small — an Instagram-style app that helps level up your restaurant’s acclaim and facilities, a shop that lets you craft new weapons and items — and over time, begin to fill up Dave’s phone. It all quickly starts to feel like it’s getting to be A Bit Much, and that’s entirely the point. Increasingly, Dave is (forgive the pun) well and truly out of his depth, treading water in an attempt to please an awful lot of masters with demands on his time.
All of this complication is external to basic gameplay, however. It’s all managed before you dive or head off to the restaurant. The gameplay loop is preserved and indeed becomes a kind of reward for getting through all of Dave’s life admin.
There’s a subtlety at play here that I haven’t seen in many games this year. Dave the Diver combines elements of adventure games, RPGs, management sims and roguelites with a touch that is as deft as it is inspired. I feel a certain communion with Dave, and not just because we share a strong, robust name. He’s run off his feet, with too much to do and too many demands on his time. There’s always something he forgets to do, some goal he fails to get done. There’s a lot of that in my life right now, and I sympathise with him. It isn’t the juggling that’ll get you — it’s juggling for days and weeks on end and suddenly realising you’re exhausted.
Which is, of course, why I keep playing it. It takes my mind off all the problems I have to solve every day by giving me a different Dave’s (comparatively) more interesting ones. The only diving I’m doing at the moment is into my emails. I’ll take his reggae-infused island version any day of the week.
Anyway, Dave the Diver is really good, and I think you should play it. It’s out now for Windows PC and Mac OS via Steam.
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