DAVE THE DIVER Review

Welcome to my review of DAVE THE DIVER. This game is brought to us by MINTROCKET (Nakwon: Last Paradise).

DAVE THE DIVER is a casual adventure game that is single-player and has some RPG, Roguelike, and management elements to it. It’s out now on PC and Nintendo Switch, it was originally released on June 28th, 2023.

Keep reading to find out my thoughts of DAVE THE DIVER.

Once you have read through this, why not check out some of our other reviews?

The Game

If you hadn’t guessed by now, the game protagonist is named Dave, and he’s a diver. It’s a beautiful game which has bright colours, pixelated graphics, and enough relaxation to put yoga to shame.

The game isn’t just about diving though, when not in the deep blue sea, Dave must help run the local sushi restaurant as well as speak to locals to get given quests.

This means we get those management game elements as well as a pretty cool little mini game where we have to rush Dave around the sushi bar, serving customers ensuring they get their orders in a timely manner.

I used the above image from the press kit for DAVE THE DIVER as all my gameplay time was on the Steam Deck itself, thanks to MINTROCKET for the image.

For the most part, you will spend your time underwater in DAVE THE DIVER. This is where you’ll hunt down those fish, spear them with your spear gun, and serve them up in the sushi bar. That’s not all, whilst you’re underwater, you will find all sorts of trinkets and treasures.

Parts for new guns, items for quests, you’ll also earn experience points which help toward unlocking new skills and upgrades. Such upgrades allow you to dive deeper, have more oxygen in your tank allowing you to stay underwater for longer, and more such as better fishing capabilities to pull in the bigger fish down below.

Should you find an untimely watery grave whilst down in the deep, fear not. You will simply be saved and respawn back up on the fishing boat. You will get to choose one item to keep that you found down in the waters below. Not bad really, better than losing everything!

Conclusions

All in all, DAVE THE DIVER is a great game, but it does have some limitations. However, these limitations are overpowered by how chilled out and fun the game is to play. I can most definitely recommend the game if you’re a fan of games like Stardew Valley or Graveyard Keeper.

Of course, this game is totally different from those, but those are also games I love to play.

One major plus for me is that this game runs perfectly on the Steam Deck. No issues at all, decent frame rates, good battery life, and best of all, no crashes!

If you wish to learn more about this game, you can head over to the official site.

I score DAVE THE DIVER a 9/10.