This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Dave the Diver. If you subscribe to The Escapist Patreon or YouTube memberships, you can view next week’s episode, on Chrono Trigger (yes, freakin’ Chrono Trigger), right now!
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Zero Punctuation Transcript
As Holmes had his Moriarty, as the Beatles had their Rolling Stones, as Kurt Cobain had his own unperforated face, so too does the triple-A games industry have its dark reflection, the indie games. Ever mirroring its actions, going down when they go up, light when they go grim, the pixel art ever-chonkifying as cutting edge graphics dance ever higher out of their grasp like a toy mouse on a string tormenting a cat. How appropriate that but a week after Final Fantasy went all grim, apocalyptic and sweary on us that the hot new indie title should be a cozy pixel art game where the stakes can’t get any lower because they’re currently ten meters below sea level in the side of a tuna fish. Tuna steaks, you see, that was the pun. Though on reflection it might be odd to describe Dave the Diver as “low stakes” considering that at various points in it you battle giant krakens, blow up enemy submarines and save a hidden civilization of merpeople from ecological disaster, but at the end of all of that you still have to slouch home and work a shift at your artisanal sushi restaurant. Perhaps the true measure of a cozy game is not that it lacks explosions and bloody fish-related violence but that the gritty fish murder passes with no greater emphasis than the straightening of the napkin dispensers.
In Dave the Diver we play as the titular Dave, an extremely nice if decidedly ovoid gentleman who has trouble saying no to people, and finds himself appointed the main supplier and head waiter for a friend’s remote sushi restaurant because he’s too nice to say “No, I do not want to spend my evenings distributing plates to tourists as I hobble around on whatever bleeding shreds of limb remain after a day spent fighting off sharks.” So it’s one of those light work sim post Dad game hybrid thingummy pops that indie games like so much, where we spend the day part of the day-night cycle swimming around an oceanic trench that mysteriously contains loads of marine life from various contradictory geographical environments that never reduce in number no matter how many we hookshot and stuff inside our equally mysteriously roomy wetsuit pants, and the evenings playing a light restaurant management game where you pick up plates and carry them to whoever’s wearing a speech bubble with an equivalent image inside, never questioning why a restaurant patron would be permanently vocalising their order or how it must be affecting the dinner conversation.
Using the subsequent profits to improve your ability to explore the ocean and widen your range of products and all of the usual floppery – fairly standard stuff for indie cozy business ’em ups in the mold of your Moonlighter or any of those nineteen different games about running a potion shop that came out for some reason, so what else does Dave the Diver have to make it stand out? Well, pretty much bloody everything. As in, every kind of game that exists in the history of the world. Exploring the deeper and deeper ocean and having boss fights with giant sea monsters is still just the paddling about on the surface of Dave the Diver with nary a need to roll your trousers up past your knees. Keep digging and there’s farming mechanics, environmental puzzles, horse racing, stealth infiltration missions, a curious interlude in which we play a rhythm game at an imaginary Japanese idol concert and then a final boss that’s more of a horizontal shooter than anything else. Which is good for people who like variety, I suppose, probably not so great for anyone who was hoping to make use of all these fish hookshotting and restaurant management skills that are mainly what we’ve been training in for the last fifteen hours, but let’s get back to that.
Like a small child covered in jam, some things about Dave the Diver are immediately clear just from a surface level glance. For example, it’s very visually charming, also like a small child covered in jam as long as you’re not the person who needs to brush the small child’s hair later. All pixel art, yes, but not because the game couldn’t be arsed to do enough sit-ups to squeeze HD resolutions into their trousers; the pixels are all perfectly placed with a protuberance of precision, the animations are about as cinematic as pixel chonk can get, and every character is infused with distinct quirks and personality that can be instantly understood without dialogue. The effort is there, and the game’s certainly keen to show it off. The animated cutscenes that played when I upgraded a gun or recipe were very lovely the first time and gave me an itchy skip button finger every other time, but never mind. Dave the Diver is, in brief, charismatic. His near-spherical form, cheerful smile and extremely unflattering beard that looks like he spent his off hours sucking the blockage out of a chocolate milkshake dispenser lend him a far stronger personality than if he’d just been generic protagonist man built like the dude from the men’s lavatory sign.
But then there’s the gameplay, and the sheer number of different mechanics, minigames and interludes means there is plenty of effort on display there as well, but it also gives Dave the Diver the sense of being fifty miles wide and about two inches deep. It’s a sushi roll sample platter, never sticking with one flavour for too long when sometimes what you want is a big long interesting sausage that you can feel tickling your lower intestine even while your teeth are still negotiating the other end. So initially you’re exploring deeper and deeper sections of the ocean and you feel like you’re in a Subnautica sort of place where the underwater realm is going to keep descending and expanding into more and more fantastical areas, but then it just sort of stops three biomes down. Then you’re knobbing around a merpeople village for a while as the game goes “Hey, have you checked out these casino minigames over here? Probably more fun than the undersea cavern one-man fish genocide!” And I’m starting to feel like I’m trying to negotiate my way through the perfume department of a big store, dodging clouds of free samples as they waft past.
It starts to make me think about Horace, the pet project that someone spent way too much time cramming way too much into because it was their special baby and it ended up this bloated overstuffed thing tottering around the dog show with its eyeballs popping out like gumballs on a novelty ice cream. Dave the Diver’s not that bad, it does keep things anchored with the persistent diving gameplay each day and restaurant management each night, although it doesn’t take long to hit bottom on that, as well; I hire two chefs and two waiters and after a handful of upgrades suddenly there’s bugger all Dave needs to do all shift except straighten the chairs and look pretty. After a while the game’s various mechanics stop feeding into each other effectively; I beat the game having barely used the craftable weapon upgrade facilities at all, and there’s not much point in supplying the restaurant with a variety of fish as opposed to just the most recently discovered stuff that earns the most cash ‘cos rich twats will pay the Earth for coelecanth snot on a biscuit if it nets them Instagram likes. In brief, Dave the Diver is full of charm and variety, but also feels like a game constantly getting bored of its own mechanics. And that’s kinda my job, Dave the Diver. “What was that? Sorry, I got bored of listening and covered myself in jam.”
Yahtzee is the Escapist’s longest standing talent, having been writing and producing its award winning flagship series, Zero Punctuation, since 2007. Before that he had a smattering of writing credits on various sites and print magazines, and has almost two decades of experience in game journalism as well as a lifelong interest in video games as an artistic medium, especially narrative-focused.
He also has a foot in solo game development - he was a big figure in the indie adventure game scene in the early 2000s - and writes novels. He has six novels published at time of writing with a seventh on the way, all in the genres of comedic sci-fi and urban fantasy.
He was born in the UK, emigrated to Australia in 2003, and emigrated again to California in 2016, where he lives with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include walking the dog and emigrating to places.
