Dave the Diver

Play this game!

During the day, you scuba dive to find fish and trinkets. At night, you run a sushi restaurant.

It's a glorious loop, nicely salted with little quests to give you goals without ever overwhelming you with too many things to do. The diving portion is lightly procedurally generated, and follows a very relaxed loop of improving your gear to go deeper or explore more areas. Other side stuff unlocks as you go, but it all revolves around the core of diving and managing the restaurant.

The writing is clever and the humor is good, tongue-in-cheek without trying too hard at it. Brief little animated sequences bring the pixel characters to life and the entire thing screams "labor of love."

It's in early access now with something like half the eventual content available, but what's there is completely polished and well worth the $20 price tag.

Don't delay, play today! Steam link.

IMAGE(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1868140/ss_6eac5a3b59e181d1ffa26757b041be521bfe1779.600x338.jpg?t=1666954118)
IMAGE(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1868140/ss_783e1f6c2d4c358fb494d055c47c0e888922abd5.600x338.jpg?t=1666954118)
IMAGE(https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1868140/ss_264faf6cbb2d4466c2a10f9e03fe1487e0615379.600x338.jpg?t=1666954118)

Interested. I wonder how it will look/play on the Deck.

Sold me.

-BEP

Out of early access as of today and the rest of the content is in. Starting over and the loop is just as enjoyable as I remembered.

Interested!

farley3k wrote:

Interested. I wonder how it will look/play on the Deck.

Past me, it looks and plays great on the Deck and it was on a tiny sale for $17. Good purchase.

Wishlisted it. This is one of those odd out of nowhere games that starts a trend.

I'm enjoying it!

Dipping back in to rec this. It hits all my personal dopamine centers: management sim, collecting things, fighting sharks, feeding cats, etc.

It's like the game writers couldn't stop changing the game and kept adding in mini-games. But yes, this game has stolen me away from Diablo.

Also stolen me away from Diablo. What an unexpected delight.

Can anyone tell me what the three icons under each sushi recipe are? I know the top one's price, but I can't figure out the other two, and I can't seem to find anywhere in the game that tells me.

I don't remember which icon is which right now, but I do know that one of them is the number of servings that can be made with one set of input ingredients. I think the other icon is the price for a critical success, maybe?

price per serving
taste, higher the taste, more chance of likes on social media, which eventually improves your ranking. Not sure if that brings in more customers
number of servings

Smiley face icon is "taste." Not sure what impact it has on customers (more likely thumbs-up on Cooksta? Dunno), but for each Cooksta rating you need at least 1 dish which meets a taste threshold. The bowl is number of servings, as someone already pointed out.

My biggest tip I found out so far is when creating a menu instead of making a number of a dish, when you manage that item set it to "auto". That means the cooks make items to order. You will make more money every night.

Keep in mind, auto dishes take a little longer to prepare. What I have read is that at platinum level of Cooksta, the max folks you get per night is 28. So I have been preparing 2 multi-serving high dollar/taste dishes (usually get around 10 servings total out of this), a high dollar/taste sushi of 8-10 servings, and then one low taste sushi set to auto-renew.

You can also edit your menu mid shift! So you can set things lower, and then add more as the inventory goes down so as to not waste a lot of food.

Wayfarer wrote:

You can also edit your menu mid shift! So you can set things lower, and then add more as the inventory goes down so as to not waste a lot of food.

This I did not know. Does the game pause when you go into the menu?

merphle wrote:
Wayfarer wrote:

You can also edit your menu mid shift! So you can set things lower, and then add more as the inventory goes down so as to not waste a lot of food.

This I did not know. Does the game pause when you go into the menu?

Yup!

This honestly looks good. The Steam reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Might look into it.

This game is stupid fun. It's so simple and silly, just a bunch of minigames and underwater exploration. But it's a blast - a combination of relaxing time passing, focused planning, and microblasts of semi-stressful activity (don't worry it's the good kind of stress that keeps its feet in the fun).

And just when you think you got the hand of it, the real challenge begins - running the sushi bar. I love when a game just comes out of nowhere and grabs you. So worth it.

I also loves the fact that Dave is pudgy. No idea why but it makes him more lovable.

You pet a whale. 10/10

Is there any way to turn off the button mashing or other QTEs?

chooka1 wrote:

Is there any way to turn off the button mashing or other QTEs?

I don't think so, and I actively avoid some of the spear types because of it. My left thumb doesn't waggle as quickly as it wants me to.
This might have been obvious, but I just had an Aha! Moment. When visiting the village via the boat method you can leave via the front gate and continue your dive! Returning back to the boat via the fast method ends the dive (obviously).

Unless you are feeling supremely lucky, DO NOT try to fight the Great White shark boss without a sniper rifle. I'd even attempt it with an upgraded wep and >350 O2.

chooka1 wrote:

Is there any way to turn off the button mashing or other QTEs?

Don’t think so, but you can just spear the fish until there is no more ate, shoot it, or decide to capture/tranq all fish.

I am still putting in sessions with this!
I love it. I'm having fun. I'm starting to see the edges and the inconsistencies are getting more apparent, and some of the design and timing decisions feel weird when I think about them too much.

Some things get explained, some of them don't. I unlocked cocktails. Because that mini-game starts in the middle of a food rush and doesn't seem to pause the other stuff I am still not sure how the hell it works. I am spending the money to train up staff to do it for me instead of figuring it out though! The unlearned recipes are piling up and I need that sweet sweet fire to unlock them before the cucumber festival starts! But instead of earning that money I now need to do a night dive because Bancho wants to win a competition with an aggressive nocturnal squid. Artists!

How is Otto both the farmer and the Fishery operator? I feel like they could have created another character without too much trouble.

I found Mjolnir. If that doesn't replace my default knife from now on I am going to throw a fit.

I feel like if I'm not tranquing the fish I'm doing it wrong. The game keeps trying to get me to switch to lethal attacks instead and it would definitely be easier, yes. But it still feels wrong.

Whoops I'm supposed to be working
Happy Monday!

I finished the main story this weekend. I enjoyed my time with it. The only boss I did not beat was the big shark for the old lady because it is a quest that can come and go if you don't beat it after a couple of days. I had it drop twice because I was trying to get the highest level sniper rifle.

I did not tranq much but toward the end to make money I was using the big net gun to just fill my storage with fish from the glacial area to upgrade dishes with. There are a lot of refill items in that area so it worked out.

I also trained up my cooks and servers to like lvl 7 or 8. Both my servers had the fill drinks skill which let me just do wasabi and grab a dish if it was busy and that was hella helpful.

Upcoming quality of life upgrade claims to make button mashing optional.

Awesome. The button mashing took me away from the game.

Me too.