Great Moments in PC Gaming are little celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
Dave the diver
Developer: Mintrukit
Year: 2023
When I first sat down to play Dave the Diver I was hoping it would be my new nighttime game. All I really knew was that it was an adventure game where you go fishing during the day and serve your catch at a sushi restaurant at night. It all sounded like the kind of mindless, repetitive fun I was looking for, just a busy little game to play for an hour a night after a long day. Brain off, fingers on.
“It never worked out that way. Dave that Diver is one of the best games of 2023, largely because it’s nothing but Mindless button-mashing time killer. Sure, you’re diving into the same patch of ocean every morning and offering customers the fish you’ve caught every evening, but it’s a game that’s relentless in its quest to give you something new to do every time you play.
Catching seahorses eventually leads to a seahorse racing and management game. Meeting a character unlocks a farming system to grow additional ingredients. There are hidden missions. Speedboat chases. Collectible cards. Boss fights. Music rhythm games.
Very quickly, I got many new activities, and I found it difficult to find time to go fishing, which is the main activity in the game. Fortunately, one of the characters I met introduced me to these giant fish farming tanks so I could collect fish eggs and start farming my own fish to make up for the days when I didn’t have time to catch fish in person. This also led to a new management system where I hatched eggs and collected fish non-lethally to breed higher quality fish to use as new ingredients.
Although it is a normal hunting game, it can seem a bit stressful. There were times when I simply didn’t want to learn anything new. I just wanted to go shrimping because my restaurant was having a shrimp-themed sushi night. Then something will inevitably happen, like a psychopathic “environmentalist” attacking me in a mech suit, or a woman asking me to find the shark that killed her husband, or a rival chef giving me a sushi challenge. I was sitting there staring at the screen and thinking, please, please Just let me shut off my brain and swim out to catch shrimp tonight.
But even when I wasn’t prepared for what Dave the Diver was offering, I always found myself quickly enjoying him, whether he was being chased by an angry ocean god through undersea tunnels or sneaking through a factory full of gunmen like I was steel. Snake or solve puzzles with a mermaid in a long-forgotten temple. Catching shrimp can wait a bit. I was finally happy because I had something new to do.
There are a lot of games that start out simple and slowly introduce new systems, mini-games, and activities as you play, but usually after five or 10 hours you settle down and you’ve learned almost everything you need to.
Dave the diver, wonderfully, never settled, 15 hours, 20 hours, 25 hours, he was still throwing brand new stuff at me. Well, even when I finished the story about 30 hours later, Dave the Diver wasn’t finished yet: he even gave me a new activity to learn and play during the credits. In fact, it’s a game that never wants you to switch off your brain and accidentally tap.
“Unapologetic analyst. Infuriatingly humble coffee evangelist. Gamer. Unable to type with boxing gloves on. Student. Entrepreneur.”
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