Discover Hour+ - Dave the Diver
A near perfect management RPG - for the right player.
Discover Hour+ is an extended exploration of a game’s interface, mechanics and themes. Light spoilers included.
Playstyle: Switch OLED, Switch Pro Controller. No rumble/vibration. Version 1.1.2
What happens when you blend diving, farm sim, restaurant management, RPG elements, and 2D pixel art into a game? Well, you get critical darling, Dave the Diver, from an indie not-indie studio.
On paper, it seems like a hot mess to stick so many game mechanics into one game, but its developers, Mint Rocket, have succeeded in producing a 2D platformer that perfectly balances “comfort game” and “action-adventure.”
If you aren’t tired of sea-ing my puns, then let’s dive into why!
Dave the Diver was initially announced as a mobile game in 2018 by Nexon Mobile subsidiaries NeoPle and Studio 42 in collaboration with National Geographic to "bring awareness to all the beauty the ocean has and how it's slowly fading away."
After several backfires and many rounds of playtests later, the game was launched in 2022 to acclaim. Sweeping awards from BAFTA, GDC, and Golden Joystick, I had to check this first-time phenom out.
The “Comfort Loop”
The game starts simple enough. I play as the eponymous Dave the Diver. Split into two core loops, I dive, and my daily catch is what Bancho serves at his restaurant.
When diving, it’s important to keep track of Dave’s air content – once it gets too low, he drowns and I can only keep one item. Thankfully it’s easy to get air refills and weapon refills. There are O2 tanks scattered everywhere – what drives my O2 to dangerously low levels is being swarmed by pesky Lionfish who bang themselves against Dave.
When I started with a level 1 air tank, I lasted about 30 minutes before running out of refills. Being able to take what I caught to the restaurant gives a sense of satisfaction for every delicious meal Bancho plates because of my effort.
Up till now, both core loops are a relaxing introduction to the game.
Core Loop 1 (Dive): Catch as many fish > Don’t die from running out of air or attacking fish > Return to boat.
Core Loop 2 (Restaurant): Choose fish to serve on the menu > Get Dave to serve dishes and tea > Get daily profits and menu research points .
An always changing landscape
From the very first dive, it’s easy to see how beautiful the game art is. Even in 2D, the procedurally-generated Blue Hole is filled with detailed fish and items, and a brightly-tropical colour palette. On the boat, you can see the water’s reflection and fish swimming underneath, tempting you to another dive. When it rains, the rain droplets continue underwater when Dave dives in, and the water colour adjusts darker to match the grey sky above.
The Blue Hole’s ecology is structured with a specific layout that anchors the player even if the many items change placement. Even though there’s no mini-map, there are always two large cliffs that mark the map’s borders, and the depths where certain creatures spawn remain the same. This keeps the location different yet familiar.
And the music is full of bangers!
Other than the dynamic and detailed art, Dave the Diver’s music is an endless earworm. Even now, the cheerful bop that’s the beluga ride plays in my head. Or the soothing, mysterious tune that repeats the entire hour I spend diving. Music is used to great effect for character introductions, hip-hop to taiko drumming as Bancho enhances a dish, intense classical music to Leah's J-pop for Duff, to Maki’s dancing Clione.
Character Art and Story
The characters in the game, from main (Dave, Bancho, Cobra etc.) to supporting (Dr. Bacon, Duff, Otto, Udo, restaurant staff etc.) have their own backstories and unique cutscene animations. In regular dialogue, their spoken gibberish is paired with equally expressive sprites that add even more enjoyment to an already fun game.
Not to say that the characters are always happy with no personality differences. Characters like Maki have a touching backstory as a sidequest. Once completed, she joins Bancho’s restaurant as a cook. Dave also gets to help several sea creatures. These moments have made me pause to grab a tissue – here I thought this was just a diving game!
While optional, making VIP characters happy with custom dishes is also an easy way to get the restaurant’s “Cooksta” ratings up. Get enough ratings to level up, and the menu expands to unlock more profitable dishes, staff and customers.
The “Action-Adventure Loop”
Which brings us to the game progression system – the action-adventure storyline.
After playing the game for a while, the game makes it obvious that players have to leave the basic diving-restaurant loop to progress the story. Like any RPG, that’s normal and expected. What’s interesting to note is the approach Dave the Diver takes. It pushes the player to make a choice by giving them FOMO (Fear of missing out). For example, if I don’t progress the story, I won’t be able to catch more unique, profitable fish and unlock more diving materials.
This happens roughly around the Chapter 2 mark, when Dave discovers evidence of a mythical village. Not progressing this piece also locks me out of the fishery/farming elements that I get from completing Otto’s sidequests. In addition, new minigames start unlocking as Dave’s phone apps, which give even more rewards to advance his diving equipment.
The game uses implied urgency such as VIP “D-days” and bosses appearing in locked-in new regions which Dave has to defeat before being allowed to leave.
So, the earlier “Comfort Loop” gets longer… and longer. Revising it, my typical run now looks like this:
Like the Blue Hole, it’s changed. While the extras in yellow are optional, they provide quality-of-life improvements so the restaurant doesn’t lose profits to Dave struggling to catch the right fish or attend to customers. At this point, diving at night is unlocked. Although limited to the mid-depths (~100m), I believe this is the point where the game’s narrative sheds its “comfort loop” and into “action-adventure.”
The Blue Hole becomes dangerous
There are three main parts where diving at night shows this literal dark side.
Sharks. And Lionfish. Everywhere. Oh wait, did I mention eels?
Once Otto gives me access to the fishery, I soon learn catching night-time marine creatures brings in high profit margins. Many “boat parties” request sharks, and they’re most easily found at night where the game spawns them in Dave’s face, literally.
Catching sharks also randomly rolls the chance to get eggs, which means sharks can be bred more easily in the fishery. By this point in the game, I had cleared lionfish from my “eco-watcher” list and spent most of the night-time avoiding their annoying group spawns to save my bullets for sharks.
Besides eels, jellyfish are plenty at night-time. Some types are part of eco-watcher quests, while others bring in high profits from their high-taste values. Jellyfish also provide materials for unique gun upgrades.
Leading us to… the Marinca Vortexes.
I can’t remember the Marinca guy’s name, but I say “oh shit” everytime a storm hits. The game tries to sink me with deep FOMO about not getting a “unique collectible card,” and the mechanic doesn’t give any hints when the same sub-boss battle will repeat if I skip this round.
I find these battles less difficult and more annoying because of the time constraints. However, while I don’t care about filling out another Marinca collectible slot, these creatures drop one-time materials that bring in large profits and rare weapon items.
And Udo’s heart-warming naivete asking Dave to take night shots of rare marine creatures.
Which lets me talk about the best part of night-time dives – getting the perfect photo. Udo’s eagerness makes him a character favourite, making his occasional requests even more special when the results turn out perfect and I get a lot of money for it.
Keeping to a schedule
So, being entrenched in the action-adventure loop, Dave the Diver becomes a game of “micro-schedules.” The two core loops still lead these smaller tasks. The original Diving loop expands to include Farming and Fishery management.
As you can tell from my updated runs, most of these micro-schedules are optional, but add to the overall story progression.
All-day diving-farming loop:
Night-time restaurant loop:
There’s lives to save, and (many) things to collect
As I progress through the late game, the majority of the story’s Act 2 is strung together by many fetch quests. These quests are embedded in the Diving loop, and completing them unlocks exposition of the origin of the Blue Hole and its inhabitants.
If you follow sidequests, the game’s time-limit encourages light strategy for the most optimal way to progress. An obvious example is fishing before going to the depths to finish Sea People quests, instead of going to the Sea People directly and missing fishing opportunities.
Strategy becomes even more important late game when the restaurant booms and you have to manage and pay staff. Because of this, it can be annoying to stack fetch quests in a “correct” order. Furthermore, some have poor pacing – depending on how the Blue Hole is mapped out when I decide to do it. There are far too many random miniboss battles that surprise the player long after entering a new region. This runs contrary to how the game trains the player in the earlier stage, where a boss battle is bound to happen at the beginning levels of a new region.
Mini-games and the meta-narrative
Looped parallel with the main quest, the game manages to blend in a second narrative thread starring its many NPCs. The minigames such as Leah's Run or Seahorse Racing are unlocked after character exposition, providing rewards when I play them regularly.
At times, it feels like I’m stopping for a round of Gwent before going back to a boss battle. It's a much needed break!
User Interface
It should be clear by now that Dave the Diver’s interface must communicate the many things the player’s able to do. How? With a ton of menus and HUDs. Everywhere. Thankfully, the diving HUD stays largely the same throughout the game.
Most of the sidequest clutter is kept organized in Dave’s cellphone apps, or hidden within the restaurant sub-navigation menus. Each new menu addition comes with a helpful walkthrough, which makes it less overwhelming to learn.
The menus borrow typical RPG game elements to streamline the resource-gathering sections of the gameplay. These include the farming, fishing and restaurant inventories. Items are organized based on scene. For example, my full dive log is only shown after I complete a dive. While I can access it during my dive to discard items, it’s in a simplified format with no dive details (dive depth, dive length, totals etc)
What I think the game does well is focusing the player on the most important missions during a dive.
The current missions display prominently on both the top left HUD and within the diving menu. The HUD shows how much air is left, dive depth, cargo limit and the current equipment. A quest item is highlighted with a blue diamond so it’s unmissable in a sea of colour.
In restaurant mode is where it transforms into a management sim. Every corner of the HUD is stuffed with main quest and side quest details, money and staff information, restaurant upgrades, wayfinding to the other game locations, and NPC interactions.
No wonder the “comfort loop” feels right at home when diving.
The fast-paced restaurant loop also has serving actions that Dave has to complete if there’s no staff to help him. On top of serving the dishes, the player helps Dave with pouring tea/beer, grinding wasabi, and cleaning after tips.
These required real-time actions during the restaurant gameplay demands me to familiarize myself with the management elements to hire staff and get upgrades, otherwise losing customers loses profit, which affects Dave’s dive progress.
You might think that this makes the game a slog in the long run, but the game cleverly disguises rewards for mid-term goals inside the restaurant loop. This loop rewards the player if I meet its demanding management tasks, ultimately feeding back to the Dive loop that’s more comforting and slow-paced. When I hire more staff, the restaurant loop eases up and I spend more time watching the staff do the jobs Dave once did.
Feedback
For a game this packed, there’s definitely room for improvement.
To my regular vision, the bright UI uses colours with suitable contrast and most of the text is large enough to be read on the Switch’s 720p screen. A post-launch update now lets players adjust the vibration level and automate QTE button taps, which are a welcome relief.
Other than these changes however, there’s no clear accessibility settings for colour blind or low vision players. Also, since the game dialogue has no spoken audio, I’m not sure how playable it is for blind players following the story. There are no difficulty options or diving equipment adjustments either. On a positive note, key bindings can be changed in the PC version for those using different controllers.
As a deaf player, Tess Grossman has a full review worth reading.
Moving on, I’ve made it obvious that I dislike the implied urgency of the sub-bosses. They don’t contribute to the main missions or long-term goals, but the game makes it seem like a “Miss it and you’ll miss it forever” whenever you skip the quest, or decide to give up and leave. As you can see below, the Mission Failed screen adds no additional information besides the text saying "Mission Failed..." and any guilt the player gets from messing up.
Once I am locked into a boss battle, my weapon loadout is locked as well. Depending on the boss, I may get a chest with a weapon that’s more effective, but the weapon often is at the base level. So I have to drop my current, generally higher-level weapon to swap, all while dodging the boss. Adding a second slot to keep my current weapon would make these battles much less rage-inducing.
That said, it’s a relief that there are no paid loot box elements that are normal for freemium mobile games. Having to pay real money for better equipment puts it squarely into gambling to win.
Conclusion
For all its FOMO elements and packed game loops, Dave the Diver manages to balance it all and deserves its acclaim. In interviews with its creators, director Jaeho Hwang and designer Nolan King, Jaeho Hwang explained that his first idea was automating a sushi bar after visiting a restaurant on Jeju Island, Korea. Further inspired by other action-adventure games like Subnautica, they decided to separate the day and night stages to add gameplay interest. Nolan King mentions that he’s a scattered gamer that doesn’t like to plan, which is a reason the game has so many different elements to keep players like him interested.
Furthermore, they wanted to showcase the ocean’s beauty through the game’s story. One of the distinct themes that surfaces with the main storyline is environmental sustainability. The game makes it very clear that whatever’s left from the night menu will be discarded. Opening a fishery means having to fish less, relying on farmed fish versus draining the Blue Hole of its wild creatures.
Even a character like John Watson only attacks Dave because he wrongly assumes he is the culprit behind destroying the Blue Hole. Many of the collectibles and loading screens inform the player about diverse marine creatures, making you want to dive longer to find them.
However, Dave the Diver can be deceiving in its playability. It’s a single-player console game that uses mobile game mechanics to hook the player in. If the player enjoys completing nested loops within its bigger core loop, then it rewards a compulsion-driven player frequently. If you aren’t into a repetitive core loop to progress through the story, then catching fish and serving at a restaurant day and night may not catch your attention for long.
Nevertheless, Dave the Diver strives to balance these distinct loops while showing you the importance of protecting the ocean, a topic that could not be more relevant in our current climate crisis. Time for me to dive back and take photos of Manta Rays.
