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Dave the Diver is an incredibly impressive adventure game and resource management mix with a large focus on comedic writing and a strong gameplay loop, even if its later chapters start stretching the game a little bit too thin to stay interesting across its story’s conclusion.


🟩 Pros
🟥 Cons


✔️ A strong and unintrusive focus on minigames serves to diversify the gameplay and support its two main branches of gameplay in restaurant management and diving. Even to the very last chapter, DTD has ever-new snippets of gameplay ready to present to the player.
❌The game is trivially easy, which devalues many of the game’s otherwise strong minigames and boss encounters. This is especially jarring during the later chapters of particularly puzzle-heavy dungeons, which become extremely monotonous due to the sheer lack of any challenge.


✔️ Despite the minimalist pixel style, the game has incredibly strong cutscenes due to its lighthearted and consistent tone. Even minor sequences ooze charisma and are clearly animated with a lot of attention to detail.
❌ DTD occasionally struggles with communicating certain mechanics to the player properly. While this never results in anything overly frustrating and the game is far from a typical wiki-game, it can be a bit obtuse with information and therefore potentially frustrating during certain missions.


✔️ There is a very nice variety of weapons to pick from, all of which offer unique benefits to your gameplay. From weapons entirely focused on catching fish efficiently to guns for combating bosses, progressing your character always feels meaningful.
❌DTD can struggle with pacing. One particular example during the early and midgame is sales events at your restaurant, which represent massive leaps in income over what you are likely to be able to achieve otherwise but also extend to time-gated missions and other miscellaneous activities that may not be available for long stretches at a time.


Technical Issues and Performance
While DTD overall ran very well, without crashes or stuttering, I did encounter some miscellaneous issues. One such issue was some audio mixing being odd; this is particularly the case during one specific bossfight in which you use a special weapon that completely ignores your sound options, as well as some audio crackling on very rare occasions. Hitboxes have also been a pretty constant annoyance, as the harpoon has a tendency to phase through fish if it connects at an angle.
Graphics and Sound
While featuring a somewhat minimalist pixel art style, DTD really sets itself apart with very frequent cutscenes to give even minor activities a lot of life. These are often very lighthearted and, considering the limitations, can be extraordinarily detailed. The same level of detail extends to some minigames, which may employ a different art style entirely.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3259330471
More importantly, there is visual clarity. Given that much of your playtime is spent hunting specific fish, to be able to improve and serve your sushi dishes, players need to be able to clearly identify what’s going on on their screen. And again, DTD does a pretty good job at that, even if it also has a tendency to rely a little too much on the player being able to discern waymarks in the background. For example, some quests may refer you to a shipwreck in the Shallows, the first sub-area of the game; however, there are a variety of different shipwrecks in various depths and shapes, and none really stand out too much.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3258565662
The sound design is a bit unimpressive. Environmental music is fine, though a bit forgettable. Voice acting is somewhat present, but through the characteristic gibberish similar to games like Okami. There is a music player integrated into the very game itself, but sadly, it does not allow players to select a playlist of their own to play over the game during their dives.
Story and Setting
The player controls Dave, a scuba diver who is roped in by Cobra to procure fish for a sushi restaurant, with the end goal of getting rich together by exploring the “Blue Hole",  a large chasm in the ocean that is largely unexplored. What starts out in the first few chapters of Dave simply stumbling from one situation into another, the story expands by around the third chapter to grow from a simple slice-of-life story around the sushi restaurant into a more traditional adventure story around a sea civilization, their mythological history, and geological catastrophes. 
That being said, the main story never takes itself too seriously, and it serves the game quite well. Much of the enjoyment of the story is carried by the various characters—not necessarily their writing, but the way that they are portrayed and interact with one another. There is some heartwarming stuff to be found on occasion, and the game does dip its toes into some themes of personal growth but largely remains comedic in nature.
Gameplay
There really are three main “branches” of gameplay in DTD, the primary one being the exploration of the Blue Hole. While you haven’t yet upgraded your suit, this merely consists of the actual fishing. Either by harpoon, gun, or other various tools that constantly expand as the game progresses.
Some chapters in, however, the game also expands the Blue Hole from just this pseudo-randomly generated fishing level to unlock separate hub areas, to questing and exploration, and to host some of the game’s more prominent minigames. Furthermore, every in-game day is separated into three timeslots. During the morning and afternoon, diving is the primary activity available. In the evening, Dave can either dive and surrender 1/3 of the evening to that activity or tend to the sushi bar as the primary way of earning money. 
The sushi bar is a halfway point between resource management, as you have to keep track of your supply of fish, and actively tending to customers. Players set a menu at the beginning of the evening, choose staff and level their stats, and have a variety of smaller activities that determine the money earned. While this starts out fairly interactive, regrettably, as you level up staff, Dave quickly becomes redundant over just how quickly your staff can handle any amount of guests. For reference, I ended the game with my staff at level 9 / 20—and my restaurant one rank below maximum—and I would not need to lift a finger to perfect a night except for filling up Wasabi.
Minigames are the last focus of the game, and while I usually loathe games that overly rely on them, as minigames like that often end up feeling just undercooked and not really fun to engage with, I also think DTD handles them fairly well. Overall, they’re unintrusive and often serve to improve the immersion of the game.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3260015449
Overall, DTD manages to provide a solid and constantly expanding gameplay loop that really only begins to tire out towards the final chapters of the game, largely due to a lack of challenge as the player begins to outpace the rate of money they need to progress and the game simply giving out between the upgrades you can acquire.
Final Thoughts
Dave the Diver is good. Really, really, surprisingly good. It’s an incredibly charismatic game that understands how to pace out player progression across its story. Its most blatant issue is the difficulty, which eventually begins to hamstring this same sense of progression. Players might find similarities to games like Recettear, both in terms of mechanics as well as the general tone, and if those little snippets of the characters even feel remotely interesting, I’d say that DTD is a very safe game to spend some twenty-odd hours in.