Dave the Diver is one of the year’s best games, and it’s still great on Switch

25.10.2023 - 11:05 / theverge.com / Jay Peters / Jaeho Hwang / Best

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

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Dave the Diver cast a line and reeled me in when I played through it on Steam Deck earlier this year. It’s lured once again on Nintendo Switch.

Sorry, I had to get the fishing puns out of the way. But if you haven’t yet played Dave the Diver, a delightful experience that somehow mixes roguelike spearfishing exploration and a time management sushi restaurant simulator into one of the most joyful games of the year, the Nintendo Switch version is a place to get your feet wet. 

The game is packed with different types of activities, and as Polygon’s review says, Dave the Diver’s vast number of mechanics shouldn’t work but somehow do. The shark meat of the game is capturing or hunting fish and aquatic life during the diving portions of the game so that you can serve up your spoils for dinner at the sushi restaurant. But as the in-game days pass by, Dave the Diver will layer on things like a farm, a fish farm (yes, they’re different things), upgrading weapons, and playing mini-games.

It all stays manageable because of the way Dave the Diver slowly rolls out new systems as you get further into the game — which was something the developers adjusted over the course of development. “In the early internal testing versions, we introduced the farm and fish farm content earlier to appeal to players with the rich in-game content,” the game’s director, Jaeho Hwang, says in an email interview with The Verge. “The feedback we received at that time was that it felt too distracting, and players couldn’t focus. So, we established a system that made it easier for us to adjust the timetable of content unlocks and put in a lot of testing to find the optimal timing.”

The in-universe smartphone, which has things like a to-do app to manage quests, an app to buy weapons and gear, and an in-universe Instagram clone (“Cooksta”) to scroll through posts about your restaurant, helps a lot, too. “In Dave the Diver, we have many systems, and we had a lot of discussions about how to convey them through UI effectively,” Hwang explained. “During this process, we were greatly impressed by games like Like A Dragon and Animal Crossing, where they used smartphones to navigate and manage various complex menus intuitively.”

Dave the Diver’s core loop helps keep the game from being too overwhelming. Diving for fish and treasures can be tense because you also have to fend off fearsome sharks and not run out of oxygen, while running the restaurant is a frantic but satisfying rush of