Let's Play Dave the Diver - Episode 1: Humble Beginnings!

I played a lot of new games in 2024, not all I could finish and many more just collecting virtual dust in my game libraries. I played some good indie titles like Celeste, Dredge, Holocure, Terraria etc. Recently I have been enjoying Dredge a lot.

I found the next Dredge already, DAVE THE DIVER. It is a casual adventure RPG where you have to explore the ocean and fish during the day and manage a sushi restaurant at night. I kept ignoring this game for a long time just because I thought it looked like a mobile game but I was so so wrong.

This gameplay loop of diving and exploring with fishing and managing a sushi restaurant is done very well.

The story starts when Dave, on his vacation, gets a call from his friend, Cobra. Cobra has an interesting business idea. He shows Dave, the 'Giant Blue Hole'. The terrain here keeps changing and Cobra wants to use Dave's skills to setup a sushi restaurant. Dave can dive and get the ingredients from here while another friend, a cook by the name of Bancho, will use them to make sushi with them.

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Cobra helped Dave learn the basics of catching fish. Dave can use a Harpoon to catch these fish (and guns later) and is limited by the oxygen meter and the weight of his catch.

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The first mini-quest we get is from Bancho, the chef, who wants us to catch 7 more fish aside from the one we caught in the tutorial section. The sushi place will be open only in the evening and before that we can make two dives one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

Even before the first day of Bancho Sushi, the restaurant opening, we had a big tremor which damaged the restaurant and we had to earn 100 bucks to repair it. So, basically, we are starting at -100 instead of 0 lol.

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I caught 16 on my first dive. Pretty impressive if you ask me. And it was just a 3-minute-long dive. There are a lot of things you can find in the water besides fish. There are plant-based ingredients, wood and ores to collect along with items like powerful harpoons etc.

It was the evening after this dive and we couldn't dive anymore. It was time for the Sushi restaurant. But wait, Dave never worked in a restaurant. That's when Bancho gave us a quick overview of the things we need to manage. There is a menu tab where we can select some dishes to be served each day. We can 'enhance' these dishes by spending some extra ingredients which increases their taste and price.

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Our job was to serve the customers once the restaurant opened. I messed up the first day and missed a lot of orders. If you don't serve the customers on time, they will leave. Turns out I was pressing the wrong buttons and taking time to observe everything.

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Even after this horrible start, I still made $24 somehow. The next day we met an NPC who was a local researcher and asked us to collect a couple of things from the ocean. She wanted Red Starfish and Agar.

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I noticed that some fish were trying to attack me and not all of them were caught by my harpoon. Some would take more than one try to capture.

We have a phone with multiple apps that help us to do a lot of things. It has a music app where we can play music tracks from the game, a to-do list to check on all the active missions, and even mini-games.

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I played a flappy bird kind of game in there called Bouncy Dumbo. Getting out of oxygen will end your run and you can only carry one item from your bag and some fish wants to kill you for sure.

When we went back to the shore after a close escape and told about these dangers in the water. Cobra called his friend who can give us guns. But he wanted us to find some materials first. 1 Rope and 1 Scrap iron. Wouldn't be too tough as they are quite common items here.

I found those along with a cheap Japanese sword as my melee weapon. Did I tell you apart from the harpoon and a gun slot, we have a small knife which is used as a melee weapon and there are items which can be found in crates that help in our run?

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I saw a huge shark in the water and maintained my distance. I don't plan to become the lunch of this predator. There was no way I am even getting close to it without a gun.

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This weapon guy, Duff, had little hope for us. He keeps taunting us on my 'non-athletic' figure. He told us to download the weapon app on my phone. This way, a new app was unlocked. We used it to craft a basic rifle.

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Now we can open the weapons chests underwater too. We can find more weapons in these chests and can get a blueprint so we can craft them later using the materials.

We also completed the simple task of collecting Agar and Starfish for Ellie as well. She also underestimated us based on our looks. She gave us a whopping $70 along with some ingredients as a reward. We were now just $6 short on our $100 dollar mission.

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It was time to set today's menu. There were only 4 unlocked slots so we can only have 4 dishes. But there is always the base menu if we run out of all the dishes before the evening is over.

We did a lot better on the second night. The revenue doubled from the last day. We still had no expenses as there was no staff in this place other than me.

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There is a Staff tab that I can see and as more customers start coming we would have to hire some people to serve all of them. Poor Dave is really 'non-athletic' for this job lol. He should just focus on diving for now.

My goal now would be to kill that shark with the newly crafted gun.