‘Dave the Diver’ overpowers the tedium of management sims

Dave the Diver is full of minigames, genres, and, most importantly, fun.

November 27, 2023

A degree of tedium in management sims is unavoidable – you might say it’s baked into the genre, a necessary part of the whole. The repetitive acts of planting and harvesting might very well be the very point of the game for some; at its best the mechanic becomes a meditative act, scratching the same itch that crossing something from a to-do list might scratch. At its worst, it might become just as much of a chore as the activity it’s simulating.

Mintrocket‘s Dave the Diver, out earlier this year on PC and last month on Switch, mitigates any chore-based tedium by slowly overwhelming the player with task after task, system after system. The assault starts with two simple parts: a fishing sim and a restaurant sim.

'Dave the Diver' overpowers the tedium of management sims

Those parts aren’t exactly simple – any good management sim compounds its mechanics with equipment upgrades, levels, and finance juggling – but the game sets them out with deceptive clarity: these are your jobs. Do these jobs and you will excel at the game.

It becomes clear very quickly that these are not your only concerns. There are monsters in the deep, for instance, from troubling but manageable predators to massive, construction-equipment armored hermit crabs. So the game adds combat to the mix, and so naturally it also adds weapon crafting. Weapon crafting, like sushi, begets its own list of recipes full of ingredients Dave now must hunt for as he dives.

'Dave the Diver' overpowers the tedium of management sims

Fishing, serving, weapon upgrades, equipment upgrades, menus and recipes. Fine. Also, you’ve got a weight limit, and the ticking clock of your depleting air tank. Seems reasonable.

Add staff management – the best servers, the best kitchen staff. Select the night’s menu – certain dishes are more popular at different times, and there are NPCs with special dish requests. And also add farming – the restaurant is going to need rice, after all. But let’s not leave out cataloging – we need to collect all the specimens of the deep, don’t we? Let’s add a Pokémon-spoofing collectible card system and an academic research chore list. Different fish need to be found at different times of day (obviously), but there are also very specific, rare fish only available on certain days, under certain conditions. We’ll need a separate source for that information. And the restaurant needs publicizing, so we’re going to need Instagram.

'Dave the Diver' overpowers the tedium of management sims

Each aspect of the game is managed through apps, and each app is introduced to Dave by a new comedic NPC; each NPC has their own needs, their own tasks, their own leveling and upgrading, and their own hilarious cutscenes.

All this, and I haven’t even mentioned the underwater society of fish people.

Just as something is beginning to feel like a drag, the game tosses in a new distraction, a new gimmick, a new app. It feels like a barrage, but never a panic-inducing barrage. Sure, the game is giving you an ever-increasing to-do list, but only rarely are those items time-sensitive. There is only so much time, and the game doesn’t expect you to do everything in a day.

'Dave the Diver' overpowers the tedium of management sims

The steady escalation of distraction attempts to alleviate the genre-borne tedium, but it occasionally frustrates its own problems by inventing an altogether different type of chore in the form of a progress-halting minigame. With all these to-do items needing to be ticked off, nothing feels as jarring as being told to jump through some new, poorly constructed hoop before you can get back to work. What should be fun or funny tasks — avoiding pursuing pirates in a speedboat while attempting to dodge unpredictable islands of stone or launching a sea turtle at a destructible ice wall with impossibly small and specific hitboxes — interrupts the very meditative flow the game promises.

Absorbing as it is, Dave the Diver hasn’t shaved away the hard edges in the way that the best management sims have. These moments of annoyance might serve a different function, however; by putting up a minor roadblock, the game reminds you to stop and check the clock. You’ve been compulsively playing Dave the Diver for seven and a half hours. You need a break. You need dinner.