Spearfishing and sushi restaurant managing indie RPG Dave the Diver was my surprise delight from last year, and proper release saw everyone else at PC Gamer agreeing with me. It's also poised to get its first real content update since release this month, October, bringing greater diversity to some dives, a fresh new quality of life update, and some straight-up crustaceans.
The first big addition to Dave's world are crabs and lobsters. These new shelled buddies will require you to take some traps down into the deeps to capture, so keep an eye out for that. There'll be a lobstery, crabby party event to go with them showing up as well. Everyone loves to get crabs at a party.
A quality of life feature coming with the crustaceans is for your farming. Right now farming is a big of a pain, requiring constant visits, but in the future you'll be able to ask absolute bro Sammy to check on it for you. You'll also be able to get an egg storage box for your chickens to prevent spoilage and a feed dispenser to keep the cluckers fed.
A couple other new things coming are expanded content for the glacier area and night-time diving content. The glacier's previous focus on story content will get supplemented with a couple new quests. Night-time diving will get more interesting with the addition of new species that appear only at night, whereas now there's a lot of species that show up both day and night, so the choice to dive at night will really mean something.
Dave the Diver was a surprise smash hit, pushing a million copies sold pretty quick. PC Gamer's Robin Valentine said it was "the kind of out-of-nowhere hit that makes gaming exciting." Meanwhile our Chris Livingston gave it a stellar 91/100 review: "I'm routinely up playing until 2 am, even after 30 hours it's still throwing fun and creative new systems at me, and every time I play I'm delighted, surprised, and utterly charmed," he said.
The update will also bring a new VIP customer, a wandering merchant selling new recipes and crops. There'll also be a new phone operator to call who can give you a run down of what's going on around the blue hole that day.
You can find Dave the Diver on Steam for $20 US.
Sorry, yeah, the editors are telling me that everyone doesn't actually love to get crabs at a party. Going to have to google this to figure out what they mean.
