THE COOKBOOK TEST #0009: DAVE THE DIVER

INSTALLMENT #0009 (FREE) / ‘EY! THAT’S HOSPITALITY! / BEHIND THE COUNTER / THE INEXHAUSTIBLE OCEAN (?) / MY QUESTION FOR YOU

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the second of my computer game palate cleanser newsletters. If a video game is a text (and it is), and it’s about food (as this one certainly is), I figure it’s fair game for analysis.

DAVE THE DIVER struck an instant chord because it’s a game centered on a sushi restaurant. I’ve worked on both sides of the counter when it comes to hospitality - working as a food critic and reporter for nearly 15 years on one hand, and organizing culinary gatherings, tastings, and live fire cooking retreats serving multicourse meals on the other. 

I’m obsessed with hospitality, because it’s one of the most difficult to quantify, difficult to achieve, difficult to maintain quantities in the known universe. Partially because it’s so deceptively difficult to attain (you just need to be nice to your customers, right? But what does “nice” mean? And what makes a customer?), and partially because it’s a compound quality with dozens of subjective and objective components, ideally working in harmony.

Anyhow, maybe it’s ridiculous to think you can start to crack the hospitality question by slicing up a bunch of pixel-based aquatic lifeforms, but I think there’s something deeper going on with this diving and cooking game underneath the surface.

at your service,

James

DAVE THE DIVER (2023)
MINTROCKET
STEAM, NINTENDO SWITCH, OTHERS
$20

Everyone likes different sorts of games, and I think I’ve figured out my personal deal: games that invite you to explore an environment, gather or capture various resources, and then use those resources to make things. STARDEW VALLEY was an epiphany for me - not only do I get to go into a dungeon and mine rocks and kill things for their gooey essences, I get to use those minerals and extracts to build and improve a working farm! Silly, yes, but the yin-yang of “harvest” versus “create” is a powerful thing, and a strong gathering or hunting or fishing mechanic gets twice as good when it’s paired with an imaginary world that the player can build using the bounty thereby obtained.

Dave the Diver always threatens to be overkill in terms of the gathering mechanics it presents, but it ultimately works. In a brilliant move, most of the game is an extension of a tutorial - new ways to farm, cultivate, forage, trap, net, spear, and otherwise grab or grow parts of the natural world are introduced throughout the game, allowing you to get your head around the new thing before the next thing pops up.

I’m not even finished with the game and I’m growing fish at a fish farm (segregated by the depth of water at which various species live), cultivating rice, farming seaweed, growing vegetables, raising chickens, netting tuna, trapping crabs, harvesting sea urchins, shooting sharks, harpooning reef fish, and retrieving lost artifacts. The world of Dave the Diver is an extremely rich and complicated place even before you get to the restaurant.

BEHIND THE COUNTER

Almost everything you gather from the world at large becomes fodder for Bancho, the restaurant’s sushi chef and owner, to turn into food for guests. That can range from the incredibly basic (sashimi from a specific fish) to the complex (a tropical fish sushi platter involving multiple fish, white rice, and seasonings.) Every evening in the game, you look over your assembled ingredients and possible dishes and put some number (usually about 4-8) of different items on the menu, in whatever quantity makes sense. 

Customers stream in once you’ve opened the restaurant; they order food (which you grab and serve, or is served by staff you hire and train), they order drinks (which you or staff also serve), and they leave a mess behind (cleaned, again, by you or a trained staffer.) There’s also a container of freshly grated wasabi that needs to be kept topped up. Like most actual restaurants, it’s a juggling act: what to put on the menu, at what price? Who to put in what position? What to prioritize - the impatient customer who has been waiting quite a while for his cheap cup of tea or the just-arrived big shot who’s ordering the most expensive item on the menu?

You can develop new dishes as you catch new fish and grow new vegetables, and you can level up existing dishes (by burning a lot of the constituent ingredients) to make them more profitable. In short: there are many, many roads to success through your staff, ingredients, and menus, and there’s a lot to be done to pick your way through the wilds of the game.

The game also turns on an essential tension that feels true to the real world: the chef, Bancho, is relentless and uncompromising, which makes him a skilled cook but not the best manager or front-of-house presence. Your character, Dave, is the other side of the coin - eager to please, obsessed with profit and loss, and always making sure the staffing and provisioning is done yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The game has a lot of characters, but the contrast between Dave and Bancho is a dialogue with some real meat to it.

The fact that the game is based on an actual restaurant in Jeju, Korea, makes the whole conceit one step more interesting, to boot.

THE INEXHAUSTIBLE OCEAN (?)

How much does a game need to reflect reality for it to be a good game? For example: Dave the Diver is set near a magical ocean-like body of water called the Blue Hole. This setting changes its layout and restocks its lifeforms - it also has a bunch of mer-people living in it, for whatever that’s worth, too.

But the species that you rampage through are mostly realistically depicted, and the ethos of the game is definitely “aquatic culinary strip-mining.” Aside from whales and dolphins, pretty much everything is fair game, and you’re really a one-man wrecking ball for the living creatures of the ocean. And the one “environmentalist” in the game’s world is a former Navy SEAL employed by big corporations that want to scare away smaller competitors. 

Is it OK to depict even an imaginary sliver of the ocean as a giant supermarket that can be shopped and emptied at will, only to be replenished as if by magic? Does Dave the Diver owe us a darker ecological message? Or can we just wallow in the fantasy of harpooning our way through narwhals and barracudas in order to make really boss platters of sushi? I guess I don’t have an answer - I love the game as it is, and I’m OK with accepting “eh, it’s magic, it’s fine, it all works out for everyone” as an explanation for the game’s ecological perspective. But if you play it and don’t buy that - I wouldn’t blame you in the least.

A FURTHER NOTE ON VIOLENCE IN DAVE THE DIVER

Several nights ago, my wife Becca walked past my computer while I was using a sniper rifle to shoot and kill a cheerful looking narwhal. "Happy narwhal-idays, brother ducker," I muttered, using a different word that rhymed with "brother ducker." She stared at me with a look of pure horror on her face. "What?" I asked. "It was him or me!"

And while it's true that the narwhals in Dave the Diver are ferocious person-impalers, it's also true that you can use a golf club to beat down entirely defenseless small tropical fish, or use explosives to detonate jellyfish.

The morality of Dave the Diver is hard to entirely understand, but it goes something like this:

CUTE [non-killable]
Dolphins
Pink dolphins
Whales
Baby whales
Manatees
Some octopuses (playful)

SUSHI FODDER
Narwhals
Jellyfish
Small tropical fish
All eels
Urchins and other shellfish
Some octopuses (sinister)

Anyhow, the fact that the game's main character is a rampaging fish-harvesting unit who can find and utilize a tennis racket in his underwater depredations bothers me, but not enough for me to dislike the game. Your mileage may vary.

THE VERDICT ON DAVE THE DIVER

(***BUY IT*** / BORROW IT / SKIP IT / BURN IT)

The mechanics and gameplay are clean, the pixel graphics are cute and enchanting, the music is enjoyable, the complex workings of the sushi restaurant are competently done, the story is compelling, the cut scenes are clever and beautifully done, the food looks delicious… If you’re a person who games and enjoys food even a bit, this is a no-brainer, especially at its reasonably low price.

MY QUESTION FOR YOU

Are there any cooking games out there that you absolutely love? Or games with particularly inspired cooking mechanics, no matter how minor they may be to the central plot and overall gameplay? I’d love to know about them, and might share short answers in a subsequent newsletter (with your approval) - message me or post a comment.