Steam’s best roguelike finally hits Switch today – and every Nintendo fan should take note
Dave the Diver is out on Nintendo Switch, which is a very good thing for Nintendo fans, because it’s one of the best roguelikes in recent memory. It came out in early access last October on Steam (almost a year to the day) and quickly became a firm favourite on Steam Deck. It certainly did in my house, anyway.
It’s a game of two interconnected parts: the titular diving half, in which Dave dons a scuba suit and explores a semi-randomly generated ocean in order to catch fish, gather resources, and find quest items, and the restaurant sim half, in which Dave plays waiter in a shorefront sushi restaurant where his morning’s bounty is served up fresh every day for its sophisticated clientele.
Along the way, you’ll encounter NPCs who enlist your help with their ocean research projects, which is worth doing for extra cash, but this also takes you through an excellent main quest that involves the study of an ancient sea people and the remnants of their civilisation that are strewn around the ocean floor. On its own, the action adventure portion of this game would be worth playing, as it would the surprisingly in-depth restaurant sim. The fact that they work in tandem here to keep all the different bits of your brain lit up is its genius.