There is a moment, early on, when Dave surfaces from the Blue Hole with a net full of strange fish and a story he cannot quite believe, and Bancho, the impossibly serious sushi master with the eyebrows of a man carrying ancient grief, simply nods and starts slicing. No fanfare. No cutscene begging me to care. Just two people who have decided, against all logic, to run a restaurant on top of one of the ocean's great mysteries. I was hooked there, not by a system but by a feeling: that this ridiculous premise was going to be taken seriously by the people telling it, even as it refused to take itself seriously at all.

The company you keep in this game is its truest treasure. Dave himself is a soft, rounded everyman, cheerful and a little put-upon, the kind of protagonist who reacts to the absurd with a shrug and a grin rather than a hero's jaw. Around him orbits a cast I came to adore for how specific each one is: Bancho and his wordless devotion to the craft, the marine researcher Dr. Bacon with his manic enthusiasm, Cobra the schemer whose greed is somehow endearing, an entire village of sea people who arrive with their own aching history. The writing is generous with its humor, but it never mistakes silliness for shallowness. The jokes land because the characters are drawn with real affection, pixel-art faces fused onto three-dimensional worlds so that everyone feels hand-lettered, a little handmade, a little loved. I laughed more than I expected. I also, more than once, felt the quiet pathos beneath the gags, the sense that these oddballs had found something like family in the strangest place imaginable.

The systems underneath all this warmth are where Dave the Diver reveals its cleverest trick. By day I dive, side-scrolling into the Blue Hole with a harpoon and a limited air supply, hunting more than two hundred sea creatures across a loop that flirts with the roguelike without ever committing to its cruelty. The water shifts every day, so the descent stays fresh, and the light combat and fishing give me just enough tension to make surfacing feel earned. By night I run Bancho's, and the pivot is the whole magic of the thing: the fish I speared becomes the sushi I serve, staff to hire, menus to tune, customers to charm, upgrades to chase. The two halves feed each other with a rhythm so satisfying that I lost whole evenings to the promise of just one more dive to fund just one more improvement. Layered over this is a genuinely dizzying density of minigames and side systems, farming and photography and errands and management minutiae, and at its best the variety kept me leaning forward, delighted by how much this game was willing to try.

At its best. Because I would be failing the code I hold myself to if I did not name where it falters. That same density that dazzles can also spread the experience thin. There are minigames I would happily have skipped, some of them mandatory and unskippable, and a handful of systems the game introduces without ever properly teaching, so that I found myself guessing at mechanics that deserved a clearer hand. The late game leans on grind, and worse, on a kind of mission gating that quietly tells me to come back tomorrow, a padding that reads less like patience and more like a stall. None of this is fatal. The generosity of the whole so outweighs the friction that I never wanted to put the controller down for long. But the seams show, and pretending otherwise would do a disservice to anyone deciding whether the loop's occasional busywork is a price worth paying.

It is, for the record. What stays with me is not the grind but the accumulation of small pleasures, the way a game this eccentric managed to feel this coherent, this full of heart. MINTROCKET took a premise that should not work and built something that rivals the genre's most charming entries for sheer craft, and the world noticed, right up to a BAFTA that made history. Who is this for? Anyone who has ever wanted a game to be a place they return to rather than a task they complete, anyone who prizes character and tone and the quiet satisfaction of a loop that respects their evenings.

On my ruler, the story and its cast are close to peerless, the writing and worldbuilding earning the highest marks I have given in a while, near a 9.5 for how alive these people feel. The systems are deep and inventive but blunted by that late padding and those under-explained edges, landing closer to an 8.7. And for heart and staying power, the thing I weigh most, it sits at a warm 9.0. Together that makes a 9.0 overall, and a game I suspect I will be quietly recommending for years.

Key art: MINTROCKET (Dave the Diver), via Steam. Rehosted for editorial use.