DAVE THE DIVER

DAVE THE DIVER

BANGER · Roguelike · 2023

Steam Deck Verified

The verdict

BUY IT.

A BANGER at $19.99.

Length
25h
Value
$0.80/hr
Reviews
96% positive
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Length
25h
typical playtime (HowLongToBeat)
Completionist
51.2h
100% (HowLongToBeat)
$/hr
$0.80
price ÷ typical playtime
Price
$19.99
as of Sep 23
Reviews
96%
162,140 reviews, as of Sep 11
Metacritic
90
critic score
Players
7.5M
owners (estimate)
Released
2023

Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA Geforce GTS 450 / AMD Radeon HD 5570, 10 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.

DAVE THE DIVER is a casual, singleplayer adventure RPG featuring deep-sea exploration and fishing during the day and sushi restaurant management at night. Join Dave and his quirky friends as they seek to uncover the secrets of the mysterious Blue Hole.
Description from the Steam store page.

What drives the score

How to read this

Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.

Raising the score
Reviews96% positive
Gates the score. Weak reviews cap it, and nothing reaches BANGER without strong ones
Reach7.5M+ players
How many own it and play it, the biggest driver for a game with no ending
Engagement25% finish
How far players actually get (achievements), a top-end bonus
Holding it back
MonetizationCosmetic, Time-limited
Paid extras, but no loot boxes or currency. A light touch
For context
Value$0.80/hr
Price per hour of game. This genre scores on player counts instead
Length25 hours
Typical playtime on HowLongToBeat. Endless games score on players, so hours stay out of it
Refunds9 of 800 reviews
Steam-purchase reviews sampled whose writer refunded the game. Nothing is docked

The value story

June 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $9.99. Its cuts run 33 percent off as a rule. There have been 22 in the 4 years tracked, about 8 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 5 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 8 weeks.

Value puts it in the top 2 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 79 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 97 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Doloc Town ($15.99, scores 93) beats it on value, while it beats Little Witch in the Woods ($19.99, scores 62).

9 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2026 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 355 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 303 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 87 percent of the 4,568 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (cosmetic, time-limited); the score docks it lightly for that.

HowLongToBeat players log 25 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 51, 2.0 times as much.

It came out 3 years ago and 3.4K were still playing it at the last check.

Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.

In-app purchasesCosmetic, Time-limitedPCGamingWiki

The drop-off

87% start to 25% finish
050100rarestfirst achievement

A normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements

Players

3,367 players at peak in the last day.

The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.

What players say

I enjoyed a lot of my time with dave the diver, but the game didn't fully resonate with me. while cute and charming at first, the consecutive introduction of new mechanics and mini-games distracted from key objectives without always directly supporting the main progression - or so it felt. it tries too much to be everything all at once, and whether intentional or not, it wasn't for me. the game is clearly made with...
maiskuRecommendedafter 41h49 found this helpfulRead on Steam
Dave the Diver is such a charming game. I've played around 20 hours so far and I'm already hooked. The game does a really good job of mixing different types of gameplay. You spend your days diving and exploring, then use what you catch to run the restaurant at night. As you progress, you unlock new areas, equipment, recipes, quests, and plenty of other stuff. There's always something going on, which makes it really...
yokoRecommendedafter 29h13 found this helpfulRead on Steam
Dave the Diver is an incredibly fun and a deep game. The gameplay offers a great variety of activities and mechanics, so there's always something new to do. The characters are memorable, and their stories make the world feel alive .The music is absolutely on the point and fits the atmosphere perfectly. There's also a lot to collect, making this a great game for anyone who enjoys collecting and completing things. A...
TafarRecommendedafter 90h12 found this helpfulRead on Steam

Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.

Cite this score

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BANG Score badge

The live badge. It shows the current score wherever it is embedded.

DAVE THE DIVER scores 90/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1868140/dave-the-diver
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[![BANG Score](https://steambangers.com/api/badge/1868140)](https://steambangers.com/game/1868140/dave-the-diver)

The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.

Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 11, price as of Sep 23.

A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.

Critics vs players+6
Critics
90
Players
96
Critics and players agree on this one.
Metacritic critics · 162,140 Steam player reviews

Tags

Details

DeveloperMINTROCKET
PublisherMINTROCKET
GenreRoguelike
Released2023
Achievements43