MeinMMO editor Lydia was skeptical whether the summer hit Dave The Diver (Steam) was right for her. Now she is excited about the diving game and wants to share her experiences with you.

The diving game “Dave The Diver” was probably the surprise hit of summer 2023: A week after its release on June 28, it had sold over 1 million copies; during the summer sale in early July, it ranked in the top 5 of the best-selling games on Steam (via SteamDB).

If you haven’t heard of this amazing game yet, I’ll summarize the key points for you:

• You take on the role of the titular diver, Dave
• During the day, you dive into the depths of the mysterious Blue Hole, which is home to all kinds of fish – and, so they say, mermaids
• At night, you sell your catches at the sushi restaurant you run with your buddy Cobra and the chef Bancho

Dave The Diver is essentially a Roguelite, even if it doesn’t market itself as such. A dive corresponds to a run, where you encounter various smaller and larger opponents and must eventually face a gigantic boss.

Between runs, you can upgrade your equipment to dive deeper, have more oxygen (a.k.a. health), carry more weight, or deal more damage.

The concept is very well received: On Steam, Dave The Diver has a status of “Extremely Positive” with 97% positive reviews. The standard version costs €19.99, and in the Deluxe Edition, in addition to the game, an artbook, the soundtrack, and an additional skin for your boat are included.

You can see for yourself in the trailer:

Love at First Click?

I snagged Dave The Diver during the summer sale on Steam because the enthusiastic praise intrigued me, and I can’t say “no” to a good deal. However, it ended up in my “Pile of Shame” for a while.

Even though my heart is for unusual games and I have a weakness for pixel art – and even though my colleague Nicole enthusiastically recommended it to me – I was unsure if this game would really be for me.

Since fishing games had hardly played a role in my gaming life until now, I thought after Dredge, there was no way a second fish game this year could fascinate me, right? Well, I was wrong.

From the opening sequence on, Dave The Diver captivated me with its charming characters. Once I could start exploring the diverse underwater world, I didn’t want to put the game down.

Time Flies Between Fish, Farming, and Serving

I would most likely compare it to Moonlighter, where you descend into dungeons at night to sell your loot in your shop during the day. By the way, it’s available on Steam for a bargain until November 2.

However, Dave The Diver doesn’t stop at the simple premise, but gradually introduces new mechanics: You quickly manage your own fish and vegetable farms, collect fish like Pokémon cards, and raise a Tamagotchi-like pet.

Moreover, there are sections where you need to infiltrate an enemy base, escape in a boat, or switch between two characters to solve simple puzzles. Oh, and there was also a rhythm game. Some of these levels were so well designed that I would have loved to play them multiple times.

And then there are the massive bosses that await you at the end of each chapter and after some side quests. These special opponents are diverse and usually require mechanics introduced in the previous sections.

Especially towards the end, I needed several attempts with some bosses until I learned their attack patterns after being caught off guard by a second phase. And yes, in the end, the bosses also drop ingredients that you can use to create unique dishes.

However, this should be well thought out, as far as I know, these items only drop once.

Like a Warm Sea Breeze for the Soul

Overall, Dave The Diver is not a difficult game and is generous with checkpoints in sections that use different mechanics than the tried-and-true gameplay loop. However, in typical Roguelite fashion, your first runs may end quite abruptly until you can improve your gear.

However, there is really no stress involved. Except maybe that one time I completed three long missions including boss fights in a row without returning to save in between – only to be killed by a simple shark when I surfaced because I was greedy and wanted to catch him too. But we won’t talk about that.

Instead, the game is perfect for letting your soul chill a bit. Especially now, as the days are getting shorter, grayer, and rainier, I enjoy diving a little deeper into the tropical-feeling game world and soaking in the summer vibes.

“Oh come on, I’ll just do this … when did it become night?”

Theoretically, Dave The Diver is perfect for dipping in for a round or two, since you can determine when to return to the surface. However, there was always something that triggered this “Just a little longer…” for me:

• “I’m so far now, I can do the boss fight too.”
• “I’ve gathered all the ingredients, I want to serve the VIP customer his special menu.”
• “I can’t possibly stop without putting the arrogant opponent in his place during the cook-off.”
• “The event is over now, but the next story chapter has been unlocked, I want to check it out.”

Thus, it rarely happened that there was a short gaming session. Currently, I am in the postgame, the story is completed, I just have some loose ends to tie up. At this point, I usually get restless and feel the urge to finish everything quickly and move on to the next game.

Instead, I don’t want my adventure in the Blue Hole to end just yet. I’m still diving to work on my fish collection and earn money to improve my farms, level up my employees, or treat myself to power-ups that would have made the main story easier.

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If you don’t feel like dreary autumn weather, I can only recommend giving the friendly diver a chance. And even if you already took a look at the game during the big Dave hype in summer, it might be worth another visit.

Since the update on October 11 has just added some new content, including new side quests and crab traps, which allow you to catch shellfish.

If you still can’t get into Dave The Diver, you’re objectively wrong, but I want to recommend the previously mentioned Dredge to you instead. Because that is also said to be supplied with new content this year.

What our editorial director Schuhmann is playing, you can find here: In a new strategy game on Steam, I sustainably conquer the galaxy

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There is a new co-op horror game on Steam that is being developed in Germany. Horror fan Cortyn took a look at the early access version.

As you know, I like horror games. Whether it’s Dead by Daylight or creepy visual novels where I cook my roommates. When there is a new horror game, I like to take a look at it.

From the developer RecklessGames UG, who is of course from Germany, we were provided 4 keys for testing. So I took three of the biggest scaredy-cats from my friend circle and told them that they should “try a game with me” – they only noticed it was a horror game when they started the download. That only made it more fun for me.

What is Demonic Episode about?

The story behind the game is quite simple. You belong to a group of content creators who visit “lost places” in their spare time, where it is said to be haunted.

You can choose from 8 characters, each belonging to 4 “classes”. While the cameraman has a longer battery life and also possesses a night vision device, the medium can perform rituals and detect the status of the demon.

Each character has its own specialty – although you only really need the medium to banish the demon. At least in theory.

Upon arriving at the destination, the game takes place in 3 phases. In the first phase, you try to get an overview of the area. You look for locked doors, accessible paths, and places to discover. Most importantly, you need to trigger “paranormal events”. These can be flying objects, a spontaneous scream, or a strange apparition. In the best “jump scare” manner, the camera immediately zooms in on the source of the apparition – causing many frightened screams from the teammates, especially in the first match.

Once you’ve discovered enough, the dark entity appears and phase 2 begins. In our matches, this was either a mysterious, floating woman or a black devil. Both entities can (in theory) be repelled with the flashlight, giving you a few seconds to breathe before the next attack begins. If you fail, a character gets injured and is dragged to a random location on the map.

Trying to find the group in complete darkness with only a limited flashlight is quite difficult – especially when you don’t yet know the maps by heart.

In phase 2, you need to uncover more details about the creature. These can be books that contain clues and ritual locations where you can perform the banishment of the entity.

In the final phase, you lure the creature to the prepared ritual location and banish the entity – at least if you manage to do it. We never succeeded, but we are probably not to blame. More on that below.

I want to explicitly praise the atmosphere we had in the first round. Everything just fit. The passage of time, the encroaching night, the ghostly woman rushing out of the darkness to abduct us. It was really creepy, and I still have to smile when I hear the panicked “Here, she comes from here!” screams – completely forgetting in the panic that with a “here” no one can make sense of anything.

In absolute darkness and with only limited flashlight light, the atmosphere becomes really eerie. Simple, but good.

An early access, but far from beta level

But now we come to the negative experiences. Because as much fun as the first few minutes were, the game quickly lost its charm for two main reasons.

Even on the easiest difficulty, we were unable to successfully banish the demon. The “devil,” which we encountered in our second and third matches, was either bugged or just poorly balanced in both games. Not only did it seem not to care about our flashlight half the time, when it was driven away, it would only run 5 meters away before attacking the next one of us.

This did not feel particularly fair and only resulted in us desperately trying to repel the old creature for about 5 minutes before it ended up killing us one by one.

The second point is that we find the advertised replayability doubtful for the time being. Because while it is true that the events, such as ritual locations or supernatural phenomena spawn randomly on each map, this is not enough to generate repeated enjoyment.

Especially the first phase, where you search for paranormal events, quickly becomes tedious. You just run back and forth across the map to fill a bar and hopefully trigger the last event, which then initiates phase 2. The first time it was cool and creepy – but by the third time it became tedious and just monotonous. There needs to be more variety and more exciting gameplay to truly be interesting. Wildly running around to trigger the same 3 jump scares is only creepy for a few times.

Ultimately, we concluded that “Demonic Episode” is still in a very, very early state for an early access title.

We agreed that Demonic Episode can definitely be a fun pastime – the potential is there. The screams of my friends were real, and I had to hold back my smile significantly in the first hour. Everyone was also very impressed that only one person is behind this project.

But until the game is really finished, a lot of work still needs to be put in.

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If you’re looking for a co-op horror game from Germany with potential and want to shape the development through feedback, you should take a look at Demonic Episode. If you’re looking for a fully fledged, finished game that captivates for hours at this moment, you should stay away from the project – or check back in a few months to see what has changed.

From today (October 26, 2023), you can purchase the early access version of Demonic Episode on Steam.

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The new SF strategy game Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova is for MeinMMO author Schuhmann the strategy game of the year 2023 on Steam. With 23 pre-made alien races, you can build huge space empires. He explains how he made a race of sentient trees the rulers of the galaxy.

What kind of game is it?

• Galactic Civilizations 4: Supernova is quite new on Steam. It was released on October 19 and currently has 76% positive reviews. For me, it is already the strategy game of the year and pretty much exactly what I expected from the new Star Trek game. I have already spent 75 hours playing the game on Steam, but I was able to play it a week before the release.
• It is a classic 4x game: The player colonizes or conquers planets, trades with alien races, explores the galaxy, researches, and goes where no human (or alien) has gone before. He can play peacefully, “convert” other races through his culture, and bind them to him, or he conquers enemy planets militarily.
• The game is so fascinating because it offers a huge variety of species that differ greatly in gameplay. In any case, one can customize Galactic Civilizations IV significantly, not only determining the shape and texture of the galaxy but also designing their own species and ships.

With each species, the way you play Galactic Civilizations changes

For me, this is the great uniqueness of the game: The game offers me the choice of 23 different races, many of which pursue typical but also unusual sci-fi ideas and strongly influence gameplay.

The Mimots can actually do nothing, except multiply rapidly and look cute. The idea is that they seem so harmless that other aliens would rather cuddle them than eat them. The Mimots colonize all worlds within paw reach, build houses there, create fields, and multiply like space bunnies until they finally overwhelm the galaxy as furry wool ball avalanches.

The robot species “Yor” are the exact opposite. They do not reproduce naturally at all; rather, every new inhabitant must be painstakingly built. This leads to disadvantages in the early game when you only have one planet, but the race scales strongly throughout the game.

Because normally it is hard to populate worlds beyond a certain value: But new robots are built faster and faster.

Another species is clearly based on the Predator from the action movies: Here it is already rewarded early on if you take over enemy planets and hunt and eat the native population.

With the stone people Onyx, ships do not heal by themselves but need a leader and the resource promethium, but for this, the spaceships have double the hit points and win every battle against similarly sized fleets at the beginning of a game.

The ultimate greens

How do the trees play? “Bartrak Grove” are so to speak the ultimate “greens”: This is a race of sentient trees that somehow set out for the stars.

The special feature of the race: Through an ability, they can bring dead planets back to life with a certain regularity, which are otherwise completely useless in the game.

The planets thus become “Class 5” colonies that can be colonized and serve as resource suppliers for the core worlds.

This ability leads the tree people to utilize their part of the universe much more sustainably and efficiently than the rest of the galaxy because they can build many more supporting colonies. This is a quiet, slowly increasing advantage. Through further bonuses in their preferred philosophy of collectivism, they use the colonized space even more effectively.

The disadvantage of the race is that they are particularly vulnerable to pollution; therefore, one should build “atmospheric cleaners” on the colonies.

What gameplay do you have with the aliens? The Bartak Grove uses a calm, thoughtful play style: They maintain good trade relations with aliens, build a defensive fleet that primarily serves as a deterrent, and establish strong trade, research, and cultural centers on their planets.

By colonizing dead planets, you gradually gain access to the coveted luxury resources and thus have an advantage when it comes to building wonders.

Now it is also important to keep an eye on initial pitfalls: Such as revolution herds in the immediate vicinity or particularly warlike ones like the Yor and an ecologically sustainable conquest of the galaxy is not far away.

If you play your cards right as a living tree, you will gradually win the galaxy without major conflicts. Then you can really take root.

More about the game:

A new strategy game on Steam fulfills all your alien power fantasies

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