Management sim Dave the Diver shouldn’t work as well as it does

polygon.com:

Dave the Diver shouldn’t work. It is an ever-expanding Jenga tower of mechanics and task management that, somehow, never falls over. Each new character, over-the-top cutscene, and minigame feels like it should topple the whole premise, but it just never happens.

Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun — and worth fitting into your schedule. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch .

Instead, what developer Mintrocket has created is a game where unabashedly having fun is the whole point, no matter how absurd the process. At its core, Dave the Diver is a combination of fishing and restaurant management sims. As the titular Dave, you go spearfishing during the day to catch ingredients to serve at a sushi restaurant at night. For most management sims, that loop is probably enough of a hook on its own.

But in Dave the Diver, that’s just the foundation. Within an in-game day or two, a graduate student shows up and sets you on missions to collect local wildlife. And then an underwater archaeologist arrives with a project. And then the otaku arms dealer shows up, followed by a boatful of militant Greenpeace activists, the Pokémon-like collectible card connoisseur, a farmer, and some pirates. It’s hard to describe what happens without sounding like a toddler “and then!”-ing their way through a bedtime story.

I’m getting ahead of myself — it’s hard not to when talking about this game. Dave goes diving a couple times a day,