I still maintain that Dave the Diver is one of the best Steam Deck games I’ve ever played, but all of its DLC thus far—yes, even the Godzilla one—has fallen a little flat. You can’t complain about getting more Dave the Diver, but it’s hard to be enthused about it, either. Developer Mintrocket has clearly come to the same conclusion, as the In the Jungle expansion adds relationships, an isometric perspective, and Pokemon-like turn-based battles. Despite the sweeping changes above ground, the depths of the jungle’s freshwater lake remain familiar, albeit with the addition of crocodiles, electric eels, and giant sturgeon to contend with.
You start the DLC by heading to a small village in the jungle. The chief wears feathers, the houses are all made from bamboo, all the stereotypes are there. However, a bona fide dinosaur has washed ashore, and the bloated plesiosaur soon explodes all over you and new research assistant Muna thanks to a whale-like methane build-up in its belly. Your famed sushi chef Bancho, thankfully recovered from his seasickness induced by the choppy journey over, soon teaches these savages how to *gasp* cook fish to kill parasites and avoid illness. I’ll get into the problematic narrative later, but in the meantime, the village offers a plethora of new gameplay options to scratch itches you never knew needed scratching.
Above the water, In the Jungle plays like a Stardew Valley-lite. You have to befriend villagers by completing simple tasks, earning enough respect (shown by the age-old heart-o-meter) to draw them to your new restaurant amid the forest flora. They don’t trust your foreign ways of cooking at first, but soon warm up to it after a couple of mango shakes and a hearty plate of fried bass.
This is a clear evolution on the Dave the Diver formula – it’s never had anything like an overworld before, let alone one that you can freely explore. The isometric perspective and real timer ticking away as you complete tasks and harvest resources like wood, stone, and lizards make this feel like Dave the Diver 2 rather than a ten-hour piece of DLC.
While this is revolutionary for Dave the Diver, the systems are simplistic in comparison to existing cosy games. That’s hardly surprising, as developer Mintrocket has shown that this is the way it likes to operate—remember the simplified Balatro minigame it added? It works fine. Ask villagers what they like, and they’ll mention a games console, a bottle of wine, or a plectrum made from a piranha tooth. Complete tasks for other villagers, and you’ll be rewarded with these very same items. You don’t even have to remember who asked for what, as you’ve got a handy tool which tells you.
Those items that aren’t earned through quests can be gathered in the murky depths or simply bought in the shop. Once you’re up to two hearts out of four in your relationship, the villager may stop by Bancho’s grill of an evening, which works largely similarly to his sushi restaurant. You’ve got different drinks on offer, which require different microgames to serve, and you also run the grill, cooking skewers in addition to Bancho’s more complex recipes.
Returning to the two-man operation is a little jarring after having practically automated your evening income stream in the base game by hiring and training staff, but you quickly get back into the swing of things, and can hire other jungle explorers to help you out, starting with a UFO-spotting student who turns into a legally distinct Spider-Man for some reason.
The village itself plays host to a wide range of characters, Spider-nerd included. from a gaggle of cheeky kids, to the chief’s daughter, who got incredibly hench in order to protect her father after he was injured in a crocodile attack, each has their own distinct personality despite minimal screentime or dialogue. Despite the simple conversations, you get a sense of each character immediately. The mother worried for her son, the poet seeking inspiration, the distrustful mango farmer. I’d prefer it if Dave didn’t automatically validate the sexist bloke’s nauseating opinions about his wife, but having a range of moralities among the villagers lends a sense of realism, I guess.
The underwater sections of the DLC are exactly as you expect. The fish are new and exotic, the more violent of which are a refreshing challenge. The base game isn’t the most replayable once you’ve reached the end, because all your equipment, weapons, and oxygen tanks are perfectly optimised that nothing in the lagoon poses much of a threat. Starting from scratch (you couldn’t fit your gear in the speedboat to the jungle) allows a difficulty reset, meaning that your aquatic adventures are far fresher than the water you’re swimming in. Pollutants in the water bar you from diving too deep until you upgrade your purification filter, but this barrier is quickly overcome, allowing you to dive into the deep end without unnecessary friction.
Speaking of which, I thought I’d like the turn-based battles more than I did. Once unlocked, you can venture into the forest, battling beetles and beasts in Pokemon-like combat. Where the simplified Stardew works well, this doesn’t so much. Pokemon is already a fundamentally simple game, and benefits from deep rosters of monsters and moves to choose from in order to add a sense of complexity, but Dave the Diver oversimplifies the formula and comes up short. As fun as it might sound on paper, it’s one idea too many for the game, and I would have preferred if it had focused more on developing its interesting characters and improving the frankly disastrous narrative.
In the Jungle’s narrative barely stops short of portraying the villagers as complete savages, but they’re clearly insinuated to be primitive. While there are pain points across numerous characters and conversations, this is most evident in the food. You might assume that, when heading deep into the rainforest, the indigenous people would know best how to prepare the local wildlife for consumption. Alas, that is not the case. Upon arrival to the jungle, you are presented with the village’s best effort at a welcome feast: a slice of raw, disgusting fish. Bancho practically spits it out, it offends his culinary sensibilities so much. From that moment on, he promises to show these people how to safely cook freshwater fish; a noble quest to bring civility and good gut health to these poor, primitive people.
Sarcasm aside, this is a tired colonial trope that Dave the Diver could so easily avoid. Why must Dave and his crew be considered saviours by showing the villagers how to safely prepare their own food? Could we not have been cleaning the lake after a tinned fish corporation dumped pollutants in it, while the locals showed us how to prepare the fish safely, and to their tastes? Suddenly, the script would be flipped, we’d be learning about and respecting their culture, and the gameplay would sync perfectly to the presented narrative. As it is, everything feels discordant, like you’re bringing a bar of Dairy Milk to Moctezuma II and forcing him to like it, wearing down his tastebuds in a war of culinary attrition.
Cosy games often fall into colonial tropes (landing on a remote island and harvesting all of its resources, paying no mind to the locals, is a common storyline), but Dave the Diver takes this lazy trope a step further and turns its villagers into unbelievable fools.
As presented, the core premise of In the Jungle’s narrative doesn’t hold up to the most cursory scrutiny. How has this village survived for even a single generation, if it doesn’t know that cooking freshwater fish removes dangerous parasites? The chief has engineered a lift that can bring you from the lake floor to the surface, but hasn’t learned to grill a Tilapia. As the expansion progresses, we learn that ancient civilisations also dove into these depths millennia ago, leaving behind primitive rebreathing apparatus. Are we to suppose they died out from starvation or fish-borne parasites, then, if they didn’t also pass down the arcane knowledge of basic cookery?
The whole thing becomes even more of a farce when you consider that the supposed expert on grilling fish is Bancho, our famed sushi chef—a dish that, may I remind you, doesn’t require any cooking. He is presented as the culinary expert, and the indigenous villagers as simpletons. By presenting the culinary challenges in this fashion, Dave the Diver has not only fallen into tired colonial tropes, but has also let down its own narrative.
In the Jungle offers more than any Dave the Diver expansion to date. The Stardew-lite overworld fits perfectly with the game’s cooking and gathering systems. The supporting cast is great, and I’m never going to say no to adding dinosaurs to any game. From a gameplay perspective, the DLC is a refreshing glass of fresh water when the formula was starting to feel stale, throwing half a dozen new ideas at the player to see what sticks. Unfortunately, this delicious sip is washed away by the tsunami of tired narrative tropes that laughs in the face of simple worldbuilding, basic storytelling, and common decency.
