DAVE THE DIVER - In the Jungle Review

A bigger, weirder, busier trip away from the Blue Hole, and mostly worth the swim.

By now, you must have put in countless hours in the Blue Hole, barbecuing fish from Bancho Sushi, and diving for what lies beneath. With the arrival of the short film Dave the Diver: In the Jungle, which promised the greatest expansion of all time, it was only reasonable to believe that the same thing would happen, but with a new look.

That's not really what you get. Dave and the crew leave the ocean behind for a freshwater lake near a remote village called Utara, and the DLC spends its runtime trying out a handful of new ideas at once, some of which land better than others. By the end, you'll have farmed, fished, fought, served dinner, caught bugs, and battled beetles, and you'll probably still feel like there was more left to do.

It had been a while since the last piece of post-launch content, and after a run of smaller, more contained DLCs, this one is clearly aiming to be something much bigger in scope. The setup has Dr. Bacon's colleague calling Dave and the gang out to Utara after something strange washes ashore: a creature that has no business being in a freshwater lake.

Add in some unexplained earthquakes and aggressive wildlife, and you've got yourself a mystery that feels like a clear echo of how the original Blue Hole story kicked off. The villagers aren't exactly thrilled to see outsiders at first, and you'll need to earn their trust before the place starts to open up.

Village chief Panutah helps smooth things over early on, hinting that you're not the first strangers to pass through, but it still takes time before Utara starts to feel like somewhere you belong. Once you're in good standing with the locals, though, Dave the Diver: In the Jungle does a nice job of making the village feel lived-in.

You're not just running errands.

There's a new Affinity system that lets you give villagers gifts suited to what they're actually into, and as that bond deepens, new daily activities start opening up around you. You'll also get a small house to call your own in the village, though the customization options for it are pretty thin and don't add a whole lot of depth beyond a surface-level decorating pass.

The story itself plays things fairly straightforward for most of its length, hitting plot beats you can mostly see coming, but there's a turn in the back half that actually catches you off guard and gives the whole adventure a stronger send-off than you might expect going in.

The ending sequence, which, depending on who you ask, ends on a fairly anticlimactic note without a proper final boss,won't be for everyone, but the road there is consistently entertaining. Where Dave the Diver: In the Jungle really splits opinion is in how much it changes the actual gameplay loop. The core of the original game was always diving and restaurant management, and both are still here, but they're no longer the whole story.

You're now spending a good chunk of each day wandering Utara in a free-roaming, isometric view that's a clear departure from the side-scrolling Blue Hole you know. Time passes in something close to real time while you're walking around the village, which dictates which NPCs are out and about and what's available to you.

The moment you start a dive or head into the jungle for a hunt, though, that clock effectively pauses.

Each of those activities draws from its own fixed pool, just like the two-dives-a-day system from the base game, so you're not getting punished for starting a dive late in the day. Diving itself is still recognizably Dave the Diver, just dressed up for a lake instead of the ocean.

You'll find a genuinely huge number of new freshwater creatures to hunt and document, including some much tougher predators that take real strategy to bring down, crocodiles among them, alongside catfish, eels, and other lake life that hits harder than anything you fought in the ocean.

The new Jungle Gun is one of the better additions here, letting you swap between shotgun, net gun, sniper, and standard rifle on the fly instead of committing to one loadout for an entire dive. That flexibility makes exploring feel more dynamic, especially since the wildlife in this lake hits harder than what you're used to.

That said, the lake doesn't feel as expansive as the Blue Hole, and the sense of discovery that comes from seeing new fish for the first time tends to fade faster than you'd like. Diving also isn't really the centerpiece of the experience this time, which might catch you off guard if you came in hoping for more of exactly what the original game offered.

For players who fell in love with Dave the Diver specifically because of its underwater exploration, that shift in priorities can be a tough adjustment.

Restaurant management returns in the form of Bancho Grill, replacing sushi with grilled Southeast Asian-inspired dishes- think skewers, hotpots, and barbecue using ingredients like lemongrass and coconut milk instead of rice and soy sauce.

The biggest change is movement: instead of sliding back and forth along a single horizontal counter, you're now running around an open, isometric restaurant space, juggling tables, skewer-grilling duties on the side, and the occasional jungle critter causing chaos among your customers. You can't lean on high-ranking employees to carry a shift anymore; you need to stay actively involved, which makes service feel more hands-on but also more demanding.

Some players found this rewarding, since it asks more of you than the original restaurant ever did. Others found it close to overwhelming, especially when you're trying to keep track of which villagers like which dishes, since mismatched orders lead to a lot of dissatisfied customers wandering off.

The new employees you eventually recruit for Bancho Grill also tend to be a much more eccentric bunch than what you're used to, which adds some personality to service even when things get hectic. The jungle itself introduces the DLC's biggest structural swing: turn-based combat.

Rather than the real-time gunplay you'd expect from underwater encounters, fights on land play out more like a classic JRPG.

They're complete with basic attacks, skills, items, and the option to retreat if a fight's going badly. Each character in your party has their own skill set, so there's actual room to strategize fights rather than just brute-forcing your way through.

Leveling up unlocks new skills and weapons, and once your party's strong enough, you can skip a lot of the grind entirely by attacking weaker enemies directly on the field for a pre-emptive strike that often just ends the fight outright. That's a smart bit of design; it means the system never turns into a slog once you've put in the early hours, even if those early hours can feel a little slow before your party levels up.

Beyond combat, the jungle also doubles as a resource zone for ingredients you can't find in the village, like meat and rarer herbs, and it hosts a handful of short daily minigames, including a Duck Hunt-style shooting segment that's a fun change of pace from everything else going on. Then there's the side content, and there's a lot of it.

Bug catching is here as a fairly low-stakes collector's activity- fine if that's your thing, easy to ignore if it's not, since none of it touches the main story. Beetle battling is the one piece of the DLC that draws the most criticism, and it's easy to see why.

It runs on a rock-paper-scissors system where a stronger bug type beats a weaker one.

But only if your bug actually uses the matching move, which means a lot of outcomes come down to luck rather than skill. You can offset this somewhat by raising stronger beetles overall, so you can simply out-muscle weaker opponents rather than relying on the type matchups working out, but the system itself still feels more like luck management than a real test of strategy.

None of this is mandatory, so you're free to dip in only as much as you want without it affecting your progress through the main story. Visually, Dave the Diver: In the Jungle leans hard into its new setting, and it mostly pays off. The jungle's lush, layered greens are a striking contrast to the Blue Hole's open blue water, and the new character designs and animations stay just as expressive and polished as you'd expect from the series.

The one knock here is that the density of the jungle environments can occasionally swallow up smaller items visually, making certain things harder to spot than they should be, particularly when you're trying to forage in thicker patches of foliage.

On the audio side, the soundtrack leans into calm, lo-fi tones while you're exploring and shifts into more intense music for combat encounters, and the new tracks fit the jungle setting well, even if not every track gets heard often during a normal playthrough.

One thing that catches you off guard, in a good way, is just how much crossover content is packed into this DLC without any of it being advertised beforehand.

You'll run into nods to other games scattered throughout your time in Utara and the jungle, and the sheer number of them is a little dizzying; there's a real chance you'll miss a few just because there's so much going on. It's a nice surprise that adds some unexpected personality to an already busy expansion, even if it does make you wonder how much of the development time went into licensing it all rather than building out the core systems further.

If there's a common thread running through opinions on Dave the Diver: In the Jungle, it's that the DLC tries to do an enormous amount, and that ambition cuts both ways. For some, the sheer density of new systems, the village, the jungle, the turn-based combat, the bug and beetle mechanics, makes this feel like the most complete, satisfying expansion the game has ever gotten, practically a sequel in DLC clothing.

For others, that same density makes the experience feel cluttered, like it's pulling focus away from diving and restaurant management, the two things that made the original game special in the first place. There's also a fair argument that some of these new systems- the village life sim, the JRPG-style combat- they all feel substantial enough.

So much so that they could've supported a standalone sequel rather than being crammed into one expansion alongside everything else, especially since trying to juggle every system in a single day can leave the pacing feeling rushed. What's hard to argue with is the value on offer.

Dave the Diver: In the Jungle delivers somewhere between 10 and 15 hours of new content.

A real story arc with an actual emotional payoff by the end, new mechanics in nearly every direction you look, and a price tag that doesn't ask much for everything you're getting. It's not a perfect expansion; the pacing can feel rushed if you're trying to do everything the village offers in a single day, and a couple of the new systems feel more like padding than essential additions.

But as a piece of post-launch content, it's hard to think of many DLCs that have tried this much at once. Whether you come away thinking Dave the Diver: In the Jungle is the best content the game has ever put out or just a solid, slightly overstuffed expansion probably depends on whether you came here for more diving or you're happy to let Dave plant some roots on land for a while. Either way, there's a lot of game here, and very little of it feels like filler.