There’s more to Dave the Diver than wasting away between the sea and sushi shop. In the Jungle is a meaningful expansion of the Dave the Diver-verse. It opens up the world we’ve fallen in love with beyond The Blue Hole and lets us explore it. It gives us a handful of new minigames, all but one of which are a treat. It expands Dave’s relationship with a cast of emotive beings and sets the stage for Bancho the Chef (coming hopefully sooner rather than later). It’s one of the better post-game DLC expansions, by just about every metric.
Oh, Dave the Diver, may you never change.
Mintrocket’s stellar diving-sim-meets-sushi-restaurant-sim-meets-minigame-bonanza has earned quite amount of praise from us (let alone other players). Head honcho Nathan’s original review of it painted it as doing “so many things so well without skimming in some gameplay design” while I described its Switch port as “one of my most favorite games of 2023 and perhaps the 202s thus far.” It’s really that fun. I’ve recommended it to players far and wide. Those who have heeded my recommendation have all come back to me and told me that they loved the game. Heck, several folks who play video games maybe a few times a quarter got hooked on the game and broke their gaming dry spell.
Since its 2023 release, Mintrocket has delivered several smaller-form free content drops that expanded the Dave-the-Diver-verse. Now, they’ve released a larger update titled, In the Jungle. It’s $9.99 and contains twenty-or-so more hours of bite-sized content that Mintrocket has refined so well.
Before we get to the rest of this review, I want to recognize that a segment of our review period involved us testing In the Jungle on a launch-day build that was mildly unstable. On the Nintendo Switch 2 version, there was some small periods of input lag/sluggishness along with random crashes. Some of these crashes have been patched out with the build that hit my console earlier this week, but I want to call out that things aren’t entirely smooth sailing at this time. The developers have promised to iron out these bugs along with some other updates, and we’re looking forward to seeing what those updates end up being.
Back to the jungle we go~
In the Jungle kicked off immediately for me, as I had finished the game back when the Ichiban’s Holiday content pack dropped in April of 2025. Upon launching my game, I was whisked away to the island village of Utara. I quickly learned that Utara was facing a pollution crisis where its sole lake had become murky, poisonous, and mustard yellow. Bancho’s (the serious sushi chef) first introduction to the Utaran people had him cringing and grimacing when attempting to eat the local cuisine. This set the stage for Dave in that he was to figure out why the lake had become infested with prehistoric and poisonous threats along with bonding with the local villagers.
My day-to-day routine dramatically changed in this village. Every morning, I (as Dave) would wake up and have the freedom to move about the village, dive in the lake, and explore the jungle. Instead of having the day broken up into distinct segments, the day passed in real time. As I moved around the village, be it towards the lake or elsewhere, my little clock dial in the corner showed the passing of time. When the day turned into the evening, I was to open Bancho’s Grill – a smaller and more intimate restaurant that served the locals.
My first two days managing the grill felt like a massive step back from the restaurant in the base game. While Bancho’s Sushi was bolstered by having a simulated trendy online presence, Bancho’s Grill was more self-contained and dependent on interpersonal relationships. The Grill felt like a living creature, as my clientele grew depending on my existing bonds with the villagers. As I completed chores for the locals and gifted them treasures based on their interests, my Grill ended up growing in size and managing to serve more food (and thus earning more money to be spent).
It’s a jarring shift from the critically acclaimed Bancho’s Sushi, albeit one that makes sense when considering Dave’s transition to a foreign space. Waking up every morning and seeing new side quests pop up amongst the villagers proved to be a meaningful, yet positive, shift in the Dave the Diver gameplay loop. Every day was one of new possibilities to get closer to the villagers and gift them small trinkets I uncovered on my explorations. It also gave me breathing room to explore the space and discover small little moments that maintained the game’s charm. The side quest to unlock an adorably green staff member reminded me how lovely yet silly Dave the Diver plays.
It should be no surprise that In the Jungle has some jungle explorations. It involves taking Dave and a small crew of NPCs through a jungle with a 3D plane. There are some standard puzzles (like moving blocks) and resource harvesting, but here it presents Dave the Diver’s spin on turn-based classic-RPG-esque combat. It’s a cute take, for sure, but doesn’t go deep into a full reinvention of turn-based combat.
It shouldn’t be, though. Dave the Diver is a charmingly constructed game comprised of endless minigames. There’s just enough depth in these minigames to act as a miniature reprieve from the core gameplay loop and it’s in line with the base game’s depth. For $9.99, there’s a solid amount of fun to be had mucking about in the jungle for 20 hours. The complaints I’ve seen online about folks wanting more seem to be those who have rushed through the DLC without properly enjoying the charm. Do I wish that there was more story content? Sure. But I’d rather focus on running the sushi restaurant (with new minigames!).
The one minigame that falls horrendously short, however, is the Beetle Battle minigame. This minigame is effectively a rock-paper-scissors minigame involving beetles caught in the village and the wild. It relies far too heavily on randomness that it’s simply impossible to master the game and have fun doing so. I won’t beat a dead horse slain by other players, but I’ll say that I’m glad that this content was treated as light side-content.
With one of Dave’s feet being on land and the other in-water, In the Jungle moves the gameplay loop away from the original charm of the base game: scouring the sea to keep a sushi restaurant afloat. Every minute spent in the village or jungle feels like a minute wasted in sludge: Dave is not a nimble protagonist. He trudges through the jungle with trepidation, he scooters around the village with too much friction, and his endless struggle to fix everything for everyone means that there’s always something to do. The decision to have days pass in real time adds a layer of stress to the player’s decision-making calculations: There are only 24-hours in a day, so use that time wisely.
I mention this here not to paint In the Jungle as a subpar extension of Dave the Diver. I say all of this as a statement of caution:
There’s more to Dave the Diver than wasting away between the sea and sushi shop. In the Jungle is a meaningful expansion of the Dave the Diver-verse. It opens up the world we’ve fallen in love with beyond The Blue Hole and lets us explore it. It gives us a handful of new minigames, all but one of which are a treat. It expands Dave’s relationship with a cast of emotive beings and sets the stage for Bancho the Chef (coming hopefully sooner rather than later). It’s one of the better post-game DLC expansions, by just about every metric.
