It isn’t until you start looking for games similar to Dave the Diver that you realize just how unique it actually is. There are very few games that combine roguelite structure with the same kind of day-night, gather-and-run loop, and fewer still that pull off the shopkeeper/restaurant side of things with the same charm. There are, however, a handful that come close, each borrowing a different piece of what makes Dave’s world work. Here are eight worth adding to your list.
1. Scale the Depths
Built as a tiny robot fishmonger and sent out on a boat with nothing but a rod and a hook, your job in Scale the Depths starts simple. You fish, scale, sell, and repeat. Four distinct waters, from Loch Ness to the remote isolation of Point Nemo, wait to be cast into, each with its own ecosystem, and every upgrade you buy lets that line reach a little deeper.
The loop of catching something, prepping it, and turning it around for a hungry customer is Dave the Diver in miniature, right down to the messages in bottles and environmental puzzles that hint at a bigger story the deeper you go. There’s no restaurant to run on the side though, no staff to hire, just the fishing and the upgrading, stripped down to its purest form.
It’s a much smaller, scrappier game than Dave in almost every respect, but for anyone who just wants that ocean feeling without the extra stuff on top, it’s a great pick.
2. Moonlighter
By day, Will runs a modest item shop in the town of Rynoka, pricing goods and haggling with customers who’ll happily walk out if you get greedy. By night, he steps through one of five portals into a procedurally generated dungeon, fighting through enemies and traps to loot the stock that keeps his shelves full for tomorrow.
That split identity, half shopkeeping sim, half roguelite dungeon crawl, is the same rhythm Dave the Diver runs on, just with portals standing in for the ocean. The pricing mechanics go deeper here than anything in Dave’s sushi restaurant, rewarding you for actually reading the market rather than just serving whatever’s fresh, while the dungeon combat is tougher and far more deliberate. If it was that day/night split that hooked you on Dave, Moonlighter is the closest thing on this list to it.
3. Cuisineer
Pom is trying to save her family’s tavern from closing for good, and the only way to do it is to head out into procedurally generated dungeons, fight off whatever’s guarding the good ingredients, and drag them home to cook. Between runs, the tavern needs stocking, dishes need plating, and customers won’t wait around for a slow kitchen.
The back-and-forth between combat runs and restaurant service maps closely onto Dave’s dive-then-serve structure, and the payoff of turning a rare ingredient into a signature dish hits the same note as unlocking a new item on Bancho’s menu. Cuisineer leans harder into real combo-and-dodge combat than Dave ever does, making the gathering half feel more like an action game in its own right. It’s a tougher fight and a lighter restaurant sim than Dave the Diver, but the loop underneath is unmistakably the same.
4. Monster Harvest
Life on the farm in Monster Harvest looks ordinary enough at first. You plant crops, build up the town, and get to know the neighbors. The twist is that certain crops, called Planimals, don’t just get harvested, they can transform into living creatures you raise, train, and take with you into randomly generated dungeons to battle other Planimals and gather rare materials.
It’s the same instinct that makes Dave the Diver work, two very different games stitched together so one loop feeds the other, just with soil and monster battles standing in for the ocean and the sushi counter. There’s no time pressure here, no dinner rush to panic over, so it plays out slower and gentler than Dave ever does. Worth a look if the “gather things in one world, spend them building something in another” structure is what you’re really chasing.
5. Aeruta
Chaya set out to become an adventurer, not a baker, but blowing up a stranger’s oven has a way of changing plans. Now she splits her time between side-scrolling dungeon runs, fighting monsters with a growing arsenal of weapons and skill trees, and working the counter of Effie’s bakery, choosing the day’s bread and racing to serve customers before their patience runs out.
That dungeon-to-storefront pipeline is close to a direct match for Dave’s dive-to-restaurant loop, with materials gathered underground feeding straight into what ends up on the counter above. Aeruta is a much more story-driven, anime-styled game than Dave the Diver, with real relationships to build alongside your baking career, but the rhythm of “gather below, sell above” will feel immediately familiar. It’s a great pick for anyone who wants Dave’s two-halves-of-a-day structure wrapped in a warmer, more character-focused adventure.
6. PlateUp!
Every run in PlateUp! starts with an empty restaurant and a handful of decisions/// what to cook, where to put the stove, how to keep the kitchen from turning into chaos the second customers start filing in. Survive the day and you pick an upgrade before diving into the next, harder shift, with the whole run capable of collapsing if the kitchen falls too far behind.
This one leans entirely into the restaurant half of Dave the Diver’s identity and turns the pressure up considerably. There’s no diving, no ocean, no ingredients to catch yourself, just the frantic plating and menu-building that made Bancho’s kitchen so satisfying to run, stretched into an entire roguelite built around it. If the dinner rush was always the best part of Dave for you, PlateUp! isolates that feeling and hands you a much tougher game built on nothing else.
7. Coffee Caravan
Coffee Caravan puts you behind the counter of a tiny mobile café, grinding beans, brewing orders, and keeping an impatient line of customers happy before the clock runs out. Between shifts, you pick your route through a branching, procedurally generated map, not unlike Slay the Spire, before facing down an especially brutal rush as a kind of boss fight.
It skips Dave’s exploration entirely, but the pressure of managing a cramped workspace, prepping ingredients on the fly, and keeping a demanding queue of customers satisfied is straight out of Dave’s sushi bar playbook. What replaces the diving is a genuinely clever roguelite map structure, giving each run its own shape rather than repeating the same shift over and over. A strong pick if it was the restaurant management, not the ocean, that really hooked you on Dave.
8. Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale
Saddled with her father’s debt, Recette has one option… turn the family home into an item shop and start selling. By day she prices goods and talks down customers who think everything should be cheaper, by night she can head into randomized dungeons herself, or send an adventurer in her place, to gather the stock that keeps the shop running.
It’s rougher around the edges than anything else on this list, with dated visuals and a translation that shows its age, but the DNA connecting it to Dave the Diver is obvious once you see it: dive for goods, come home, sell what you’ve found, repeat. The dungeon runs are simpler than Dave’s diving and the shopkeeping is deeper, but that same push-pull between two loops feeding each other is right there at the core. If you want to see where this whole idea largely got its start, this is the place to look.
Where To Dive In Next
None of these games are going to fully replace Dave the Diver, and they’re not really trying to. Each one just took a different piece of it, the fishing, the shopkeeping, the dinner rush, the dungeon runs, and built something worth playing around it. Start with whichever piece you miss the most, and the rest of this list will still be waiting for the next time you need something to fill the gap.