Mintrocket’s Dave the Diver was always a strange beast: half restaurant-management sim, half undersea Metroidvania, with a habit of derailing itself into anime-grade melodrama every twenty minutes. In the Jungle, the new standalone expansion, doesn’t reinvent that formula so much as relocate it — swapping coral for canopy and somehow turning the dial on the original’s tongue-in-cheek thirstiness even further past eleven.
A familiar loop, transplanted
The core rhythm is intact. You explore by day, run a kitchen by night, and watch the systems quietly compound on each other in that satisfying loop Mintrocket nailed the first time around. The jungle setting reshuffles the verbs more than it rewrites them: instead of harpooning tuna with a spear gun, you’re now wielding a proper rod and reel — a reward gated behind early progression rather than handed out at the start. It’s a small detail, but a telling one. The base game’s running joke was that Dave, ostensibly a diver, never actually fished. The expansion delivers the punchline.
That sense of self-aware play extends to the new biome’s encounters and the overhauled cooking minigames feeding Bancho’s sushi bar, which by most accounts still anchors the experience. Reviewers landing on “delicious” as the operative descriptor suggests the team understood what not to touch.
The cutscenes are doing… a lot
Where In the Jungle gets weirder is in its presentation. The base game’s cutscenes were already an acquired taste — a parade of bouncing physics, wide-eyed reaction shots, and gags that landed somewhere between Cowboy Bebop and a Saturday-morning energy drink ad. The expansion, by all accounts, sharpens that edge rather than dulling it. The new cast is more overtly designed for fan-art Tumblrs than the original crew, and the camera knows exactly what it’s doing.
This is a deliberate choice, and worth taking seriously as a design decision rather than a punchline. Mintrocket is making a calculated bet that its audience came for the tonal whiplash as much as the gameplay loop — that the jarring shift from precision-timed sushi prep to a five-minute melodramatic flirtation cutscene is the texture players actually want. For some, it’ll be charming. For others, it’ll be the moment the controller goes down.
What it signals for the studio
What’s interesting here isn’t whether the expansion is good — the early read is that it clearly is — but what it tells us about Mintrocket’s confidence. Rather than chasing a sequel, the studio has doubled down on its weirdest instincts inside a self-contained side story. That’s the move of a team that trusts its identity and isn’t interested in sanding it down for a broader audience.
If you bounced off the base game’s tonal stew, In the Jungle won’t convert you. If you didn’t, it sounds like a generous second helping — fishing rod finally included.