I loved Dave the Diver, so Bancho the Chef immediately got my attention. Mintrocket revealed the standalone prequel during the June 2 State of Play, centered on Bancho, the sushi chef from Dave the Diver’s Blue Hole. It is in development for PlayStation 5, PC, and likely other platforms, with wishlist pages live now on PlayStation and Steam, though no release date was given.
Anyone who has played Dave the Diver knows Bancho is a natural choice to headline his own game. Mintrocket says he topped a massive fan vote and is one of the most-cosplayed characters the team sees at events. Bancho the Chef is set in 2004, 19 years before Dave the Diver, following a young Bancho, before he became a sushi master, as he travels across Japan, Korea, China, and other Asian regions to learn from master chefs. The studio describes it as a mix of cooking sim, RPG, and adventure.
The core loop marks a shift from Dave the Diver, where players only served dishes at the sushi bar. This time, players cook the meals themselves and serve customers directly under a time limit, raising each restaurant’s reputation and picking up local techniques as they go. There is more to it than cooking, with mini-games like fishing and petting cats alongside cooking requests from each region’s locals. Mintrocket also moved from pixel art to 3D for this one, aiming to capture culinary details like the sheen on a fillet, splattering oil, and smoke rising off the grill.
Much of the studio’s effort went into the act of cooking itself, with heavy use of the DualSense controller. Mintrocket is leaning on haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, and the gyro sensor to recreate the sensations of cooking, from feeling a knife meet the cutting board, to cracking an egg with the adaptive triggers and built-in speaker, to scrubbing a plate with the touchpad. The reveal comes as the studio preps Dave the Diver’s next expansion, In the Jungle, with more on Bancho the Chef promised later this year.
