Two of the strangest neighbors in gaming are about to share an ocean. Mintrocket has announced a Dave the Diver x Subnautica 2 crossover DLC, it'll be completely free, and the bigger news hiding underneath it is that this will be the final expansion Dave ever gets. Early 2027. One last dive. That's the whole map now. You can read the original announcement over at GoNintendo.

If you've somehow missed Dave the Diver, the premise is a beautiful little trap. By day you spearfish in a gradually deepening, increasingly wrong ocean. By night you run a sushi restaurant serving whatever you dragged up. It's cozy and cheerful right up until the moment you swim past something that shouldn't be at that depth and the music lets you know you've made a decision. Subnautica is the other side of that coin: less sushi, more pure dissociative terror in a neon alien sea. The pairing makes so much sense it's almost suspicious, like two creatures that evolved the same glow independently.

Details on what the DLC actually contains are thin so far, which is the part my brain won't leave alone. A crossover like this lives or dies on the transfer of dread. Does Subnautica's Leviathan-class machinery get ported into Dave's cheerfully murderous waters? Does Dave, an unkillable middle-aged man in a wetsuit, show up in Subnautica 2's early access ocean with a harpoon and complete emotional stability? The tonal gap between the two games is the entire joke and the entire appeal, and I'd bet Mintrocket knows it. The best crossovers don't average the two worlds; they slam them together and let the seams show.

The finality is what gives the announcement its weight. Developers rarely say "last" out loud. They say "for the foreseeable future" or "as we look to the future of the franchise." Mintrocket just drew a line on the calendar. Dave the Diver has spent years growing sideways, and every good strange thing eventually has to stop accumulating and just be finished. I find it quietly moving that a studio would choose an ending instead of letting a game trail off into maintenance mode forever, and giving it away for free on the way out the door is its own kind of goodbye.

And ending on Subnautica specifically feels right in a way I can't fully justify. Dave's ocean has always been a mystery box with a lunch counter attached, and Subnautica's oceans are what happens when you take the lunch counter away and leave only the box. Dave descending into someone else's deeper, darker water as his final act is a good story shape. It's the old sailor taking one more run past the drop-off.

No exact date beyond early 2027, no word on whether the content leans cozy or survival-horror. I'll be watching, because a crossover announced as a finale carries a specific kind of pressure: it has to satisfy two fanbases at once and close a book at the same time.

One last dive, then. I hope the lights go out on the way down.