A young woman decides to take a diving vacation — and that is where every conventional underwater game would start stacking on the pressure. Air supply ticking down. Health bar lurking in the corner. Something predatory in the distance. Splash Divers, from developer TinyMo GAMES and publisher Spiral Up Games, makes a deliberate choice to discard all of it. The game was featured in last Friday’s GDoCExpo Direct — the 11th annual Game Devs showcase for indie games from underrepresented creators — putting one of the season’s most conceptually confident cozy titles in front of a global gaming audience.

The GDoCExpo Steam Sale launched alongside the Direct and runs through October 2, offering discounts and playable demos from hundreds of indie studios.

What Is Splash Divers?

Splash Divers is an underwater exploration game coming to PC via Steam, with no release date yet officially announced. Its premise is deceptively simple: dive into a colorful ocean, explore at your own pace, photograph marine life, collect shells, and get to know a cast of dive buddies who have come together from across the world for their shared love of the sea.

There are no enemies. There are no countdown timers. There is no air supply meter slowly draining toward a fail state. That last design decision is more significant than it sounds — and it defines what kind of game this actually is.

Why Removing the Air Timer Is a Genre Statement

Every major underwater game in the past three decades has used oxygen as a core mechanic. In Subnautica, running out of air in the wrong location is a death sentence. The original Endless Ocean on the Nintendo Wii included a breath meter. Even games that stripped away combat kept the oxygen economy as the fundamental pressure system underlying exploration.

Splash Divers removes it entirely. The game’s central movement model, revealed during the Steam playtest earlier this year, works differently than most players might expect: your diver primarily walks along the ocean floor, not swims through open water. Swimming — ascending to higher ledges, crossing gaps, climbing up reef formations — consumes a stamina meter similar to the one in Breath of the Wild, not an oxygen meter. Once you settle back onto the ocean floor, that resource regenerates.

The result is a physical model that reads more like a third-person exploration game with water physics than a survival sim. You are a diver who happens to be underwater, not a diver racing against suffocation. The ocean becomes a landscape to inhabit, not a resource-constrained environment to survive.

This places Splash Divers in a tradition most PC players haven’t visited in years: the lineage of Endless Ocean, the 2007 Nintendo Wii title that let players photograph marine life, fill encyclopedias, and build relationships with dive companions — with no combat and no oxygen pressure. That game built a quiet, devoted following. Splash Divers appears to be its spiritual successor for the Steam era, with social multiplayer layers and global localization the Wii original never had.

Protagonist, Story, and the Ocean You’re Exploring

You play as a young woman who has come to a tropical island for a diving vacation. The island has gathered a diverse cast of fellow divers from across the world — each with distinct personalities, particular skills, and individual stories. In the playtest preview, reviewers met about half a dozen of them in the roughly hour-long demo, with more promised in the full game.

These characters give the game its dramatic texture. They hand you tasks — photograph this creature, collect these shells, clear this trash from the reef — and their requests create a natural structure for each dive session. The central question the game is asking is a social and exploratory one: how deeply will you come to know each of these strangers, and what will you find together in the ocean between you? The emotional register is that of a summer vacation you want to last forever: warm, unhurried, and filled with small, satisfying discoveries.

One of the playtest’s most warmly received activities was collecting ocean-floor trash alongside dive companions — a grounded detail that gives the game’s environmental setting real weight. The ocean you’re exploring is a living space that your presence, and your care, can affect.

Building Your Personal Ocean Encyclopedia

The gameplay loop centers on three interlocking collection systems. First, a camera system: photograph marine life to populate a personalized ocean encyclopedia. The creatures you’ll encounter have distinct behaviors — lobsters dart backward, crabs shuffle sideways, squid will ink the camera if you get too close — so building the encyclopedia means learning how individual animals move and responding to them in real time.

Second, shell and conch collecting: hidden beneath the waves, these feed into a customizable dive journal. Third, stickers gifted by island locals: used alongside shells and photographs to decorate that journal. The journal becomes a scrapbook of your specific ocean vacation — different for every player based on what they chose to photograph, collect, and document.

The encyclopedia and the journal together function as a progress system that never penalizes. You either have more entries than yesterday or you don’t — there’s no score, no rating, no star count telling you how well you’re doing.

Who Can Play Splash Divers?

Splash Divers targets broad accessibility. The game’s minimum PC specifications — an Intel Core i5 10th Gen processor paired with an NVIDIA GTX 1650 GPU — mean it should run on laptops and budget gaming rigs purchased within the last five or six years, not just high-end gaming desktops.

The social layer sets it apart from most cozy titles, which are overwhelmingly single-player. The game’s Steam page describes players diving together with friends, exchanging collections and gathering for bonfire celebrations on the island, uncovering each other’s stories. The social architecture — shared ocean, cross-cultural cast, exchange of discoveries — maps naturally onto the genre’s growing appetite for games that reward spending time together without competition.

Where Does GDoCExpo Come In?

The Game Devs of Color Expo, now in its 11th year, is one of the games industry’s most consistently meaningful showcases for developers from underrepresented backgrounds. Its 2026 Direct featured more than 40 game announcements and exclusive updates, broadcast last Friday, September 25, at 3 p.m. PT / 6 p.m. ET on the GDoCExpo YouTube channel.

Since 2019, Game Devs of Color has awarded more than $450,000 in grants to game creators of color — $21,000 distributed to three recipients in 2025 alone. The Expo’s combination of conference programming, developer grants, and the linked Steam Sale creates a pipeline that moves games from announcement to audience with structural support that independent developers frequently lack.

Splash Divers‘ presence in that ecosystem is a natural fit. A game this deliberately patient in its design — one built around unhurried discovery, community, and finding beauty in the mundane details of the ocean floor — aligns with a showcase that consistently foregrounds creative work made with a point of view.

Can You Play It Right Now?

A “Cozy Dive” playtest was available on Steam earlier this year. As of publication, the full release date has not been announced — check the Steam page directly for current playtest or demo availability.

The GDoCExpo Steam Sale, which launched alongside last Friday’s Direct, runs through October 2, and includes demos and discounts from hundreds of indie games. It is the best current opportunity to discover Splash Divers and the broader slate of titles from creators the Expo spotlights.

Spiral Up Games, the Singapore-based indie games publisher behind Splash Divers, has built its catalog around indie titles with strong cross-cultural appeal — its roster includes Wandering Sword, Back to the Dawn, Dungeon Inn, and Affogato, with particular expertise in reaching the Chinese-language market. The 20 languages confirmed at launch for Splash Divers — including Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, and Arabic — reflect that publishing philosophy directly.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes Splash Divers different from other underwater games like Subnautica or ABZÛ?

Most underwater games — including Subnautica, Ecco the Dolphin, and even the contemplative ABZÛ — use an air supply or oxygen mechanic as a background pressure system. Splash Divers removes that entirely. Instead, your diver walks along the ocean floor and uses a stamina meter (similar to Breath of the Wild) only when swimming upward or across gaps. The game is less about surviving the ocean and more about inhabiting it at your own pace — making it the closest PC equivalent to the 2007 Wii title Endless Ocean in design philosophy.

Is there multiplayer in Splash Divers?

The game’s Steam page describes players diving together with friends, exchanging collections and joining bonfire celebrations with the island’s cast of dive-buddy characters — features that go beyond solo play. Exact multiplayer architecture (online co-op, lobby size) has not been specified in available materials, and the Steam features list currently shows single-player only; check the Steam page directly for the latest on multiplayer availability.

What are the PC requirements for Splash Divers?

The listed minimum specifications are an Intel Core i5 10th Gen processor paired with an NVIDIA GTX 1650 GPU — hardware that most mid-range laptops and desktop gaming rigs from 2019 onward should meet. These specifications signal that TinyMo GAMES prioritized broad accessibility over graphical fidelity, which fits the game’s cozy, inclusive design philosophy.

When does the GDoCExpo Steam Sale end?

The Game Devs of Color Expo Steam Sale — which launched Friday, September 25, alongside the GDoCExpo Direct — runs through October 2, 2026, at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET. It features discounts and playable demos from hundreds of indie games, including titles from developers featured in the GDoCExpo Direct.