Coming to Switch and Windows on May 23, 2024 (and runs perfectly on Steam Deck), Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a lovable indie puzzle game full of character. And while I wasn’t entirely happy with the puzzles, the presentation made the experience more than worth the short, silly two hours.
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In Duck DetectiveYou play Eugene McQuacklin, a duck and detective who’s down on his luck, behind on rent, and has a bread problem that’s likely driven his partner away. On behalf of an unknown client, your assignment is to investigate a local bus depot to find out who’s behind some mysterious dealings involving, well, erm… salami.
The game doesn’t lack silliness or personality. With fully voiced characters and a pitch-perfect, smoky jazz soundtrack, Duck Detective has enough charm to keep you hooked throughout. It’s also a visual delight, with two-dimensional characters moving through 3D environments with satisfying waddling animations and excellent graphics.
Puzzle solving involves Mad Lib-like puzzles based on what you can discern from the environment and from conversations with NPCs in the bus depot office, where you question everyone from managers to customer service representatives to the very jaded and over-the-top penguin janitor. You can visually examine each character for notable details to discern elements of their personality, and ask them specific questions about evidence you come across as you begin to solve the case.
Duck Detective can be quite a challenging experience. It’s definitely a game that you can relax into because of its atmosphere, but you’ll need to pay a little more attention than you might expect. Each of the Mad Lib-style puzzles requires you to talk to a series of NPCs before you can piece together everything you’ve learned. But this isn’t an exercise in creativity. Although there are some alternate outcomes based on your choices, solving each part of the case requires you to guess the correct words in each puzzle’s sentences.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t brute force my way through some of these puzzles, simply going through the options for each set until I got it right. Inelegant and definitely not in the spirit of challenge, I know. But in my defense: Duck Detective was actually a reminder to me that I don’t do well with Mad Lib style games. There is an optional “story mode” that highlights incorrect answers for you, which I ended up using. Even though the entire scope of Duck Detective
It helps that there are a few amusing lines in each cutscene, such as facts about how likely ducks are to pay their taxes, how many of them exist, and their relationship to skateboarding.
And here I realize that my frustrations with the puzzles don’t really bother me. Yes, I struggled to figure out what was going on. Maybe that just means I’m a bad detective. Or a bad duck. Whatever the case, the charm and elegance of this game make it a casual indie title that you can beat in under three hours.
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