Released on May 23, 2024 for Switch and Windows (and it runs perfectly on Steam Deck), Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is an endearing indie puzzle game full of character. And while I didn’t totally vibe with its puzzles, the presentation made the experience more than worth its brief, silly two-hour experience.
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In Duck Detective, you play as Eugene McQuacklin, a duck and a detective who is down on his luck, overdue on his rent, and with a bread problem that likely drove his partner away. Hired by an unknown client, your job is to investigate a local bus depot to find out who is behind some mysterious shenanigans involving, well, um…salami.
The game isn’t short on silliness or personality. With fully voiced characters and a pitch-perfect smokey jazz soundtrack, Duck Detective has enough charm to keep you engaged throughout. Visually it’s a delight too; the two-dimensional characters move through 3D environments with satisfying waddling animations and excellent artwork.
Unraveling mysteries involves Mad Lib-like puzzles based on what you can discern from the environment, and from chatting with NPCs around the bus depot’s office, interviewing everyone from the manager, customer service agents, and the very jaded and over-it penguin janitor. You can visually inspect each character for notable details to discern elements of their personality, as well as ask them specific questions about evidence you’ll come across as you start to crack the case.
Duck Detective can be a bit of a challenging experience. It’s definitely a game you can chill out to based on its vibes, but you’ll need to pay a bit more attention to it than you might expect. Each of the Mad Lib-style puzzles require you to talk to a number of NPCs before piecing together everything you learned. But this is no creative exercise. Though there are some alternate outcomes based on your decisions, cracking each part of the case requires guessing the right words in each puzzle’s sentence.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t brute force my way through some of these puzzles by just cycling through the options for each sentence until I got it right. Inelegant, and definitely not in the spirit of the challenges, I know. But in my defense, Duck Detective was actually a reminder for me that I don’t do well with Mad Lib-style games. There is an optional “Story Mode” that highlights wrong answers for you, which I ended up using. Also, while the entire playspace of Duck Detective consists of a lobby, office, kitchen, parking lot, managerial office, and a server room, the loading screens in between each area wore on me. They weren’t necessarily long, but as I ran around getting clues from each character, I started to get a little tired of the few seconds of a loading screen each time.
It helps that there are some amusing lines during each cutscene, such as facts about how likely ducks are to pay their taxes, how many of them are in existence, and what their relationship is with skateboarding.
And that’s where I find myself rather unbothered by my frustrations with the puzzles. Yes, I struggled to figure out what was going on. Perhaps that just means I’m a bad detective. Or a bad duck. Either way, the charm and polish of this game makes for a breezy indie title you can move through in under three hours.
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