Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a parody noir game in which you are a duck trying to solve the mystery of who stole lunch from the refrigerator in a bus company office. The most obvious comparison is Frog Detective, but this is slightly more serious both in tone and in terms of the puzzles involved. Although not a grisly murder mystery or hardcore deduction game by any means, it’s probably a bit too much for particularly young kids and you’ll need to think at least a little bit if you’re playing on the normal difficulty. Or you could just brute force everything.
Gameplay mostly consists of walking around and interacting with people or objects. Both of them can be inspected with your magnifying glass to reveal 3-4 hidden pieces of information, and people can be interrogated about your key items a la Ace Attorney. You’ll unlock keywords from doing these inspections and interrogations, which you can plug the mystery outlines in your notebook in order to make story progress. You’ll have something like “[person] [verb] [person] in order to [verb] [noun]” and events will start to happen once you’ve plugged in all the right words. Most of the time it’s pretty obvious which words are correct and the puzzle is mostly figuring out which interactions unlock the right words, but a couple of puzzles at the end do require you to make some small deductions.
The highlight here is the writing. You have to like this particularly campy style of humor, obviously, but I can’t imagine why anyone who didn’t would ever start looking into the game. It’s extremely heavy on duck puns and quirky characters and has some kind of joke in almost every situation, although it never quite gets to the point of being annoying. The story is decent as well. There is an actual mystery here, unlike in most of the Frog Detective games, and the ending sequence has some satisfying twists and reveals.
Duck Detective is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a silly, cheap game about a duck that you can finish in one sitting and get a few laughs from. It’s nothing mindblowing and I may not remember much of it in a year, but it kept me entertained all the way through and managed to surprise me a few times. That’s a solid outcome considering the price. Hopefully the developers will keep building on this idea – I don’t think this needs to be an epic sixty hour adventure, but there’s definitely room for a similarly sized sequel or two that takes its systems a little further.
Rating: 80%
MSRP: $10
Time to beat: 2 hours to do everything
For more reviews, see my Steam curator page: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43219041