Step into the shoes of the duck detective, called in to investigate a stolen lunch and other mysterious happenings, and use all of your mystery-solving skills to quack this case.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami
Developer: Happy Broccoli Games
Price: $10
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch (reviewed), Xbox Series X|S
MonsterVine was provided with a Switch code for review.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is an adventure game about a down-on-his-luck detective called in to investigate a crime. He’s recently divorced, addicted to bread, and struggling to make ends meet. He’s also a duck.
There’s a surprising number of mystery games starring animals, and a large number of them have you playing as a bird, but Duck Detective is one of the most charming. By finding clues and analyzing them, you’ll make “deducktions” to crack the case–excuse me, to quack the case. You also have a dedicated quack button. It has no practical use; it just lets you quack whenever you want. Even the loading screens get in on it, as they present you with a number of random duck “facts,” like how ducks sleep with one eye open to prevent crime. Duck Detective embraces its goofy premise and runs with it, which brings an added bit of charm to an already charming game.
The characters are presented as 2D cutouts in a 3D world, similar to the style of later Paper Mario games. It also has full voice acting, which was a pleasant surprise. Anything you can interact with in the environment is marked, so it’s a matter of walking around to check everything you can for clues. Sometimes you can also inspect things more closely. When that happens, you need to find a handful of details about the object or character you’re inspecting by hovering your magnifying glass over significant places. These details are then added to your list of clues that you can use for a given deducktion. You can also present evidence or character profiles to other characters, although not everything is available to present to everyone. While I understand the reasoning–you can only present things that will get a reaction–it felt a little annoying to get a new piece of evidence and then run around to see who I could ask about it.
Once you have enough clues, you can fill in the blanks to make a deducktion. I like this system in theory. It forces you to pay attention to all the little details to understand what’s going on. At the same time, it sometimes resulted in leaps in logic. The gathered clues function more like a list of keywords, without the full context of the clues you’ve seen recorded for you to check, so the connection between your investigation and the deducktions isn’t always as clear as it could be. Moreover, since it lets you know how many keywords you’ve gotten incorrect, it’s possible to brute force your way through. Aside from the deducktion system, there are also a couple of more traditional puzzles. One of these was tricky, but actually pretty clever once I understood what it meant.
Duck Detective has a built-in hint system where you can ponder the case for a hint about what to do. However, these hints are fairly general. For example, if you’re missing keywords, it simply tells you to make sure you’ve checked everything. The developers have also added a Story Mode that provides you with more hints when you get incorrect answers, but that update hasn’t come to the Switch version as of the time of this review, so I wasn’t able to try it out.
The mystery itself has an odd blend of tones. On one hand, this is a lighthearted game about a duck detective no one takes seriously, investigating lunch thefts. There’s a good dose of humor in all the character interactions, both with the detective and with each other. At the same time, the mystery ends up being more serious than it appears on the surface, if still a bit sillier than the average detective game. The resolution more or less brings everything together, although there are a few odd points that kept it from feeling entirely satisfactory to me. It takes less than 3 hours to finish, and it left me wishing it was the prelude to something more.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a charming game with a good sense of humor and an interesting approach to mystery-solving. At times I wished it made its connections clearer to make clues feel more like actual clues instead of just a handy keyword list, but whenever I saw the word “deducktion” or pressed the quack button, I couldn’t help but smile. I don’t know if the developers are planning to do more with Duck Detective, but I’d be interested to see how they might evolve these systems in the future.
The Final Word
Duck Detective is short enough to feel a bit lacking, and some of its mystery-solving gameplay could be polished into a more satisfactory experience. However, it’s cute and charming, and it has a dedicated quack button. For a bite-sized experience playing as a duck detective, it provides an entertaining couple of hours.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
