Duck Detective: The Secret Salami

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is an adorable little detective story with great characters, clever writing, and a genuinely interesting mystery to solve. Clocking in just under two hours, you’re sure to get at least one great afternoon out of this clever and entertaining Ducktective Noir.

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is just a ton of fun. It’s a perfect replacement for a family movie night, with two funny and endearing hours of lightly challenging mystery and engaging story.

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a delightful experience that will appeal to any gamers who like a good mystery, humor, and some solid investigative work. The small cast of characters delivers some great interactive moments and is fully voiced. All the investigative mechanics are easy to use, and the game really asks players to think about the case to reach its solution. The world is so interesting and the gameplay engaging enough that I wanted the game to be longer, which is a rarity these days. I’m hoping that McQuacklin will take more cases in the future and will have the opportunity to enjoy many more bread slices. Play Duck Detective: The Secret Salami in two or three sessions, enjoy the humor, and try to solve the mystery without resorting to hints.

Again, it’s worth mentioning that Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a very short game. It’s intentionally cinematic in nature, and tells a very punchy tale over its runtime. But even with its short length, developer Happy Broccoli Games has delivered a worthy experience – a layered detective tale with neat mechanics, wonderful characters, and a buoyant sense of charm.

Overall, The Duck Detective is as lighthearted and as fun as it gets in terms of puzzle games. It’s the perfect game to unwind down to play. With such a stellar cast and sense of humor all in a cartoonish art style, it’s hard not to feel joy when playing this game. It has a bunch of little quirks that I haven’t mentioned in the review because the joy of this game is just experiencing it. The gameplay and fill in the blank sections definitely need some work and revisions in its sequel, but how can I not be happy to dive back into this little, silly loosey goosey world.

While Duck Detective: The Secret Salami has an incredible voice cast, colorful characters, and an intriguing plot, I was let down by the puzzles and gameplay. There were a few puzzles that I solved on my own with no issue, but many puzzles had clues that left me in the dark instead of guiding me.

Quotation forthcoming.

Fun, funny, and memorable. Very simple gameplay, but well worth a couple hours of your time.

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a mystery game packed with character. You play the titular duck detective, Eugene McQuacklin, a down-on-his-luck Private Investigator in the noir style who is out to solve the mystery of the missing salami. It is beautifully drawn, the characters are fun, and there are some genuinely funny moments, not least reading the duck 'facts' that pop up frequently as you play. Puzzles are solved by investigating the surroundings and speaking to suspects to identify keywords which can then be combined, a bit like Return of the Obra Dinn, but with a dedicated quack button. Best of all, for those of us with kids, it was over in a couple of hours, and I had a mighty fine time. No filler, all killer. The AAA industry could learn a lot from Happy Broccoli Games. I'm looking at you FFVII - Rebirth!

Duck Detective has some of the best mechanics of any puzzle game I have played. You gather clues from collecting objects and words. The words you get from talking to people and inspecting objects. You then use the words to fill in the blanks of your deducktions to figure out what has happened in order to further the plot. It's all very simple and easy to get used to and is helped by the game's fantastic UI. You can get an idea of what to try next by looking at the map where it lists where each person is and if they have an exclamation mark then you should talk to them or show them an object to get their thoughts on it. The game also has a hint system but to be honest I didn't find it very useful as it is extremely vague. You can also simply try various combos of words in the deducktions and guess them if you can't figure it out based on clues. I had to do this a few times. The game will say how many errors you have and obviously if you try something different and that number goes down then you have found the correct option for that blank. The reason I had to do this is that while the plot makes sense in hindsight I had trouble piecing together where it was going by the clues provided and didn't always see it's logic. That being said many of the puzzles are well done, make sense, and have good hints provided by objects and other clues. The voice acting was great as was the humour. I can see kids enjoying this but as an adult I had a great time as well. The art style was very well done. It almost had the look of a pop up diorama the way the characters moved. One thing I didn't like was the fact that at the end I can't choose to arrest no one. I won't spoil the plot but let's just say I don't believe every crime is worth punishing. I played Duck Detective on Linux. It never crashed and I didn't notice any bugs or spelling errors. There is no graphics options aside from resolution. The game saves on exit and there is just one save slot. Even though the game had no v-sync option it still respected my refresh rate. Game Engine: Unity Graphics API: OpenGL Disk Space Used: 229 MB Game Version Played: 1.0.12 Graphics Settings used: 2560x1440 GPU Usage: 8-27 % CPU Usage: 5-15 % System RAM Usage: 2.2-2.9 GB Frame Rate: 148-165 FPS If you enjoy point and click games then I can easily recommend Duck Detective. It has a great comfy atmosphere, some good voice acting and humour as well as a good plot and mechanics. It lacks a few things like multiple save slots and a manual save system and suffers from a bit of logic issues at times but none of it's issues are in any way deal breakers or hamper the enjoyment. I finished the game in two hours and forty nine minutes. I paid $14.68 CAD for it and found that to be great value, I’d say that even $25 CAD would be good value for it. My System:Intel i5-12600K | 32GB DDR4-3200 CL16 | Gigabyte RX 7800 XT 16GB | Western Digital Black SN850X 2TB | Artix | Dasharo 1.1.1 | Mate 1.28.2 | Kernel 6.10.8-artix1-1 | Mesa 24.2.2-arch1.1 | MSI G2730QPF 2560*1440 @ 165Hz

A silly little story with great voice acting & silly puzzles. Lovely anthro character designs /w fancy clothing I like! I completed it in less than 2 hours but generally I enjoyed every last bit of it, like a good interactive movie. It is an easy game to get 100% in as well if you are an achievement hunter. I think it would be a wonderful game for middle aged kids too.

A fun, quick detective game. Its pretty simple and straightforward to solve, just a little bit more direction would of been better as there is minimal information to go off of. Played on Steam Deck.