Duck Detective: Secret Salami review

Duck Detective: Secret Salami is an adventure game, but it's part of a new strain of them that focuses less on how to move between places to see what happens next and more on tasking you to put items and information together to solve a mystery. Although there are more refined versions of this ilk out there, this ducktective game finds appeal by simply being a somewhat rare breed.

In Duck Detective: Secret Salami, you play as a hardboiled detective who is down on his luck and also just so happens to be a duck. Your character is called up to solve a mystery at the city bus station ran by other animal-human hybrids, and it kicks off a small series of mysteries that you must solve through the power of deducktion (the game's term, I'm not that clever).

The way you solve these mysteries involves some tried-and-true detective work: interviews with suspects and people of interest, clue-gathering, and--of course--piecing everything you gather together. Duck Detective: Secret Salami breaks these procedural steps down into discreet mechanics and systems so that you're never left to perform any kind of abstract or obtuse action to progress. When you talk to folks or discover evidence, these things are all added to your notebook as a keyword, and every "challenge" in the game revolves around filling in the blanks of a proposed conclusion.

Much of the appeal of Duck Detective: Secret Salami revolves around its colorful world and cast. The developers really have fun with the duck-as-detective conceit and inject the experience with a lot of wordplay and other silliness that makes working your way through it a delight. To add to its charm, the game is fully voice-acted, which also helps bring all of the characters to life.

To help you work your deducktive magic, Duck Detective: Secret Salami has a few systems in place to help make sure you don't get stuck on any step for too long. Your detective notebook has a nifty notification system that alerts you whenever one of the conclusions becomes solveable, and the conclusion pages themselves give some light feedback about incorrect answers to help you puzzle things out without outright telling you what to do. You can also activate your detective's inner monologue at any point to get some hints on how you can gather key pieces of evidence and move things forward.

There's not a ton of depth or nuance to Duck Detective: Secret Salami's gameplay or case, though there is more than enough there to support the game's short runtime. As a free-to-start game, hearing that the free portion takes about 10 minutes would sound quite short if you didn't know that the game itself is easily completable within two hours.

I mostly enjoyed the few hours I spent in Duck Detective: Secret Salami, but there were a few things that left a dark cloud over the experience for me. First is that there doesn't seem to be much of any attempt to leverage the humor surrounding the duck-as-detective onto the rest of the cast. Few if any jokes in the game revolve around the various other animals in the cast, which at a certain point made me wonder why everyone wasn't just a duck. Secondly--and more importantly--some of the wording in the fill-in-the-blank segments reads very ambiguously, which led to situations where I knew the solution but had to plug-and-chug various answers to actually get the right answer to move forward.

Duck Detective: Secret Salami has enough charm and novelty to leave me satisfied at the end of its short mystery. That said, it feels like a game that doesn't quite put all its cards on the table and could use some refinement. I hope to see more games like this in the future, though perhaps ones that may take a few more swings than this one.