May 23, 2024

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami Review

Rahul Shirke

Check out our review of Duck Detective: The Secret Salami to find out what we thought about this wholesome detective mystery adventure.

Jaded Duck Detective Eugene McQuacklin is a duck down on his luck. Now that he’s no longer with the police, he’s forced to work out of a tiny apartment. What’s worse is that his addiction to bread has led to a divorce. And when he does get a case at long last, the fare to get there leaves him unable to get back home unless he gets to the bottom of a workplace mystery.

The game wastes no time in throwing you right into its mystery-solving mechanics, as you begin the game trying to make sense of your own ducky life. This first “deducktion” eases you into the game’s Obra Dinn-esque mechanics, where you first explore the environment to collect words as clues and then fill in the blanks with the words you’ve discovered.

Duck Detective is a much more forgiving, wholesome adventure than Return of the Obra Dinn, however, so expect plenty of hinting and nudging in the right direction.

The scope of the game is also very limited. Once you enter the main mystery of the game, you’ll be restricted to some four or five smallish areas populated by a handful of colorful animal characters. Apart from talking to them and interrogating them with the items you find, you can also ‘investigate’ them to take a closer look at them.

The investigation mechanic is a clever idea as it gives you a magnifying glass to run over the subject. The simple cartoon art ‘magnifies’ into more complex features under the glass, revealing details you could not have deduced previously. Apart from conversation and interrogation, this becomes a prime source of uncovering clues.

Solving the game’s ‘deducktions’ is a fun mental exercise, but I found myself employing trial-and-error guesswork far more than I would have liked. There were quite a few times where guessing the deducktion was what revealed the mystery to me, rather than the other way around. For a game with a wide, wholesome appeal, I feel like some more granularity in the deductions was warranted.

Nevertheless, Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a delightful way to spend 2-3 hours of an evening solving a mystery that starts with a stolen lunch and ends with uncovering crimes considerably more dramatic.

The assured puzzle-solving gameplay and the game’s fully voice-acted, quirky characters make for a very comfortable, engaging experience. When the credits rolled, Duck Detective: The Secret Salami left me wanting for more, so I sincerely hope Happy Broccoli Games will cook up more duck mysteries in the future.

Developer: Happy Broccoli Games
Country of Origin: Germany
Publisher: Happy Broccoli Games
Release Date: May 23, 2024 (PC, Switch)

This review is based on a copy of the game provided by the developer. The PC version of Duck Detective: The Secret Salami was played for this review.

Thank you for reading our review of Duck Detective: The Secret Salami. Playing the game already? Check out our walkthrough of the game!

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