Duck Detective: Deducting The Secret Salami

The first few seconds of Duck Detective immediately sets the scene: in a sleazy office—or rather that of Eugene McQuacklin, burned-out just-divorced barely-a-nickle-left private detective—a phone rings that might just yield the case Eugene needs to get out of his personal mess: there’s a salami bandit operating in the offices of BearBus, a local bus company, and it’s up to you to deduct their identity and put a stop to them!

The first thing to do, of course, is to find out who hired you, as it seems every employee at BearBus is reluctant to talk to you let alone spill the beans. Eugene can talk or interact with people or objects (A), interrogate or closely inspect people or objects (Y), and in some cases, present confiscated evidence, hoping that’ll get them to loosen up. Duck Detective might classify as an adventure game, and depending on the platform you’re pointing and clicking, but emphasis here is on deduction and interaction, not on objects to combine with other objects to get from one puzzle to the next.

Besides the immediate familiarness of a poor lonesome cowboy—erm, detective—you’ve probably helped before in other adventure games, the way Eugene narrates each scene he enters and discovery he makes sounds a lot like Leslie Nielsen explaining the viewers of The Naked Gun series the plot twists. We really enjoyed that kind of humour and less common narrative style. It somehow fits like a duck (ha!). Nothing to quack at! Ok, I’ll shut up now.

The core “Deducktions” (don’t blame me, the game calls them that) gameplay mechanic consists of on the one hand finding the right keywords to fill your memo book and on the other hand filling in the correct keyword at the correct location that might or might not include some guesswork. For instance, in the screenshot below, the for Deduction “The Salami Bandit”, you’ll have to complete the sentence: …. is the Salami Bandit, because ….’s and his/her ….. are …... That could lead to Jef is the Salami Bandit, becuase Natalie’s and his/her mugs are expensive. Which is totally wrong, of course.

If you have trouble doing the detective work, a hint button gets Eugene pondering and retracing his steps which can help get the player back on track. The hints are vague enough not to give anything completely away. In more than a few instances, we weren’t sure of one or two keywords, so be prepared for a few leaps of faith.

The Salami Bandit case lasts just two hours: once you get to know all your suspects you’ll have to draw stern conclusions. This episode takes place entirely in and around the offices of BearBus, which for the length of the game felt okay. In terms of graphics, the characters look like illustrated stickers that shuffle up and down without animating. Considering this is another small indie team’s love letter, I can live with that, although it was strange to see a perfectly fine walking Eugene in loading screens but then suddenly losing any feelings in the legs. Or feathers?

Even though that’s probably not the focus of Duck Detective cases, I would have liked to have seen a few more puzzles. Opening up the odd case by figuring out the combination based on information gathered in the office was about as far as this secret salami goes. Sure, you gather clues by looking at people’s PC screens when they’re away, but most of those yield strange keywords that did not feel all that related. We first thought the gathered keywords were the clues, but later realized the clues are implicit and the keywords are just there to fill Eugene’s Deduction notebook. Most of them you’ll never even use.

For a short enjoyable deduction-based adventure game, it’s hard not to recommend Duck Detective: the Steam version is less than €10 and a new episode is coming this year. Just don’t expect any intricate gameplay mechanics or complex puzzles headed your way. Those were sure to ruffle too many feathers (whoops I did it again). Oh and did I mention the voice acting is pristine? Eugene is voiced by Sean Chiplock, a veteran that also did Arthur Ackerman in Loco Motive.

The best thing about Duck Detective were the funny Leslie Nielsen-style moments where Eugene sketches the scene in tense past tense. So that’s what was going on! Someone is being framed and I had to crack that case! Good luck deduckting your way through BearBus office intrigue!