Indie Game of the Week 436: Duck Detective: The Secret Salami

Duck Detective is the latest to join the Indie league of funny animal crimesolvers, walking the same gumshoe beat as Inspector Waffles or the Frog Detective in his indefatigable pursuit of justice and answers. However, while Inspector Waffles hearkened back to classic LucasFilm adventure games and Frog Detective to... fucking around and doing nothing simulators, I guess? Duck Detective is instead riffing on the semi-new phenomenon of the logical deduction game: an obscure puzzle-adventure subgenre that the Golden Idol games have done a fine job cornering of late like Return of the Obra Dinn did a few years prior. The titular Duck Detective, Eugene McQuacklin, is hired to investigate a stolen lunch at the BearBus transportation company: seeing as he's out of cash due to an expensive breadcrumb addiction, he takes the demeaning job only to find their office in disarray and its staff wholly unhelpful in response to his interrogations. Early goals might include getting everyone's names and professions from contextual clues (it doesn't occur to Eugene to just ask) and piecing together the original stolen lunch case, which then leads on to several others.

While I appreciate anyone choosing to waddle into the freshly burgeoning logical deduction field there's a certain process that must be observed to do this right, and you'll often find whenever a trendsetter breaks the mold and introduces something relatively new to the video game sphere that the lesser imitators in its wake make slip-ups, to the extent that it retroactively serves to make that originator all the more impressive in how confidently they were able to deliver. Consider Super Mario 64 bursting onto the scene with all the moxie an Italian day laborer can conjure, codifying an entirely new genre while also setting the bar prohibitively high for others to follow, then consider how everyone else that tried to get in on the 3D platformer racket did so with considerably less impressive results. That's the sentiment I got from my two hours with Duck Detective: a game that certainly has its charms but is found to be lacking in the core fundamentals of this new paradigm.

If I had to specifically narrow down the issue I had with the game it's that, with its multiple choice Mad Libs prompts, there's no real idea of where you should be starting from or what this particular deduction (or deducktion, as the game calls them) is asking for. Instead, you get case titles like "more business" or "who did it?" that tell you nothing about what they're actually asking, and instead of focusing on the central mystery—who is this so-called Salami Bandit who keeps stealing lunches?—it sends you off on adjacent tangents, so rather than filling the blanks with "the Salami Bandit did this" or "the lunch was stolen by X" like you'd think you ought to be doing it's about some other thing that bears some minor relation to the thefts. That other thing might still lead back around to the central case, like strands in a web of connected conspiracies, but with no clear indication about what it is you're meant to be focusing on for that particular thread of the investigation you're left playing guessing games until you either brute force it or are forced to rely on the in-game hint system to point you in the specific direction it had in mind. I recall the Ace Attorney games tripping this pitfall a few times too, for as excellent as they otherwise are: situations where multiple mysteries were afoot and you were understandably concentrating on the wrong thing, leading to multiple "wrong answers" that were actually right answers but for a completely different subject that the game wasn't ready to devote itself to quite yet, since you needed to know this incidental detail first to solve the bigger central mystery. With a little more direction or perhaps a few filled-in Mad Libs prompts to get you started—like stating that this deduction specifically was on the topic of illegal imports or a dubious side-gig selling bus vouchers that an employee is revealed to have—it would've made this game far more palatable to navigate.

Anyway, that's the fundamental reason the game doesn't quite work. Everything outside that, though? Delightful. Like the other named humorous detective games above there's a silly sense of humor that works on me and having a rogue's gallery of possible subjects in crime mystery fiction like this also means you have a bunch of colorful weirdos to flesh out if you're going for a more comedic tone. The staff of the under-performing BearBus organization are deeply uninterested in their jobs, typically busying themselves with other matters that intrigue them more: the friendly alligator Freddy Frederson, made out to be the obvious culprit initially except he's a bit too guileless to really be the mastermind, is very happy that a famous detective is snooping around the office since he's a huge fan of the thematic genre; the office sheep mom Margaret is busy cooking up a birthday cake for the underappreciated receptionist, in the process leaving all her customer service work to the already tightly-wound cat Laura; and the janitor Rufus is particularly insouciant about your presence there, preferring instead to lounge around even while you knock over all the waste paper baskets (which has an achievement attached to it, as if causing a mess wasn't its own reward). It's a very short game with a limited number of moving parts, which would typically make the logic puzzles easier to suss out had they been organized better, but the worldbuilding and characterization are pretty good for the limited amount of screen-time they're given. You have some nice noir-ish tunes to complete the vibe, with new areas often desaturated for a moment as Eugene cuts in for some tortured internal monologues like a good noir detective should.

I certainly love the format and I think the comedy and aesthetics of Duck Detective are a promising indication of where this series could go, especially if they follow their Frog Detective peer in producing these bite-sized adventures every so many months to create an episodic series of deduction games, but for now I have my reservations regarding any following up on the good detective's future cases. Obra Dinn and Golden Idol I think made this type of game look way easier to make than it actually is, so we'll probably see far more Duck Detectives than Golden Idols in the future if narrative-driven logic puzzle games continue to thrive in the Indie space to the same extent as, say, exploraction games or run-based games or deckbuilders (duck-bill-ders? Wait, why am I posting solid gold like that on the internet for free?). It's really hard to dislike a game that's this disarmingly cute and goofy, that's specifically trying to make a specific type of adventure game I could see myself getting obsessed with in due course, so for now I'll wish its sequels the best and I may yet one day find myself grabbing a few more in a future bundle whereupon I'll almost certainly have some thoughts to post on here once again.

Rating: 3 out of 5.