I’m still on an indie dev kick, and I decided to play Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (Happy Broccoli Games). It’s about a duck who is, yes, a detective, and it’s very Sam Spade about the whole thing. Except with animals as the characters, and a very cute pop-up book, cut-out characters visual style. The whole thing is very snappy, and I loved the vibe.
The basic premise is that you play as Eugene, the duck detective. In this game, he gets a call from a mysterious person in the bus company complaining about their lunch being stolen. Eugene goes over and starts interrogating everyone. You get clues from your talks, and the I really like how simple the mechanics are. You hover over an object, and it has three exclamation points you have to find. Each one has a relevant word/phrase for your case files. Or, you could ask suspects questions/observe them, and you would get clues in that way as well.
I will say that some of the ‘deducktions’ (yes, that’s what they were called, and yes, it’s pretty cringeworthy every time I saw/heard it) I had to make weren’t intuitive/did not seem to be what the clues was telling me, but I don’t know how much of that was my fault and how much was the game.
In general, I was able to mash it out because the way to solve each issue was Mad Lib style. There were sentences with blanks, and every time I clicked on one of the blanks, a list of words would pop up. It would tell you helpfully if you had ‘2 or less’ words wrong or ‘3 or more’. There’s a story mode, too, in which it will tell you which answers you got wrong, but I did not turn taht on.
I will admit I had to look up one answer online because I just could not get it. When I looked it up, it turned out that I was looking at the puzzlse (figuring out a safe combination) in the completely wrong way. That’s just because my brain is weird, though, so I’m not mad about that.
I loved the characters, even the most annoying one. Who, I found out later, was voiced by Brian David Gilbert. He used to work for Polygon and now does really crreative and weird vidieos about once a month. He’s also in the second game, and he’s just as annoying in that game! And yet, somehow, he became endearing by the end of the second game. Not because he’s voiced by BDG, but just because of how well-written the games are.
Each game took me about three hours, and I easily platted both of them. I really appreciated that you could get the ten or so achievements in each game mostly just by playing the games. I loved the atmosphere and how the games were just oozing with charm. And the fifties feel to the dialogue with the effortless nods to modern time.