Duck Detective: The Secret Salami

It's cute, it's charming, it's funny, it has amazing voice acting, but it's short. Gameplay is similar to The Case of the Golden Idol. You are presented a scene and expected to make a series of deductions based on different clues you collect by talking with wonderfulk suite of characters or by observing details in enviroment (btw. I love how observation works in this game). Instead of one big sheet with questions you are presented with bunch of smaller tasks to fill with words. Story is really nice with good writing and voice acting and with satisfying finale. Puzzles are pleasant to solve, not stupid, but mostly on the easy side. I want more. This whole thing was delightful, but over in 1h and 45 minutes. I want more cases, harder puzzles and more Duck Detective!

Duck Detective is a cute whodunit story in a world filled with antropomorphic characters, with the main character having a noir detective vibes. This game took a bold approach, and devs came up with a pretty original combination of mechanics. The main one is Deduc(k)tion. You get a sentence about a case with missing keywords, and you select the keywords to fill in the blanks from a list of ones you know. There are multiple ways to learn keywords. One of the more original ones is a mechanic called Investigation, where you move a magnifying glass over a character / object trying to find important things. Other ways are either talking to characters, or asking them about particular clues. Clues are investigatable objects, that you can ask other characters about afterwards. All the mechanics are user-friendly. During investigation you will get notified, when the glass is over something important. During deduc(k)tion the game will give you limited information on how many keywords you got wrong. Also there's a hint system, but I didn't use it. The art totally fits the mood. The backgrounds are 3D with isometric camera. I really liked the detail, where some objects react to you moving near them. For example, if you walk past a rubbish bin, it will fall. The characters look like cardboard cutouts with almost no animation. Paper Mario vibes. Music and SFX were nice too. Not memorable, but fulfilled their background roles well. All the dialogue is voice acted, and it's awesome. Things I didn't like: * The game is a bit heavy technically. That's understandable, given, that it's made in Unity engine * A lot of walking back and forth between small locations, each transition has a loading screen * Most of the deduc(k)tions are short and easy to get. But at the end you suddenly get a huge one, and, if you haven't figured everything out yourself, you'll have a hard time Overall, I'd love to see more like this. I had a blast playing this game.

For the most part, this was a very enjoyable experience that I wish had a couple more cases. At least one puzzle had a completely inane solution and a couple of other solutions only felt justifiable after the fact. I also got frustrated with how you were allowed to use information only after it decided you'd actually gotten that information. I knew the complete names of at least two characters long before the game would let me actually assign them their names, and some keywords didn't enter the usable vocabulary the first few times you encountered them (even when you'd seen them in context). The voice acting was great. The plot twists were well done with at least one giving me a V8 moment. (For you whippersnappers, in this context it means "good".) The only decision (in a set of three) in the game you get is less meaningful than color choices in Mass Effect. I enjoyed the game.

Cute art style and a nice story make an overall great experience