Half-Quacked

I’ve seen my fair share of animal detectives over my years: Frog Detective, Chicken Police, Tails Noir, even Pikachu has found his way to sleuthing and investigating.  Most of these titles bring a certain characteristic to the table, be it charming humor, determined wit, or a real thinker of a good puzzle.  For Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, the opportunity is there to grab all three, but takes empty grasps at all of them.

For Eugene McQuacklin, the road traveled has been a tough one.  Recently separated, down to his last dollar, and looming on the last hit of toast he said he wouldn’t do, the Duck Detective is contemplating selling his badge to make enough for rent.  Approaching his lowest moment, his phone rings to the tone of a concerned individual looking for a sleuthing intervention regarding…something, the detective was too busy getting out the door to take in all of what he was supposed to be there for.  But fret not!  Eugene’s powers of deduc(k)tion will help fill in the blanks and help him crack the case of the Salami Bandit!

You arrive at your destination with little info but a lot of questions, and to that you’ll use your deduc(k)tion skills.  You’ll start interacting with the diverse cast of characters who are employed at the BearBus station, from giraffes to cats, buffalos and bears.  Each character is fully voiced and comes with a range of emotions on how their day-to-day is going at their workplace.  You can choose to talk to them which give you small quips on their current state, interrogate for additional details, or inspect their demeanor: all to add “clues” to your notebook to work out your deduc(k)tions.

These are tackled with a fill-in-the-blank style puzzle, taking in all the clues found throughout your searches and piecing them together to get closer to solving the big puzzle.  At first these are pretty cut-and-dry and help understand the situation at hand but diving into the later puzzles where you start getting deeper into the Salami Bandit’s hands the expectations of piecing these together become a little tedious due to how open some of the deduc(k)tions are.  The beginning ones may have 2-4 gaps in the puzzle, but the later ones have you almost completing whole sentences with nearly 30 words to choose from that could realistically fit multiple scenarios though you’re only needed for one specific detail.  It becomes less of an A-Ha moment and moves to jamming square pegs into round holes to figure out exactly which part they want you to talk about.

The whole case runs a little over 2 hours which I felt was a fair amount of time to dedicate grilling six different staff members and investigating clues in essentially 4 rooms worth of content.  Some of the puzzles outside the deduc(k)tions were very clever, specifically finding out Margret’s work computer password, but there were very few of these to chew on outside of the heavily leaned on fill-in-the-blank criteria.

Where most titles within this genre find a niche to latch on to like explained before, the problem I found with Duck Detective is that it doesn’t quite hit any of the goals you would expect from this kind of game.  There were very few humorous bits to progress the character traits and motives, the flexing of your brain muscles never really hit a good elasticity as the puzzles are either cut and dry or do too much to be obtuse, and the wit from the main detective doesn’t carry enough to feel motivated to push through this case to its fullest.  There is a good foundation with the art, style, and presentation, but if there ever becomes more of the Duck Detective, and I do hope there is, it will need to pick what style of detective it wants to be and to stick the landing like I’m sure it can.  Otherwise this detective might be the thing it’s trying so hard to stay away from: Toast.

5/10