When your salami gets stolen, who do you call? The Duck Detective! Addicted to bread, recently divorced, and unable to pay the rent, the Duck Detective must take on low-paying jobs to get back on his feet. Duck Detective: The Secret SalamiReleased on May 23 by Happy Broccoli Games, the cliche of the hard-luck, hard-boiled detective turns on its head and then makes it quack.
Duck Detective starts out like any good noir detective film; in fact, it’s essentially is a playable detective film. The game can be completed in just three hours, making it one of those games that you will probably finish in one sitting. You play as the Duck Detective, whose first mystery is to find out what happened last night. Once that is solved, he can go to his client. The only problem is that he doesn’t know who called in the lunchroom mystery: who stole the salami?
Once in the office, the Duck Detective must interrogate suspects, find hidden clues, and piece together the details. He keeps track of what he finds in an in-game notebook that contains keywords related to the interviews and clues; to solve the mystery, you must fill in the blanks with those keywords, a la The case of the Golden Idol(This gameplay starts with the first scene, where you try to figure out what happened last night. This scene serves as a simplified tutorial.)
Image: Happy Broccoli Games
What the Duck Detective finds in the office is a dramatic, silly, and quite complicated mystery that must be unraveled slowly. Yes, there’s the missing salami, but there’s so much more: hurt feelings, jealous coworkers, a canceled Halloween party, and an international conspiracy. The office workers are generally quite apathetic to the Duck Detective’s presence, simply answering his questions and going about their routine corporate work — until they can no longer hide from his (actually quite capable) deductive skills.
You’ll continue to play this fill-in-the-blanks gameplay throughout the game, with the scenarios becoming more complex with each thrust of the story. There are a lot of words to pick up, some of which are clearly misleading. It’s tempting, when you get stuck, to just pick up random words and plug them in, but that becomes frustrating. If you don’t know the solution, it feels more satisfying to go back to the environment and dig deeper into the office. I can imagine that backtracking might be annoying for some, but that’s not how I found the game: it’s so charming and short that nothing stuck around for too long.
Through it all, Duck Detective is a silly mystery game that relies on the absurdity of it all. There’s a button to make it quack. Lots of fake duck facts, like the fact that ducks sleep with one eye open to watch for crime, or that they can fly backwards. I found myself giggling during an afternoon of quacking and finding clues, the most I’ve laughed while playing a game in a while. The thing is, I both wish there was more to play, and I love that it’s a short, fully contained experience. Duck Detective could easily turn into an episodic franchise, like a TV detective series, with the duck solving a bunch of crimes. Happy Broccoli Games has of course given no indication that this is the case, but let’s hope.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami was released on May 23 on Nintendo Switch, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on a Steam Deck using a download code provided by Happy Broccoli Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You may additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.