The team behind the Tiny Game Chronicles podcast takes a look at a game they covered in a previous month’s episode. For June Marcus delves into Duck Detective: A Secret Salami by following their usual podcast format. Subscribe to The Tiny Game Chronicles podcast for their fortnightly episodes on short-form video games, and please make sure to check out the accompanying episode to this article on Duck Detective: A Secret Salami.
Happy Broccoli Games’ 2024 debut title, Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, was a game we’d had on our radar since the inception of Tiny Game Chronicles. It’s thought of quite highly by many in our community, and we were excited to finally jump in last month to see if The Secret Salami lived up to the hype.
In The Secret Salami, you play as Eugene McQuaklin, a down on his luck private eye detective with an insatiable bread addiction. It’s a lighthearted take on the detective noir genre that begins with Eugene being called to a bus station to investigate a stolen lunch from the breakroom. He soon realizes there is much more going on than the simple theft of a sandwich and must uncover a larger conspiracy involving the Salami Bandit. In typical detective game fashion the gameplay involves exploring the environment and speaking to characters to gather clues. These clues are used to solve roughly a dozen fill-in-the-blank sentence puzzles by the game’s end.
High-Level Thoughts
It didn’t take me long to realize I was going to struggle with the puzzles in The Secret Salami. In the opening scene, I found myself wandering around our protagonist’s office, re-checking the clues I’d discovered, feeling certain I’d missed something obvious. Turns out I hadn’t missed anything; rather, it was more an issue with how my brain seems to struggle processing the ‘use items in your inventory-style puzzles’ common to the genre. And unfortunately, it was an experience I’d return to on many occasions during The Secret Salami’s roughly 2.5-hour runtime. But in fairness to the game, this is mostly a “me issue.” And despite this being a game that frustrated me at times, there’s still a lot to like (and discuss!) about this bite-sized whodunnit adventure.
Duck Detective Standouts
The first thing that stands out straight away about The Secret Salami is the Paper Mario-esque art designs of the characters. They’re bright and cheery and feel like you could almost peel them right off your screen to put them into a sticker book. There’s, of course, the aforementioned Eugene, complete with his stereotypical detective hat and trench coat, but there’s also a literal zoo of characters found among the employees of the BearBus company. My personal favourite was Freddy Frederson, an anxious alligator working in operations, who also happens to be a Eugene superfan. Freddy’s beady eyes and short-sleeved shirt and tie give off some real Dwight Schrute energy.
But these colourful designs belie some surprising visual depth to the entire cast. Throughout your investigations you are sometimes asked to examine the characters with your trusty magnifying glass. Doing so illuminates small details, not just in the character models but also elements that speak to the character’s backstories. It’s a nice metaphor illustrating that there’s usually more to someone once you’ve dug a little deeper.
The second standout was the game’s humour. As the title suggests, expect a heavy dose of absurdity in The Secret Salami. It’s not quite a full-on mockumentary of the detective noir genre, but the shades are there. This isn’t to say there aren’t some traditional crimes you’re tasked with solving, but the seriousness with which our characters tackle even the most mundane infractions was hard not to smile at. Plus, there are plenty of duck puns!
This comedy would not have worked nearly as well if not for the fully voice-acted cast. Lines have an almost stage play-like extravagance in their delivery. Full marks to Sean Chiplock, who voices Eugene like a self-deprecating Sherlock Holmes. Lizzie Freeman, who plays Laura Angst, the neurotic customer service representative, was also hilarious.
The final standout was the main gameplay mechanic in the game: the Deducktion System. However, unlike our first two standouts, this was largely a negative one for me. As Eugene, you explore your environment, talking with the other characters and interacting with various items around the BearBus station. As you do this, you gather information about a particular mystery you’re working on. As the loop continues, you’re adding key words to your inventory that are used to solve fill-in-the-blank puzzles. On paper, it’s an interesting take on a more traditional point-and-click adventure, but too often I found myself struggling to even know the intent of the incomplete sentence. A conversation log would have been a huge help here. It would have made it so much easier for me to be able to review what I had already gathered in one place rather than trying to remember the details of a conversation I’d had 20 minutes prior. And because you’re always juggling more than one mystery at a time, it’s easy to get those details mixed up.
It’s obvious the developers knew they needed to provide players some feedback while they were attempting to solve the word puzzles, but what they settled on feels like a half measure. With every attempt you are notified how many of the words you’ve placed are incorrect. For example, if a sentence required you to fill in 6 blanks, it might tell you that you still have 3 words wrong, but it doesn’t tell you which ones. This helps to prevent brute-forcing your way through the word puzzles, but for a player like me, it mostly just led to frustration. Often I felt that I was very close to solving the puzzle, but I’d tried every solution that made sense. It made me question some word choices I knew were correct, which began this cycle of swapping words in and out at random, often leaving me further from the solution than when I’d started. A few times I just gave up and watched a YouTube video to find the answer. I do wonder how much of my annoyance could have been alleviated had the game simply locked in words when they were put in the correct spot.
I should note that the game has two difficulty options when you start—normal and easy. I played on normal and haven’t gone back to check out the easy difficulty, so it’s possible some (or all) of my quibbles are addressed in that mode.
Who Do I Recommend This To?
Despite my frustrations, I think The Secret Salami is a pretty easy recommendation for most players. It’s charming, funny, has great voice acting, and did not overstay its welcome. If, like me, you’re someone who struggles with the types of puzzles found here, you can probably safely pass, but even at that there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.
