There’s an endearing quality in Duck Side of the Moon that unlocked an old memory of mine of my sister. She was several years older than me, and at one point in our childhood, amidst the Lisa Frank notebooks and well-fed Tamagotchi (hers never died), I remember there being a day in which she ceremoniously decorated the ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars. This happened some time in the morning, and I begged her throughout the course of the day to turn the lights off so I could see the room in the soft light of the stars.
When night finally rolled around, she assented and let me enter her bedroom and hit the light switch. Walls melted away immediately in the green glow of celestial orbs. I felt I was in space, bouncing on her bed, likely to her annoyance, and feeling freedom in the air.
Once she was ready to kick out her little brother, I started to notice small imperfections as my eyes adjusted to the dark. Furniture silhouettes gained mass, as did book spines, as their titles came back into view. But I didn’t want to return to reality. I’d rather continue pretending to be in space.
Such was my experience throughout my playtime in Duck Side of the Moon, as it kept reminding me of these types of memories. It’s a game hatched from a student project that has grown into a spectacle. Swirled in pleasant purples and inhabited with rock-like aliens, it’s a cozy collectathon in which you star as Doug, a duck on a mission. The goal is to find a new homeworld. You crash into a planet, and your dismissive assistant Chippy, the primary voice for exposition, instructs you on how to repair the ship and continue your journey.
It’s enough to get you going. The scattered bits of planet and the residents you get to know will engage you the most. You’ll start by meeting Billy, a tinkerer who manages to create things with explosive ends. He’s got a master plan to dislodge your ship and help you move along, which chains into you meeting someone else, who has a part, and you get the general idea. It snowballs from there, and by the game’s end in two or three hours, you’ve become acquainted with a fun cast of lovable rock friends. You’ll need to rely on them in order to continue your mission, and they need you to restore some broken down areas in their home too.
Yes, you’re correct: Duck Side of the Moon sounds like a children’s version of Project Hail Mary. There’s no Ryan Gosling, although his surname would have made for a great pun somewhere, but instead it relies on its own charm as you get to know and help out your new alien friends. Of course, it has its differences. The protagonist being a duck is a dead giveaway. One of its delights as a video game is how it feels to fly in space.
This was the true joy for me. There’s no stamina bar. It’s just you and space. You float from rock to rock, collecting and fetching items and returning them to their owners. The feel here is immaculate. Being able to disengage and reengage gravity at will and waddle, hop, and glide your way around each map could alone be its own game. It’s immediately intuitive and enjoyable, and it makes for breezy play, going from quest to quest, using your tools to mine materials or collecting bolts to repair your spaceship and prepare it for takeoff.
As alluded to with the two- to three-hour run time, Duck Side of the Moon is short. I think that even serious collection enthusiasts will be able to exhaust all the side quests and maximize their abilities in under five hours. This isn’t a problem, as the game is designed with density in mind over an extensive experience.
For the story it aims to tell, this is where maybe the cracks of light poke through a dark room. The game shares critiques on burnout, which are largely underdeveloped, alongside a narrative on found family and where home is. The two aren’t at odds with each other, but the latter is handled in a much more concise way that lands more gracefully than the former. The impression is that the added themes on burnout were made to give the game a more mature, cozy feel, rather than be branded as a kid’s game. I’m speculating here, but the former certainly comes across as pasted on rather than baked into the foundation of the game’s trajectory.
