Duck Detective: The Secret Salami - Switch Review

Alex Harding -

With soulslikes, roguelites and metroidvanias seemingly releasing every other week, it's easy for our relaxing past time to turn into another stressful activity in our daily lives. That's why games like Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is so welcome these days. Being able to relax with a game that features a duck solving silly office squabbles, to a point where it gets ludicrously out of hand (wait, ducks don't have hands... uhh, webbed feet?).

The Good

The titular duck detective fits the cliché to a T; a newly divorced, shamed former police officer is down on two things: luck and rent money. Its setting and tone perfectly encapsulate classic film noir in a satirically comical manner. There are also an abundance of puns; you get to make deducktions! In addition, every line of dialogue is fully voice acted, and it's all wonderfully delivered. This helps with the characters quirks and personalities, it brings it all to life in a way that just wouldn't have been the same without it.

You'll find clues highlighted throughout the scenes, allowing you to fill in word gaps to solve puzzles. You'll find seemingly unrelated words with your trusty magnifying glass and detective abilities, as all great detectives do! It's not exactly difficult, but it is adorable and fun.

There is a great use of hints that don't give away too much and make things too easy. You can solve puzzles by moving words around, with it cryptically saying whether you're on the right track, as well as the map showing rooms where you still have clues to uncover.

TL;DR

  • Wonderfully quirky
  • Fun detective gameplay
  • A hint system that doesn't giveaway too much

The Bad

A lot of deducktion-solving came about through trial and error. Many of the answers are a real stretch and after exhausting all possible answers you'd think it might be, it then comes down to simply selecting random answers to fill in the remaining gaps (or at least it did for me).

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is unfortunately a bit short for how wonderfully charming it is. About 90% of the game is set inside the one office building, and while you unlock a couple of rooms throughout the game, it's six small rooms in total and they all look pretty similar.

Hovering over clues sometimes takes a while for things to show up, despite hovering over them previously multiple times. There were many times where I just opted to wildly fling my magnifying around the screen until the game decided I'd spotted something.

TL;DR

  • A lot of trial and error problem solving
  • A bit short
  • Hovering over clues can be cumbersome

Final Score: 8/10

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a fun little quirky time that can fill a single evening with ear-to-ear smiling joy. Admittedly, having a series of individual cases would've provided it with more longevity; perhaps in a sequel. And what a sequel that would be; this game made me smile more than any game has managed to do this year, and that is worth the price of admission many times over.

Thank you for checking out our Duck Detective: The Secret Salami Switch review, thank you to HappyBroccoliGames (via Future Friends) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support: