Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, developed and published by Happy Broccoli Games, released 2024
i'll be the first to say that noir detective media doesn't really do it for me. i'm not really into the trope of the "hard-boiled detective" and the edgy/scandalous affairs he (intentionally using the pronoun he because 99% of all noir detectives are male) engages with while on or off the case. it's overplayed, overdone, and usually hypermasculine in the worst ways.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a parody of the hard-boiled noir detective, instead playing up how silly it is that Duck Detective plays everything so straight and serious when the situation he's faced with is decidedly not serious at all. it's a mystery in a call center. and there's some illegal salami. wowza
a quick summary since i think this is a game you should play yourself
this game is fairly short and not really intensive in the mystery solving department so i genuinely recommend you pick up this game if its of any interest to you. if that's not your speed, i'll quickly run through the events of the game without giving too many story spoilers.
Duck Detective, down on his luck, divorced, and short on rent takes a case that takes place at a call center for the city's(? country's?) bus line, Bear Bus. when he arrives he doesn't even know who his client is! he does learn that the case is surrounding the theft of a lunch from the kitchen, and everyone seems to suspect that the alligator, Freddy, is the one to blame for it. the guy has bus autism leave him alone.
Duck Detective does eventually learn that the CS rep Laura was the one who called him in. it's also Sophie the giraffe's birthday and she's sad that everyone forgot it, but it's clear that everyone's planning a surprise party for her.
Freddy is being framed for the theft of the food and the lunches by the "Salami Bandit" since he picked up the wrong bag (full of salami) from the bus when he returned to the call center. The Salami Bandit is smuggling salami into the country because meat is prohibited from crossing the border.
At the surprise party, one of Sophie's presents gets stolen and replaced with salami, seemingly implicating Freddy further. Duck Detective has no choice but to delve into the secrets of each employee of Bear Bus in order to suss out who could be the Salami Bandit.
Duck Detective learns that the salami present was intentional, nothing was stolen or swapped. The salami present contained the message "be quiet or else", warning Sophie to shut up about something she knows. he tries to talk to the whole office but no one seems to really care about what's going on and Sophie apparently has left a resignation letter on her desk and disappeared.
Duck Detective opens the safe in the boss's, Manfred, office and finds a note that matches the handwriting of all the Salami Bandit notes but also a note of blackmail. after investigating the sever room, Duck Detective finds that Rufus, the maintenance person, and Margaret, a customer sales rep, are conspiring together to sell bus vouchers. a completely unrelated crime.
Duck Detective figures out that Sophie was kidnapped by the Salami Bandit, who turns out to be Manfred, with Sophie as an accomplice. Boris, the bus driver, was convinced into being an accomplice too, due to he and Sophie dating. Duck Detective also figures out that Sophie's being kept in the storage hold of one the buses and goes to rescue her.
the still image cutscenes for this game are well illustrated and pretty cute
in the rainy parking lot, Duck Detective reveals it all, Bear Bus's profits were going down and so Manfred got into salami smuggling and roped Boris and Sophie into helping him. Sophie wanted to report what she knew to the police and in order to shut her up, Manfred kidnapped her and stowed her in a bus.
you get to pick the ending of the game, where you can suggest who should be arrested for the crime: Manfred, Sophie, or Boris, or any combination of the three being found guilty or not. your ending changes only slightly depending on this choice.
there is a little post-credits scene where Duck Detective needs a ride home and Freddy, who has been fawning over him all day, offers to give him one. Duck Detective reluctantly gets in the car with the detective fanboy and they go on their merry way.
how the game plays
in my own observation, people compare this game a lot to The Case of the Golden Idol, where in your notebook you get keywords and character names and you have to fill out a sheet that describes the deduction that Duck Detective is trying to make. it is far simpler, with not as many blanks you need to fill in, and you only unlock new mad-libs pages whenever you advance in the plot.
additionally, clues and people can be examined closer with a magnifying glass, revealing a more detailed piece of art than the one you're initially presented about the object or person. i think it creates a fun mechanic since you're only provided a small amount of information at a time, even if it can feel like a bit of a pixel hunt. Duck Detective then provides you keywords and implications about the things you see from these observations.
there is also an available hint mechanic where Duck Detective will go over the information that's currently available to hopefully help to lead you in the right direction. i tried to not use this mechanic because i wanted to figure everything out myself, and also felt a little patronized by the notebook deductions suggesting i use it when i got my answers wrong too many times.
while based on other detective game mechanics, their use in this game is effective since it's a very story-forward type of game. on top of that, there is a separate mode for a more story-like approach to the game rather than a mystery one when you start a new game. the easier mode says it will provide you with more information when you're incorrect in your notebook deductions (and you can change this setting whenever you want if you get stuck at certain parts of the game).
review and analysis
this game is pretty short, i think i finished it in about 2ish hours and i was pretty thorough with my investigation and got stuck in a few places. i don't think it needs to be any longer than that, it's a really polished experience with full voice acting, cute animations and environments, and humorous writing.
the humor in this game and the tropes it plays on are entertaining, plus there are plenty of duck puns. they never felt grating, just a more of an understanding "oh, you" whenever it fell hard into one of the things it was trying to parody. this game doesn't take itself very seriously, which maybe makes the seriousness of the crimes being committed funny as well? like the initial introduction to the game is a stolen lunch, but then you uncover that there's blackmail and smuggling and a kidnapping occurs! those are some pretty heft crimes lurking under the surface of a seemingly innocent case about a theft.
i think that depth of the secrets of the Bear Bus call center is what makes this mystery really enjoyable. you keep finding layers to pull back until you realize this isn't so silly, there is a dark core to the events that you are trying to unravel.
i really enjoyed this game both as a detective game lover and a funny little animal enjoyer. i would heartily recommend this game to anyone if they were looking for a low stakes, entry level type game into the detective game genre. like if i had a hard time recommending Case of the Golden Idol to someone because the cases might be too difficult for them or they wouldn't enjoy the content, i'd jump to Duck Detective as something comparable but much more streamlined, easier to figure out, and tonally a lot more light.
anything else?
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is available on Steam, GOG (where i got it), Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.
i hope that Happy Broccoli Games makes more games like this in the future, either in the Duck Detective series or with some other kind of mystery solving adventure since they've shown they can make a pretty effective mystery! HBG has a previous game, Kraken Academy, which is a game about a kid going to a new (weird) school and engaging in some groundhog day-like events. the game has some stylish character art and animations that appeared in its trailer so i might check it out eventually, but you won't hear about it on this blog.