"The stained carpets and peeling wallpaper exuded a stench of stale coffee and abandoned dreams."

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a mystery adventure game developed and published by Happy Broccoli Games.

Story
In Duck Detective: The Secret Salami you play as titular private investigator Eugene McQuacklin, who gets a case of solving the salami theft from local office. But as he soon will find out, there is more to it than it meets the eye...

Gameplay
It doesn't take a detective to figure out core gameplay is all about solving a meaty mystery by using wits, charm, and duck-related puns! With isometric camera you control our hero as he investigates, questions, and deducts to solve puzzles and progress in the case.

At the start you will get a very simple tutorial to let you get familiar with game mechanics before you dust off the fedora. First off, interracting! Whenever you find an item you can interract with, you can get a closer look and using a trusty magnifying glass find details that can help you out later. Same applies to characters you encounter across the game, and it's worth to chat with them later on about items you may have collected or about discovered information, as they might shed some new light on your investigation.

All the information you gathered is collected in Eugene's notebook. Here you will check possible suspects and what you know about them, important items collected and investigated, plus de-duck-tion menu. To progress in Duck Detective you have to solve puzzles in the form of phrasal templates, where you select correct words to fill up the gaps. Those you can get from previously mentioned investigation work. Then just pick all correct ones and voila, our detective is one step closer to cracking, or quacking? The case! Because templates often contain multiple slots to fill in, to give you some sort of help game mentions how many chosen words you picked are correct, but which are the correct ones you have to guess on your own.

If at any point you will get lost or stuck because finding justice ain't a swim in the pond, game provides help in form of hints to put you back on the right track!

Playtime and replayability
It takes 2-3 hours to complete this quacking case. It's a short and linear title, so it's more of a "one-and-done" type of a game you enjoy on a chilly day (or night).

Impressions
Duck Detective is a fantastic little game. I must admit it had surprising amount of head scratchers where I got stuck for a brief moment, but game does provide helpful hints in such case, making investigations a well made and enjoyable part of the game. There is great humour in animal related puns, mainly related to ducks due obvious main protagonist reasons that makes backtracking between very few areas of the game to get more clues fun. Charming artstyle, especially paper cutout characters is just lovely! As per tradition, smooth jazz soundtrack plays along your detective journey, and fantastic voice acting really shines, it has just the right amount of overexaggeration to balance the thin line between seriousness of the matter and lighthearted tone of the game, possibly my favourite aspect of them all.

Unfortunately game is quite short, so once you fully get into it, it ends, leaving you craving more of Duck Detective. Though I say cheap price and quality of what game has to offer does recompensate for said "issue". Ultimately I had short but wonderful time with Duck Detective, and I cannot recommend it enough!

Final words and conclusion
You can buy Soundtrack DLC to further support the developers!

A parody of hardboiled detective done right. Duck Detective is charming, funny and entertaining in all the right ways even if short in lenght. Worth every bread!

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