Duck Detective: The Secret Salami

A charming premise executed with real craft

There's an inherent, disarming silliness to the premise of Duck Detective: The Secret Salami — a hard-boiled noir detective story, played entirely straight in tone, starring an actual duck. Happy Broccoli Games leans into that tension rather than undercutting it with constant jokes, and the result is a genuinely well-crafted short mystery: inspecting evidence transforms the game's art style into a different visual register for a moment, voice acting gives even minor characters real personality, and the whole package earned solidly positive reviews from critics, 76 to 80 across Metacritic's platform-specific scores. Steam's own massive player base agrees just as strongly, Very Positive at 94.6% across more than 6,100 reviews — numbers that put it comfortably among 2024's better-received small indies.

What the acclaim gets right

Presentation is where the game earns its reputation without much dispute. The specific transition effect used when zooming in on a piece of evidence — the art shifting into a different style for that closer look — is singled out across nearly every review this piece drew from, positive or negative, as a genuinely clever piece of visual design rather than a gimmick. Voice acting draws the same consistent credit, giving the small cast real warmth in the limited time the story spends with each of them. And the central "de-duck-tion" mechanic, filling in blanks about suspects and motives from gathered evidence, lands as charming rather than merely cute — critics and players alike credit the writing with actually committing to its own premise rather than treating the duck angle as a one-note joke.

The complaint that shows up almost everywhere

What a large, consistent slice of detailed reviews land on instead is how little content sits underneath that presentation. A typical playthrough runs somewhere between one and two hours for a single case, and global Steam achievement data backs this up in a genuinely striking way: even the rarest tracked achievement in the entire game sits at 46.4% completion — an extraordinarily high floor compared to almost any other game, confirming that a huge share of buyers simply finish everything the game offers in one sitting. Several reviewers explicitly frame this as feeling like "a prologue" or a demo for a longer game rather than a complete product, and multiple detailed reviews specifically invoke Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol — two of the deduction-puzzle genre's most demanding and acclaimed examples — as the standard Duck Detective invites comparison to and doesn't come close to matching in depth.

That comparison sharpens into a more specific critique of the puzzle logic itself. Rather than requiring the layered, cross-referenced inference those genre peers demand, several reviewers describe Duck Detective's deductions as frequently solvable from a single, obvious piece of evidence handed to the player directly. One specific example circulated among multiple reviewers as emblematic of the problem: concluding a character is a "hard-working family man" because of a stain on his shirt, or "disrespectful" for standing outside with his hands in his pockets on a cold day — logic that reads as arbitrary rather than a genuinely earned deduction a careful player pieced together themselves.

The sequel didn't expand the format

Worth noting for anyone weighing whether to wait for more: Happy Broccoli Games released a standalone sequel, Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping, about a year later, and it runs to a similar two-and-a-half-hour length. Reviews of that follow-up raise substantially the same length concern the original drew, with at least one describing it as feeling closer to a piece of DLC than a fully distinct sequel given how little the format has grown between entries. That's useful context for managing expectations: if you're hoping a second helping solves the "too short" complaint, the evidence so far suggests the studio is deliberately committed to this scale rather than treating it as something to expand.

A price that mostly matches the length, if not the depth

It's worth separating two distinct questions the negative reviews sometimes blur together: is this good value for money, and is this a satisfying deduction puzzler. On the first question, the honest answer is mostly yes — at NZ$14.75 for a one-to-two-hour experience, the price-per-hour math holds up reasonably well against plenty of other short indies, and several reviewers explicitly acknowledge this even while marking the game down. The sharper disappointment is really about expectations set by the genre it's borrowing its structure from: Obra Dinn and Golden Idol trained a specific audience to expect deduction puzzles as the main event, with presentation as a supporting layer, and Duck Detective largely inverts that relationship without necessarily telegraphing the swap clearly enough in its own marketing. Buyers who understand that going in are considerably more likely to walk away satisfied than those expecting the genre's usual depth wrapped in a cuter shell.

Verdict

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a genuinely charming, well-crafted short mystery that earns its critical praise on presentation, voice acting and a whimsical premise played with real conviction. Where it falls short of its own genre's best examples is depth: a single, straightforward case solvable in one sitting, deduction logic that several reviewers found too simple or genuinely arbitrary, and a sequel that didn't meaningfully expand the format when the opportunity arose. At its low asking price, treated as a short, funny palate-cleanser rather than a substantial puzzle experience, it delivers real value. Come in expecting Obra Dinn-level deduction, and the sizeable, consistent minority of disappointed reviewers have a fair point worth reading before you buy.