Playing A Game Duck Detective: The Secret Salami PC

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is a cute, short, fun little detective story.

Its dialog - including voice acting! - is surprisingly well done; Detective Eugene McQuacklin is a pitch-perfect satire of hard-boiled noir, and the game's script is dense with amusing details. (Investigating suspects' computer screens is always good for a laugh, as you read through their browsing history and their silly text messages.)

And the art style is pretty dang adorable, with Paper Mario-esque cutout characters hopping delightfully around the crime scene.

The hint-collecting and mystery-solving gameplay is mostly good. Duck Detective does well at teasing its story as you gather clues and solve simple puzzles -- although some of the "deducktion" prompts simply require you to guess until it says you're right, and feel like jumping to conclusions rather than deducing them.

But hey, you're just a duck. Maybe I'm overthinking it.

The game is unambiguously brief: after a short tutorial, "The Secret Salami" is its one and only case, and you can solve it inside of 2 hours.

It moves swiftly, though, and is polished enough that those 2 hours are a real treat.

Better than: Detective Grimoire: Secret of the Swamp, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice: Phoenix Wright - Asinine Attorney
Not as good as: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (NDS)
May leave you wanting more: and there is! McQuacklin's story continues in Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping.

Rating: Good