Last year’s Duck Detective: The Secret Salami was one of my highlights of the year. A wonderfully slim yet totally fulfilling 2-3 hour noir satire, the game offered just the right balance between quality humour, puzzles that were both puzzling and made you feel good about yourself, and the all-important quack button. Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping is more of the same. It’s not more than that, but it didn’t need to be.
The story picks up where the previous one left off. Eugene McQuacklin is still living through hard times, with his marriage failed and his bread addiction (you read that right) in bad need of an intervention. As luck would have it however, he’s about to “enjoy” a moment of respite, as his endlessly annoying housemate drags him to a campsite that… happens to be haunted. Apparently. It’s time for the detective to distract himself from his woes by getting to the bottom of it all.
If you did play the original Duck Detective, then know that this sequel does basically the same thing. If you didn’t, then look forward to some simple, but clever design. Across the length of the mystery, there are a series of “clues” to solve, and each of these is handled the same way: You’ll explore the various rooms that make up the office for clues, and then use those clues to fill out a statement that features a series of blank spaces. A simple example might be: “_______ is feeling sad today because ______ forgot their _______”, and you’d need to figure out, from a list of keywords you’d unlocked from exploring the environment, what those names, objects, and verbs in each statement is.
This never becomes overwhelming. Even the most complex puzzles will only challenge you to figure out a statement with seven or eight blanks across a little more than a dozen words. There’s a generous hint system (and an easy mode that makes it even easier), but even if you’re totally stuck, you can just input random words into the puzzle, and the game will tell you how many are incorrect, so you can trial-and-error your way to a conclusion with little detective effort. This is a game that was designed to entertain and to be finished, not to frustrate.
Even when you do get temporarily stuck and a little lost for what to do next, Duck Detective avoids being frustrating thanks to the good nature of the characters and art. This isn’t a game that takes itself serious, but it’s also not stupid for the sake of it. Every character is written sharply and performed brilliantly, resulting in a cast that Agatha Christie herself would find to be fun. This time around, you even have a sidekick (that aforementioned annoying classmate) who opens up some new puzzles to play through.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, that sidekick is really the extent of the new gameplay features. The Ghost of Glamping is more refined, and the puzzles are more interesting. The developers clearly continued to learn following the release of the first. But, releasing so close to the first while being so similar does raise some questions now: Would it not have been better to pack these games up into a single release?
I don’t mean because it would add to the run-time, either. But consider this: If the developers had have created a single game with several of these cases to solve, they would have also had the opportunity to link them together with an overarching plot and characters. Currently, we only really get to know Eugene McQuacklin and the others within the context of the cases that he solves. Aside from a tiny bookend on either side, we don’t get a chance to really see him shine as a character. When it was just one Duck Detective title, this wasn’t such an issue, but now that we have two and the continuity of the same detective between them, I’m down the rabbit hole and want the developers to go full Raymond Chandler with the characterisation.
Who knows? Perhaps something like that is down the track, and the developers are building to it. It’s hard to shake the feeling that they’re just getting started with what they can achieve with this little series. All in all, the original Duck Detective was a wholesome, entertaining, totally charming bit of brilliance, and this stand-alone sequel does it justice.
