Dani is really looking forward to the release of a little detective game. She’ll tell you why you should definitely try the Steam demo of Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping.
My name is Eugene and I’m a duck. My ex-wife won’t return my calls. My room is a mess of trash and stale toast. And my loveless roommate is dragging me to a campsite. Life is hard. Fortunately, it’s supposed to be haunted, so I’ll have something better to do than watch him and his new girlfriend make out…
Duck Detective is just wonderful. Right now, this eerily charming puzzle-adventure fits perfectly into my life: It makes me laugh at a time when the terrible news in the real world is coming at me in waves. And it’s short and simple enough to play in between long sessions of Kingdom Come.
What is Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping?
Stylistically confident cartoon graphics meet straightforward gameplay and make it one of the coolest indie games in recent years. It’s not for nothing that The Secret Salami, the first case of the down-and-out detective, has 95 percent positive user reviews on Steam
I control a duck wearing a magnifying glass and a hat (and yes, you can quack at any time), always on the lookout for puzzles to solve. Why said ex-wife no longer contacts me, for example. Or whether my roommate is possibly planning to kill me on a deadly roller coaster. To do this, I collect terms and names that I then insert into a cloze text. Simple, but ingenious.
Of course, I can be wrong about that, which sometimes results in hilarious dialogue. The fantastically scored conversations (English with German subtitles) are my highlight anyway. Duck Detective was inspired by the popular anime series Aggretsuko and it shows.
The Duck Detective has a penchant for melodrama, which is underscored by appropriate noir jazz sounds in many scenes.Since Disco Elysium, no decrepit investigator has enchanted me as much as this beak-head!
I particularly enjoy the little physics interactions that keep happening to me by accident. I run into a trash can and crumpled paper rolls out with a rustling sound. Metal balls clatter, pens roll onto the floor. I love little things like that that make the environment a little more lively.
You don’t need any knowledge from the first game, you can also get started with the demo of The Ghost of Glamping. Eugene’s first case takes about two to three hours to play, and I suspect that will be the case with part 2 as well.A release date has not yet been set, but it should be sometime in 2025 So not too far from ENT.
Okay, that one was lame.
ENT-schuldigung.
Editor’s conclusion
Games like Duck Detective warm my heart. A witty idea, smartly implemented within the naturally limited budget. It’s great that part 1 was apparently successful enough to finance another case. I would play a new adventure with Eugene and his friends every year!
The setting also reminds me pleasantly of the world’s best animated series, Gravity Falls. Maybe some of you remember the fictional show Duck-tective that appears in it? I often wished that it would come as a spin-off, but hey, now I have something very similar in game form. Also good!
