Grade: B–
It’s a duck, except he’s a detective. Or a detective, except he’s a duck. Anyway he wears a fedora, seems depressed, quacks wise, and eats too much bread – so we can leave the rest to the philosophers. In this sequel to Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (who knew the world needed two such games?) this pleasingly drawn cartoon hero navigates a series of locations solving puzzles.
Reminded me a lot of the 1990s. Fancy the funny-animal thing still going strong all these years after Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters I was about to write, but then I remembered Aesop. Likewise old-school point-and-click adventures, though now they’re swipe-and-tap adventures, so that’s progress of a sort.
Anyway, it’s set on a campsite, or glampsite if you will. You have a neurotic best friend who is a crocodile, and your first job is to deduce who his new girlfriend is rather than just, y’know, ask him. There’s an uptight beaver, an even more uptight goat (or capybara or something), and all manner of not especially dark, or especially secret, secrets.
The gameplay is much as expected. You track around clicking on everything clickable to collect clues, and you interrogate and re-interrogate a small pool of suspects. There’s a nice bit of business with a magnifying glass, and clues come in the form of keywords you slot into gaps in sentences for your – wince – deducktions to complete each section.
Amiable enough. It’ll beguile a medium-sized train journey on an iPad, while also allowing you to wonder if this is what Prometheus will have had in mind when he stole fire from the gods.
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