Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping - Review
I had not played the previous game, The Cost of Salami, so I jumped into this adventure game without prior experience and expectations. It’s a fairly straightforward game. You play as the Duck Detective and you have to solve mysteries, find culprits, and decide who goes to jail in the end!
It’s a 2D game, with a cartoon look, and all characters appear as flat elements who jump around over an isometric background.
Point, Click, and Guess
You get clues by clicking on objects around, and talking to people, and observing objects very closely with a looking glass.
Before you can move to a next scene, you usually have to solve a riddle, and this is where Duck Detective is somewhat original. You are given a few sentences where some expressions are redacted, and you need to fill in the right words of character names to fill in the blanks correctly. You don’t type anything, you take the expressions and names from the clues you have collected. Since there’s quite a few combinations possible, they give you some hints to get there, as well as an indicator to let you know if you are on the right path (more than 3 elements are wrong, for example), to make sure you make some progress.
A VERY short story
After a short introduction you end up in the main set of the action, a luxury campsite where a crime has taken place; an item from one of the guests has been stolen, and you are on your way to find the culprit. To do so, you need to unveil everyone’s prior story at the camp. You will soon discover that while most characters at the scene appear at first to be completely unrelated to each other’s, surprising ties actually exist between most of them - and this is where the insights behind the theft lie.
Add to that a haunted manor, and some superstition, and you are given a fairly diverse campsite to work with. None of the intermediate goals or mysteries are too difficult to solve: it requires some back and forth between the different places of the campsite, dialogs, to get there.
What surprised me the most is to see the end credits so fast. I think I beat the game in less than 2 hours, and this felt like I was just done with the introduction by the time the credits rolled. I am so used to games like Ace Attorney where you get hugely more mileage out of a title (dozens of hours!).
This felt way, way too short to be satisfying. And that’s a shame, because the experience is fun, the artwork is cute, and the story was reasonable (nothing amazing though). Even though it’s priced at under 10 dollars on Steam, this is roughly the same price as what the Ace Atttorney trilogy goes for (when on sale, and it’s frequently on sale), and if you have never played Ace Attorney it’s a much better game and much longer one (pronbably more than a hundred hours in the trilogy!) at this price point. If you have done many games in the same genre, I can only recommend Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping if you are fully aware that it’s a very, very short game when going for it.
As a side note, the game is Verified on the Steam Deck, and works very well with the Deck screen and controls. The performance is great even at small TDP settings.
The game is available on Steam, and we have received a key from the publisher for this review.