Duck Detective: The Secret Salami Review

Such a lovely detective game in which you solve the crime of the stolen lunch… Fully voice-acted and so well-done. Takes around 2,5 hours and has 1 missable achievement.. just kick every bin you see.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 2,5h without a guide
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: There are guides on Steam with the solution. However, you still have to find the clues yourself.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Probably the one to kick over all the bins. However, you spend almost the whole game in that building, so as long as you do it before solving the last puzzle you’re fine.
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: I think that you can play on story mode without missing out on the achievements, but I didn’t test this.
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

What a lovely game. It is such a delight! It reminds me a lot of “Frog Detective’ but with some mechanics of “Obra Dinn” added and as an extra treat, the game is fully voice-acted.

You (Duck Detective) get hired to solve the mystery of the stolen lunch, however… there is much more going on at the company you visit to solve this game. It has a button to quack and it the loading screens are short, but when they are there, they will throw funny duck facts at you.

Duck Detective is so well done. I love how you could see how many clues to find for each objective/person. This stopped me from overthinking it when it wasn’t needed. It was also nice to see that the game kinda tells you when you have enough clues to solve part of the mystery. I suck at this type of game but this one was just great with a wonderful production.

What was a lovely surprise is that at the end of the game, it tells you how others judged the characters in the game, which was nice to see, and while I voted differently, I can totally understand the scores at the end.

Achievement-wise this game has only one missable achievement, which you can complete almost the whole time you play this game as long as you don’t fill in the final solution. That achievement is for kicking the bins in the BearBus Office. There are 9 bins (the one in your own office you can kick over but doesn’t count). All the other achievements are story-based and can’t be missed.

I give Duck Detective: The Secret Salami 4,5 out of 5 stars and I hope we will see sequels in the Duck Detective series!

This review for Duck Detective: The Secret Salami was written on 27 May 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 7 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.