Duck Detective: The Secret Salami ★★★★☆

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, teaching us to always label our food.

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami and every other video linked to it can be seen on our Patreon, and if you’re wanting to know what other games we’ve played and have posts for, here’s our list of current games.

• Adventure
• Casual
• Family Friendly
• Hand-drawn
• Indie
• Mystery
• Point & Click
• Puzzle
• Singleplayer

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Not Now Mom Podcast Transcript

This is the transcript of our podcast episode for Duck Detective: The Secret Salami on Not Now Mom, I’m Gaming.

All links within this section do not pertain to the game itself, and don’t need to be clicked. They are affiliate links that take you to random products I think are interesting.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Not Now Mom, I’m Gaming.

[music]

My name is Kay and on this episode we’ll be talking about Duck Detective: The Secret Salami. And normally in these podcast reviews, I play the game out while recording it and go back over the footage to talk about certain areas, but this time, I went ahead and wrote out the review as I played the game.

I don’t imagine this will be easy to do for every game since this one has a go-at-your-own-pace vibe to it and action games half the time just won’t let you catch your breath to write something down until a certain point, or if you constantly pause.

Which hey, I might just do in later games, who knows.

But this game has been on my wishlist for not too long, but long enough that I wanted to give it a try once the Steam Sale came chugging along offering to take my money for games I didn’t need.

Why not add to my hoard.

Which is exactly what I did, and I have no regrets. Hopefully you don’t either as you listen to me banter about the game.

The blurb for Duck Detective: The Secret Salami states this:

Aggretsuko meets Return of the Obra Dinn in Duck Detective, a cozy mystery game about a down-on-his-luck duck searching for answers in a sinister sausage-based conspiracy.

Due to this game being fully voiced, I’ll keep those sections in, but pull the other portions out until I have something worth mentioning.

Let’s get into the gameplay review.

The title screen is what you would expect a detective’s office to look like.

The messy desk, no organization to any of the paperwork stacked and scattered about, even though there are cabinets for that purpose. A plant that’s dying because who can bother with watering a plant when we have a board of connected evidence to mull over. Plus, there’s that piece of bread that’s hardened over the hours of us forgetting it’s even there.

Here’s the jazzy detective tune to listen to, by the way.

[jazzy detective tune]

I think the only thing I’m a little disappointed with here is there’s nothing really ducky about the room.

Aside from the cursor which is a green duck foot. I had to lean in to look at it to make sure because I honestly thought it was a piece of lettuce at first. But no. It’s a duck foot.

The options menu has three categories: General, Video, and Audio.

For the general, there’s a Story Mode, but I don’t know what that is or how it changes the game. I kind of wish they put a little description of it somewhere when you hover over it, but they didn’t. Just know that for this gameplay review I had it set to off.

They also have a dyslexic font option, which makes the text size a little bit smaller when on.

Honestly, I kept it off because the smaller text was going to mess with me and I’m not dyslexic. Also, does the text really matter? I thought words kind of became jumbled no matter what.

Everything else in the options is self-explanatory.

Oh, another little fun thing they did with the title screen menu is when you mouse over the options, they have a bar around them that are different colors, depending what you’re mousing over, which doesn’t really serve much of a purpose, but hey, it looks nice, and is fun to hover over all the options to switch the colors.

All right, let’s get on with the actual new game.

It brings up the pop-up if you’d like the dialogue to auto-advance, and I’m going to say no, because I like to read at my pace, and I’m not a huge fan of games that has characters conversing without you giving a click to continue, because sometimes you might look away from the screen and miss some information.

So no auto-advancing for me.

After that, the game does tell you the difference between detective mode and story mode. Basically, story mode makes it a bit easier for when you get things wrong and detective mode is less helpful in regards to incorrect information.

I’m going detective mode, but it’s a choice that can be altered at any point in the options menu.

All right, this game is actually voice-acted which makes the auto-advance to the dialogue perfectly acceptable to me, but I don’t know if all of it is voice acted or certain scenes, so that’s something to be mindful of.

The VA has the voice of a good detective though.

Can’t wait to make him a bad detective after saying that.

Our first case is figuring out where our money went and this is where “Deducktions” comes in. Nice play on words. We can either investigate our surroundings or speak to people in order to find clues that will slide into view. Once we have enough of the clue words, we can add them into blank spaces of our Deducktions journal.

I like the concept.

I also like that it’ll tell you if it doesn’t look right at the bottom.

So for now, we have the Deducktions for The Nest Egg 1/5, and the only word we have for it is rent. The information we need on the right says: [blank] spent his/her last money on [blank] for [blank].

Fairly easy.

And as part of our journal we also have tabs for Suspects, Inventory, and Map.

It seems like Ana filed for divorce, and judging by her picture on the bulletin board…I’d say she looks like an ostrich. They always did seem a little uppity to me. Maybe he should’ve went with a swan.

Once you get all the clues, we’ll say so, another nice touch so you don’t keep going around looking for stuff, I guess, even though this room is small and it looks like most things you can interact with do have an icon near them that turns a different shade once investigated.

Okay, so after adding in some of the blanks with words, it did tell me 2 or fewer things were wrong, and even though there’s only three options, it does narrow it down.

It’s interesting to note that you can use the same keyword twice, like in this first one.

I was under the impression each word would only have one use, but that’s not the case.

I’ve never played a game of kind of cardboard cut-out characters, like with Paper Mario, but I have to say, I really like the style. I’ve been wanting to play some games like this, but just haven’t had the time yet. I have a long wishlist, you know.

Another fun fact is you don’t have to click to go certain places on the screen–I’m using a mouse and just hold down the left button in order to walk around wherever I want, which means I’m walking through every puddle, pile of leaves, and bottles I see.

The first character we run into is an angry koala.

Apparently the Bear Bus always runs late. Doesn’t every bus?

Holy crap the game told me there are over 1000 ducks on the transition screen.

The waiting area has a cute giraffe calendar that looks a whole lot happier than the actual giraffe receptionist, but it’s blank. There’s absolutely nothing going on in September. We can’t even remember the 5^th of September because it’s not on there.

All right, it turns out after speaking with the receptionist, we can interact with the calendar for some clues.

Guess I needed to be more patient and observant. Which is why I’m not a detective myself. Which is why Sherlock Holmes games trigger me.

On the table someone has had their mug stolen again and has made a very threatening complaint in the suggestions box about it.

It must be a nice mug. I bet the angry koala wrote it.

After gathering enough clues, I was able to deduce the next part of the investigation without a hitch, and then told Sophie happy birthday unlike all the other schmucks she works with.

Inside the next room, I think my favorite character so far is the croc–nope, it’s the cat. It’s definitely the cat.

We just now get our name, and while the first name isn’t all that impressive, our last name is.

McQuacklin.

There’s another step to our deducktions and that’s apparently called Pondering, which should give us new perspectives? I guess you just mull over the details of what you’ve gathered so far and talk yourself through it.

I can’t guess it right now, but I’m pretty sure the cat is Laura from her mindlessly tapping on the keyboard–one of the complaints in the suggestion box was in regards to her. I guess I do kind of like that you can’t just mindlessly guess names when you haven’t actually acquired any information around them yet.

After checking out the bulletin board by the croc who’s wearing some lame velcro shoes despite all the expensive salami he’s carrying in his pristine bag, I got my second achievement, which is Fits the Bill. The first one is Early Bird, gained from solving the first deducktions, and the second is completing 5 investigations.

Achievements that go along with the gameplay so far.

But you will need to go on a rampage with all the trash bins within the office to get one of the achievements that doesn’t exactly go with the  storyline.

But at least you get your frustrations out from Ana dumping and divorcing you over bread, right?

I’m pretty sure Ernst is using the cliche of a giant picture in order to hide a possible safe of some kind. How much you want to bet he’s hiding some porridge back there?

You know, three bears, that kind of thing?

When asking the croc if they know who sent us here, he requests us to sign our book we wrote, and who am I to say no to an adoring fan? Especially when apparently I’m flat broke and need someone to actually like me around here.

After speaking with everyone I could and figuring out all my little brain could, I went ahead and chose to Ponder.

All right, he doesn’t really give you a whole lot more to go on–more like reminders than anything else, and he did mention the map to figure out where everyone was and after looking at it, I noticed that Sophie had an explanation mark over her head so, I guess that’s one thing I may have missed so far.

After that, honestly, I took a wild guess on the croc’s name. Freddy Frederson.

Yeah, he looks like the name fits him.

Now’s the time to go into the kitchen, which should be the crime scene.

Okay, well the cook or baker or whatever seems to come on a bit strong with asking us some pretty potent questions that you probably shouldn’t ask a detective, but I’m going to go with the choice of teething turtles. Because if those are teething snapping turtles, it’s going to get gruesome up in here.

It wasn’t a story about snappers, much to my disappointment.

And Margaret’s.

I managed to snag the Rage Uncaged achievement in the kitchen. Can’t say I’m entirely fulfilled after knocking the bins over, but it’s a start.

I just want to say, the salami bandit has the gall to actually leave a note and sign it with “Salami Bandit.” Clearly they’re rubbing it in someone’s face.

All right, Margaret seemed a little over the top in her denial of not knowing what’s going on, but also, I just thought of it. Calling in a detective over a stolen lunch? I get it’s probably happened more than once, but geez, the amount of times people have taken someone’s lunch from the fridge at our factory, why not just put some laxatives in there and tell them to have at it?

You know, I haven’t mentioned it up to this point, but I love the noir type of color scheme when first entering an area and saying something about it, before everything gets color.

Adds a nice touch to the detective theme of the game.

I never thought about it before, but I guess a well-proportioned nose makes you a handsome buffalo in the animal world.

Boris was the last character to find the name of, and at that point, I got the achievement Ducks in a Row.

Okay, I had everyone names and all that, so now…I couldn’t figure out what I was doing.

I mean, I could try to brute force my way to finding out who the lunch thief was, but that’s not very fun, and I went into my Pondering state again, but it was kind of still the same information he’d said before.

Going into the journal, it looks like it does want me to solve the client’s case.

I just feel like right now there’s more open-ended things that I want to find out more of. Like Margaret’s password on her computer screen, what’s behind the big painting in the boss’s room, and what’s up with the gym clothes bag.

Maybe the bag is Freddy’s because he said the salamis were just there, that he didn’t buy them, so maybe his bad eyesight means that he took the wrong bag? Though he doesn’t really look like he works out, so maybe not.

If we think about it, the clawed handprint can only belong to Freddy, Laura, or Manfred, and I think we can cross Laura off the list because she’s a cat and has more of a paw print.

Manfred is harsh, but I don’t know. Nobody seems to like Freddy all that much, but it just seems like he’s an airhead to me.

All signs kind of do point to Freddy though.

But I don’t know whose lunch it was, really, and that’s kind of the problem.

Okay, so I thought I’d be funny, since I don’t know who the actual thief could be and decided to choose The Salami Bandit as the thief…which was the correct answer. And I established that it was Laura who called, though I’m going to have to go over the notes on how to decipher that one.

I thought we’d asked her about it before and she just kind of shoved us off.

I get it, she’s busy, but dang girl, you want someone to stop nabbing your lunch or what?

Apparently being a duck and wearing a trench coat automatically makes you a duck detective.

Oh snap, she just called out the main suspect.

Two more Deducktions have come up, and I’m kind of excited about them. There’s a lot of blank words to figure out, and if I’m being honest, I thought I was getting a little too close to the end even though there was clearly more stuff to figure out and we had picked up all kinds of extra keywords throughout our investigation so far.

It doesn’t really look like we can investigate anymore, meaning we have all we need.

The first one was fairly easy given the keywords about a birthday party, which would have to be for Sophie, though I wasn’t sure who was throwing it. Looking at the board in the kitchen and seeing the sticky note with a cat and a giraffe, I’d thought it would be Laura, but when that proved to be wrong I went with Margaret, since she’s got a mixer in hand.

As far as The Culprit goes…

The second word could be framed, and if that’s the case it’d have to be Freddy, since Laura called him out on it.

I managed to narrow it down to two wrong words, which was who’s doing the framing and the wrong item.

The wrong item would either have to be bag or lunch, but because this is in regards to a stolen lunch, I’d have to say it’d be the wrong lunch, probably due to Freddy’s poor eyesight. Which means I’d have to figure out who’s actually framing him, who I thought was Laura, but apparently not?

Okay, this is why I’m bad at being a detective, even though the clues are glaringly obvious.

I had to go back in the fridge and look at the contents.

It’s a salami sandwich that was taken by the salami bandit and Freddy has a bag of salami, bless him, so that’s really the reason he’s being blamed here. Meaning the Salami Bandit is framing Freddy and not anyone specific.

Ugh.

Detectiving is not my strong suit.

This is why you get unique bags and not just generic looking ones that anyone can buy at a store.

It’s a bit of an overreaction to salami as a present, unless the present that was in the box had more value than the food that’s now in it. You can’t possibly cry over a present switch, could you? That’s a bit melodramatic, right?

That brings us to three more Deducktions to get through, and none of them are complete at the moment, so it’s time to crowd-surf with questions throughout the office.

If I were to guess, I’d say the cat plush came from Laura, the necklace was from Boris, the book from Margaret, which come on, wasn’t so adult that it needed that reaction from us, and the salami had a note in it calling everyone edgelords.

Seriously.

Also worth noting is that the first letter to every word is underlined, reading: Be Quiet Or Else.

It’s clearly a threat, but is it a threat to Sophie? Is that why she’s crying? Maybe she knows who the Salami Bandit actually is and can’t say anything.

Aw, the heart necklace was from Boris confirmed.

I don’t like how we’re walking around in the rain with our journal held open in our hands, just soaking the pages. What detective does that?

Margaret’s computer password was easy enough; I just had to figure out the alien’s eye color.

They better be kissing Frederson’s butt and giving him a promotion for throwing all this shade toward him.

On another note, I was wrong about the presents for the Deducktion process. Margaret did not give the book, it was Rufus. That and nothing was stolen, which I didn’t think anything had been. Nothing said otherwise.

Looking into it, I still would’ve figured Margaret had given the book, but it does say that Rufus is a sci-fi fan. I just think it’s a bit of a reach there, but the game’s lenient in allowing you to take your time in choosing the correct answers, so I can’t complain too much.

The second thing we deduced was a little easy and a little complicated.

It just seemed like “letter” and “message” were a little too close to each other in meaning, even though it does make sense that the message was in the thinly disguised threat and it was written as a letter.

Eh.

Word usages.

I couldn’t tell you how I deduced the last Deducktion because I was clearly picking options. The word Brezel was on the information board and I chose that, even though it was wrong. And at that point, I just went down the list until I found the right place.

But hey, we got our Break Performance achievement…by breaking through the logistics.

I feel like Sophie isn’t here because she’s having a conversation with the Salami Bandit, not having family issues, exactly.

All right, I clearly don’t like Rufus and he’s now an official culprit.

Tone it down, edgelord.

I’m telling you, Rufus did it. We’re close to calling him out, now he’s on the defensive.

I was wondering when he’d get the heck out of his office so I can snoop through the hidden portion of his family painting. I don’t know if there’d be anything incriminating, but…he did dismiss us and head out of the kitchen, so hey, he could be in on this.

Man, what if it were more than one person behind this?

I mean, the buses from this place are being used to smuggle the salami in, so it would make sense that Ernst might be in on it, or even calling the shots.

I’d think he’d at least have an underling.

Heck, he could even be holding Sophie’s job over her head if she says anything.

Well, as far as the safe’s password hint goes. All I can think of is Customer Service/00/Birthday

Whatever the heck that means.

I’ll have to come back to it.

It looks like we have a BlueSky account and we’re pretty desperate for money.

I don’t know if that’s her actual resignation letter. Why now of all days when we’re close to figuring out who the thief is. I’m going to guess she was made to write it just to get her out of the equation, since she seemed to be a liability with her knowledge.

Okay, that’s kind of hilarious that she asked AITA for expecting coworkers to remember my birthday.

I would personally say yes, because why are you expecting all of them to remember your birthday and give you a present or acknowledgment when it happens once a year, you’re not all tight friends or family, and there’s a lot of stress and things going on from one year to the next.

Guys, keep your expectations low.

I can’t even remember my dad or brother’s birthday, okay?

Nobody particularly enjoys their job. They do it for money more often than not. Although, if you do love your job, then good on you.

We still need to do something in order to have all the keywords available to us, but looking back through Margaret’s PC conversations, she’s got a message up with “Cutie” who has an alien icon and they say to delete everything.

So perhaps this is all Rufus and Margaret’s doing after all?

I know I still need to crack open the safe, but…I still don’t really get the code, and I’ve never been all that great at puzzle solving, no matter how many hidden object games I’ve done that demand it of me.

After thinking about it, it could be talking about Customer Service, which would be Laura or Margaret. The OO could stand for Operating Office, which would be Freddy, and then if BD is birthday, that’d probably be the 7^th, for Sophie, right?

7 is obvious, but for OO, maybe that’d signify the 4 bus routes? That would just leave the first number if those two are correct. And that’s a big if.

Maybe the CS is a 3 for the 3 hour delay on Margaret’s computer?

This is me grasping at straws, if you couldn’t tell.

And those straws, it turns out, were all wrong, because boy did I try to brute force this code into submission, thinking the last number had to be 7.

Well, going into the Pondering section, it did mention abbreviations and numbers, which I already knew.

Okay so going back to look at the birthday cake, it has 9 candles on it, so maybe that’s the magic number for the last digit?

That one was wrong too, so now I’ve come up with maybe the first number is 2 for their being two CS workers, and then 1 for one Operating Office, and then BD would have to be 7…right?

Please tell me I’m right.

I’m wrong.

I’m a ducking terrible detective.

Well, going along the lines with how many workers there are…does that mean BD means Bus Driver, and not birthday, because that would make the most amount of sense, and detectives go by what makes the most amount of sense.

It was 214.

Are there four bus drivers? I thought there were just four routes? I guess I just assumed there was only one bus driver due to us only knowing about Boris, but hey, we cracked the code, and all that’s left is to quack the case!

I’m sorry, I hate puns too.

I blame Nocturne.

We finally got a key to the Server Room. You think Sophie’s in there? Technically nobody saw her leave, right?

Every tech that has to deal with connecting server wires and all that, I’m sorry you have to look at this atrocious wire management.

Wow, we are not looking good in this mirror.

Also, I don’t think a tattered hat makes us poor. What if it’s our one and only favorite hat that we just don’t want to replace?

Looks like we’ve got all our clues now.

Ha!

Sophie didn’t leave at all–like I said, nobody was around to witness her leaving, but we never figured out if it was her actual handwriting on the note, either. In any case, she was kidnapped.

Though I could’ve sworn they’d have tied her up in this room or something.

I don’t know where they would’ve stashed her away at, aside from one of the buses.

So really, after collecting all the hints and going through the More Business Deducktion, it wasn’t even really about the salami. It was technically about the vouchers that were being sold illegally.

Boy, figuring out the first section to it gave me a rough time, since Sophie was kind of the focal point for me, and I love hyperfocusing on one thing, which makes me a terrible person to play Overwatch with, thanks to my tunnel vision.

I mean, he’s right.

We kind of got derailed with the whole vouchers ordeal.

I’m guessing we’re down to our final two Deducktions before the case becomes solved, so we’re going to start with The Kidnapping, because that seems more important than some petty theft of someone’s sandwich.

All right, the whole “in” and “on” is a bit superfluous, don’t you think? You can be in a bus and you can also be on a bus, so that’s just kind of a word choice preference.

I’m honestly surprised the culprit hasn’t entered the Server Room yet.

Meanwhile, we’re just going to stand in the Server Room until we finish the last Deducktion of The Salami Bandit, who is decidedly not Freddy.

But watch it be Freddy anyway.

In order to solve it, we have to figure out whose handwriting is the same.

I mean, The Salami Bandit’s ink color is the same as the one on Sophie’s desk (which could’ve been falsified anyway) as well as the one in Manfred’s safe, though that had another letter with different handwriting. But…I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s Manfred’s handwriting, just because of the blue ink.

Hot dang, I’m a good ducktective and nobody can tell me otherwise!

Well, so much for those being the final Deducktions to figure out. I guess that was me being hopeful, even though clearly there’s more than one person behind this. There had to be.

I started with The Infatuation, just because.

Hot dang, who would’ve thought the person to be kidnapped was one of the people pulling the strings. That never happens, right?

And then the final one (I think) is going back to the salami ordeal, and not the vouchers.

Truly, it did.

But then again, they could’ve also been oblivious about it and just went about their daily route, unaware of the luggage they were carting around. Ah, unless the bus drivers have to manually check the luggage for illegal goods. Is that what it all boils down to?

Wait, I thought Sophie was part of it?

Unless it was planned to have her tied up in the bus cargo area? Because she’s the one that pulled Boris into it.

All I can think of is the Duck Tales theme song now.

I love how evil and unhinged Manfred looks when coming up with the salami plan.

I mean, I would think that all three of them should be arrested, but definitely Manfred since he came up with the whole idea in the first place. Not to mention, he tied Sophie up and put her in the bus. I can’t imagine how cramped she would be in there, being a giraffe and all.

We’re going all in.

Manipulating someone who’s in love with you and wants your attention no matter what shouldn’t be a reason for pulling their strings into something illegal.

I think Boris is the one person I feel bad for. He did it to garner the attention of someone he truly had feelings for and make her happy in the process, which probably made him happy as well.

But…he knew doing this would be illegal and did it anyway, so Boris should also get arrested.

He realizes he’s going to jail, right? How’s he going to support his family in there?

Wow, he wasn’t even entirely in on it.

All right, well, you’re kind of dumb for believing that story, Boris, but also, Sophie is over here crying while calling him out for his stupidity.

Yeah, thanks Nocturne. I sure did.

That gives us our final achievement Quacked the Case, and it turns out that the majority of players arrested all three of the culprits. However, not as many arrested Sophie, and I can’t believe all of you were manipulated by her tears and the fact that she was kidnapped.

Come on now.

We’re going to take a moment to sit through the credits, because…it’s a good acknowledgment to do so.

He doesn’t want to get in the car with someone who stalks him for his mystery books and such. I don’t blame him. Freddy is just…different.

Oh this will be a long drive.

And that’s the end of this podcast review of Duck Detective: The Secret Salami.

I really liked this game, and I’m kind of sad it took me this long to play it. I saw other people playing it on YouTube but didn’t look at any of the videos since I didn’t want to be spoiled, but it looked really cute and I kept it on my wishlist.

I’m definitely looking forward to playing The Ghost of Glamping next at some point.

And as mentioned before, I haven’t played any games so far that feature this paper-characters style of artwork, but I absolutely love it. I know there’s another game I’ve been wanting to play that’s got this style and I think…it’s called Echoes of the Plum Grove.

Don’t know when I’ll get to that, but maybe one day.

As I say with every game on my ever-growing wishlist.

I really need to take it one day at a time, one game at a time, but I’ve just got to get these reviews and such out to you guys so you can deal with my crazy thoughts on different matters and point out how silly they are in the grand scheme of things.

But as far as mysteries go and case-solving, this game was very nice and lenient and didn’t shame you for constantly coming to the wrong conclusion.

I also liked that it didn’t necessarily hold your hand, but gave you nudges in the right direction instead.

Like with that safe puzzle.

I had to figure that out on my own and it was a doozy, even though in the end the answer did make sense. I know some other detective games make you want to scream, and I hope I don’t play any of those any time soon.

This game has not tricked me into thinking other detective games will be a nice, smooth ride.

But it’s past my bed time as of writing this review, and I must bid you all good night as the rest of the world says, Not Now Mom, I’m Gaming.