Release date: 2025
Version played: PC (via Steam) in 2026
The sequel to their earlier offering in the same series, once again developed and published by Happy Broccoli games, Duck Detective – The Ghost of Glamping is yet again a 2D duck-tective game. Resuming control of the now infamous Duck Detective, Eugene McQuacklin, players follow on from The Secret Salami living with Freddy Frederson, but feeling down in the dumps. In order to cheer up Eugene, Freddy takes him to a camping site where Eugen can meet Freddy’s new girlfriend — and solve a mystery! Utilising his skills of itnerrogation, observation and perspiration, Eugene looks to get the bottom of this spooky campsite detective case!
+ I once again absolutely adored the voice acting and signature graphic style. The little cardboard cutout puppets have only a handful of expressions, but every single one of them got a chuckle or a smile out of me. The new characters, of which there are many, are memorable in their own says, some endearing themselves early or intentionally proving difficult to converse with
+ the puzzles are almost entirely the same format, filling in the blanks of a phrase with clues you have learned from conversation or observation. It felt like I had more words to choose from, but many of them were so outlandish I can’t imagine the developers thought anyone would use them. But what’s a detective story without a few red herrings, eh? (this is also a hilarious joke about the characters in these games being animals)
– the puzzles and gameplay is perhaps too similar. I was waiting for something a bit more, and it just never happened. A Pokemon Go! parody, as well as various sorts of supernatural teases and the like don’t lead toward anything (aside from, potentially, being relevant to a deDUCKtion) and I felt a little bit underwhelmed
– this game felt very, very short. I finished it in under two hours, which was only two playing sessions. I commented to a friend that I felt like the story was wrapping up surprisingly early, but my in-game tracker said I was not even half done — I then rapid-fire smashed out multiple deDUCKtions in a row and the story concluded. It was perhaps a very disappointing pace, to the point I wondered if I had accidentally done something out of order
Should you play this game: I don’t know if my expectations were too high from how much I loved the first game, but this felt like a step sideways, if not a half step backwards. It was significantly shorter, taking me under half the time of the first game, and the final handful of deDUCKtions all happened one after the other in rapid succession.
