izigame.me

I really don't want to come off saying that Duck Detective is a bad game. The art style and visuals are great, the audio and voice acting are solid, and the mechanics behind the mystery gameplay are engaging.  And the low price point certainly lines up with the short play time.  But seeing that this is currently rated as Overwhelmingly Positive, I can't really bring myself to say that I recommend it.
The title character, Duck Detective, is woefully underutilized.  On paper, it is such a great character concept, with a catchy name and a striking visual design.  But there is very little relevance to the Duck part of the character.  I can only name three things: There is a dedicated Quack button, a core detective mechanic is a pun in which you make DeDUCKtions, and the character has a drug-like addiction to bread.  All of these are experienced within the first few minutes of the game.  For the rest of the game, nothing about being a duck is relevant, not mechanically, not narratively, not even for comic relief.  This game could have been Dog Detective or even Human Detective, and it would have been a nearly identical experience.  None of the other animal characters have any relevant animal quirks either.  For a game that screams "You are a DUCK!", they really don't seem to embrace that detail.
While the core mystery solving mechanics are enjoyable, a lot of the execution doesn't really come together.  There were a number of moments throughout the game where I felt like I had all of the information available to me, but I still didn't understand what DeDUCKtion the game wanted me to come to.  Because there's no penalty for getting it wrong, and you are just immediately informed when it is correct, there's incentive to just keep guessing until you stumble into the right answer.  Even after seeing what some of the DeDUCKtions were meant to be, I still didn't understand how you were supposed to come to that conclusion.  The game clearly marks everything you can investigate, so I feel confident that I didn't just miss something.  It would have been much more satisfying and enjoyable if the details of the case had come together more cohesively, instead of just arbitrarily coming up with conclusions that seemed entirely out of left field.
Those two major elements left me unsatisfied with the Duck Detective experience.  If $10 is no object and you want to see the game with the cute duck, by all means, go for it.  But if you were hoping for a genuinely great duck-centric mystery solving game, then maybe just keep your fingers crossed for the sequel.