This is what life is. The duck. Pool. No game play only duck. “I want gameplay” this is good. You are whiny duck control by the Joe Biden duck. What happened in 2001. Where were you during 9/11? Exactly. These ducks don’t ask such silly questions. They do not buckle to control or mental enslavement like characters such as Mario. We watch as they burn. They spew. They sink. They maim. It is so incomplete. I hate it. It reflects the very nature of our world. Though our realities may differ, our hearts beat as one. This taught me as such. I learnt a lot about free will and authoritarianism today. I scrame at my duck and felt bad at first when it was slow but I get it now.

For a game that is basically an entirely visual experience where overtime you get more of the funny characters that do funny things, this is honestly really really good, am a big fan! The idea is simple, as is the progression and ultimately gameplay, but it is the execution of just watching your arsenal of rubber duckies grow slowly over time and seeing them all just float around in the pools, all with their own fun designs, sounds, and even behaviours that is just done oh so well! This is an oddly engaging game for what it is, and for that alone it is deserving of my praise.
Just wish I could afford the DLC to let the fun times continue, looks like there is so much more awaiting me.
For now though I guess I consider this complete, and when I eventually get the DLC I will probably just say "An excellent extension onto what was already an oddly captivating experience!".
You can quote me on that.

Let me tell you about a fly I once nicknamed Buzz. Two flies, as a matter of fact, because I couldn't tell them apart. Here I am, lying down on the couch of a moving RV. The thing's definitely a bit of an old spirit: the seatbelts tucked beneath, which I've chosen to neglect, are what you find on school buses across America. Old-fashioned, down to the way the logo on the buckle has been scratched off and spat on time over time. Now, if you lie down above the drivers, you get a glimpse of the world as it passes you by: gravestones in the middle of who knows, rocky nowheres, and once the West Coast has flown past you, great American dustbowls punctuated only by the wind passing through the small screen in front of you and the car radio down below. But, of course, you don't get that on the couch. For the price of comfort, I would argue, you get the ceiling. Only if you lean forward in a way you're really not supposed to does the world reveal itself in broader strokes. The problem with the ceiling is that it can't compete with your phone, and the problem with your phone is that there's only a finite amount of social media you can scroll through and music you can listen to before all of your senses go numb. In come two flies, almost innocuous in their immediate presence, willed into existence somewhere in a parking lot we stopped at, never at ease with themselves. I struggle to come up with ways you could keep a house fly as a pet since it'd always find holes in the cage you put it in. But more damning than that, you can't have more than one of them. You can have two black cats but never two flies. At which point does the second fly steal the name of the first? At any point in time you decide to notice them.

I left that trip short of the two flies I had acquainted myself with while staring at the ceiling. Not pets, not nuisances, just things that were there and made me feel... I don't know, relieved?

I don't see how the average experience of going to feed the ducks in your local park is all too different. There are more of them, they're larger, much slower, and less malicious in intent. But the reality is that you always leave the park having acknowledged the adorable creatures beneath you as little more than a temporary relief from day-to-day ennui and stress.

Plastic ducks don't fare the same way. They're a good middleground between flies and ducks: they're small and, in many cases, indistinct enough for you to impose your imagination on something that is decidedly real, and yet they float. They're slow and graceful, and best of all, they stick around. Down to the aggressively yellow color they sport, there's an undeniably charming sense of artifice to them that, expressions be damned, brings a smile to my face.

Placid Plastic Duck Simulator sits at ease in that artificial middleground as a piece of digital artwork, calm with the fact that you cannot feed its ducks more than your own politics and personality if you so choose. What going digital with this experience means is that the well-worn rules of what is both natural and artificial are discarded entirely. Through the use of save games, your ducks are as they were, rather than a natural byproduct of the environment they're in. No longer do two or three Buzzs' pass you by in the span of an afternoon.

But then, what do you achieve when you can no longer let go? What is the value of holding dearly onto something so obviously impersonal? What do you gain from it?

Quack.

Game that really makes you think.

Allowed me to reflect on my entire life and understand myself on a deeper level.

Truly amazing.