For most people, the appeal of this game probably lies in the twee mystery-ish vibes it shares with contemporaries Frog Detective and Later Alligator. What interested me was that it paired these with the actual mechanics of a mystery game, as well. Duck Detective sells itself on its store page as "Aggretsuko meets Return of the Obra Dinn", and in doing so it gives itself pretty big shoes to fill. Unfortunately, those shoes fit about as well as you'd expect shoes to fit on a duck.

It's a little weird that Duck Detective cites Obra Dinn when mechanically it's much closer to Case of the Golden Idol: as the player investigates, they collect words in a word bank, which they then use to fill in the blanks of prewritten statements to form a deduction (it even makes you deduce the names of each character, even though that makes much less sense in a game where your character could just ask them). There's nothing wrong with this mechanic, inherently - Golden Idol's a fine game - but crafting these deductions is a delicate balancing act, and it's one Duck Detective seems to stumble on more often than not. The sentences are short and vague enough that it's sometimes possible to put in answers which are accurate but simply not what that specific question is looking for, which is confusing and frustrating. The culprit's alias, "The Salami Bandit", is in your list of proper nouns, making it difficult to tell in some deductions whether you're actually supposed to figure out who did something or just punt it to a later deduction. Many of the words in your word bank come from investigating or asking about something completely irrelevant to the deduction that uses it - this isn't a mortal sin, mechanically (Golden Idol does it too, sparingly), but there's a dissonance to it that just feels kinda lame.

As far as the twee-vibe part goes, though, Duck Detective works out alright. The characters are all just abrasive enough to be plausible suspects without being actually unlikeable, and weird enough to be memorable without being so weird that it gets in the way of actually deducing stuff about them. The cartoonish style of the dialogue is fine by itself, but really doesn't lend itself well to being voice-acted, and I ended up muting the voices before even meeting a second character. No shade on the actors themselves, though - I don't think anyone could have made it work for me.

To cap this off on a high note: I want to make a mystery game myself, and I think a lot about how to do that (which is why I've been so critical towards something I would probably just passively enjoy otherwise). I think the most interesting idea I've had so far was the concept of structuring difficulty levels around the amount of feedback the game gives you, so it was really cool and encouraging to see this game do the same thing.

The balancing of the roguelite deckbuilding is fairly poor, the range of abilities and status effects is needlessly complicated, and I would typically dislike the nature of the roguelite upgrades this game offers because they artificially increase playtime without adding interesting variation (i.e you just died, but now you can add +1 to all melee attacks and go again..).

Having said that, roguelike deckbuilding is an inherently satisfying genre that's hard to truly get wrong - and Across the Obelisk saves its many flaws with its one defining feature: online co-op gameplay. Cooperative turn based strategy games are few and far between, and all the nitpicks fade into the background when you try to figure this one out with a friend or two.

As a solo game I don't highly recommend, but in co-op AtO works really well.

This is, for the most part, The Golden Idol Experience crushed down into a 2-hour snack of a game.

However - my favorite bits of the base game were long-term eureka moments. Realizations about the nature of a death from three chapters ago, reveals of hidden identities, etc. Those sorts of payoffs aren't really possible in a runtime this short.

Even so - I'm glad we got more of this game, and I hope this won't be the last we see of it.