+: Duck Detective: The Secret Salami + Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping, Eye 4 Eye

-: The Final Print, Kona, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

The theme for the pans this time is “cultural appropriation.”

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami
Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping
(Happy Broccoli Games, 2024 and 2025)

The loading screens in the Duck Detective games have “Duck Facts.” When I saw the fact, “Ducks were named after Sir John Duckworth, who invented the duck in 1756,” I so failed to stifle my laughter that Mr. Act made me read the duck fact to him. He chuckled and then went, “Yup, that’s 100% your sense of humor.” So that this game is pandering to me specifically is probably something to keep in mind when I say: This game was hilarious.

Honestly I loved everything about these games. The art was wonderful, the environments were bright and colorful, the mysteries were simultaneously both low-stakes and huge conspiracies, and the gameplay was excellent. I thought the UI was one of the best of any of these games, and this is the first time I thought the mad-libs style solving system worked like a dream. Bless this game for the innovation of a separate character page so you don’t have to keep re-entering names. And the vibe was just unbeatable. The idea that ducks get trashed on white bread and DD is just stuffing wads of bread into his coat is incredible.

I do think the characters were stronger in the first game. I thought all the officepeople were such great hammy but real people. Sophie posting to AITA was one of the funniest gags I’ve ever seen. I do have to say I really like how they handled Theodore in the second game, without giving away too much the 180 in my opinion of him was A+ guiding by the narrative, and I also liked Toby and Amelia, though I found Madeline and Arnaud to be a bit one-dimensional.

One thing I did end up liking about the second game was Freddie and DD’s relationship, I thought the swing from Freddie being overbearing to DD just being so irresponsible it loops back to being unkind was really effective. Poor Freddie! He has so much pathos, lol. I also really liked the sequel hook, both because it says DD is going to have to actually deal with his issues as well as because the idea of Freddie having to save DD tickles me. I really appreciate the game playing with the detective convention but also being willing to go, “Actually someone like this this is probably not in a great place,” and picking it apart a little.

My only real complaint about these games is that I have to wait for the next one to come out! I wish there were 15 and I could just go through them all.

Eye 4 Eye
(Yi Dai, 2023)

The freeware has made a really great showing so far, tbh.

So the bad here is the story, and the good is the gameplay.

The story was really cliche; I clocked the “twist” at like 10 minutes in because it was so obvious, and the story was a really typical “what if tech went HORRIBLY WRONG” kind of thing. And while I appreciate stories about how tech bros are evil, this really didn’t bring anything new to the table. It was…fine, just boring. I think if you weren’t used to this type of story it might feel a little more thrilling, but like I said it was all telegraphed waaay out. It made it impossible to get invested at all.

But the gameplay here was great! I really enjoyed the puzzle design and the exploration; I wasn’t a fan of the look but that’s really a matter of my personal taste. The puzzles were a blast and I enjoyed the experience. Also I don’t know what my deal is but I love search string puzzles, lol. The puzzle design here was better than many of the like, $15 retail games I’ve played. And honestly, the story worked perfectly fine as a way to send you in the right direction to find the next puzzles. I think if the dev can nab a real writer they could do something pretty cool.

And really, it’s freeware! If it appeals to you at all it’s probably worth checking out. According to Steam it took me about 70 minutes to finish and it was a totally good use of that time. My only caveat is that it’s very much designed for a mouse/keyboard — it couldn’t be played on Deck or with a controller.

The Final Print
(Dummy Detectives, 2025)

My toes always curl a bit when I see Northern and Western Europeans take African American oppression as a Serious Subject. This game has validated this response (yet again).

Consider, for instance, the description this game gives itself:

You’re a journalist investigating a suspicious case during the Harlem riots. Take pictures of evidence, gather information by interrogating people, and put it all together in an article to show people the truth.

What are “the Harlem riots”? Why is it constructed as if there’s That One Everyone Knows? I initially assumed they were talking about the Red Summer, which was 1919, but there were also historically significant riots in Harlem specifically in 1935, 1943, and 1967, as well as a major one in Harlem in 1926 in the Jewish and Puerto Rican areas. This is information I found by going, “Haven’t there been a bunch of important riots in Harlem?” and spending approximately 10 seconds googling it.

So we instantly have an idea about the game’s perspective here, which is that it fundamentally doesn’t actually care about African American history and struggle; it cares about seeming to an equally removed audience of Europeans that it’s about Real Issues. This is a depressingly effective tactic — this game won “Best Student Game” at the Dutch Game Awards this year. This is textbook appropriation.

The game apparently takes place “in the early 1940s,” which actually still doesn’t really tell us whether it’s addressing the 1935 or 1943 riots, but I assume is meant to indicate the latter. The 1943 riots followed the shooting of a Black US Army soldier by a white police officer; to quote Wiki:

“Charles Lawrence of Fisk University described ‘resentment of status given Negro members of the armed forces’ as ‘perhaps the greatest single psychological factor in the making of the Harlem riot’, as Bandy came to represent Black soldiers and Collins came to represent white suppression.”

To say none of this is in the game is an understatement. The murdered man is a nightclub owner who is killed by, and this is the kicker, another black man. The killer then comes to you claiming he was being blackmailed by someone, presumably the white cop, but I actually don’t know because the final sequence where you’re supposed to be able to accuse the cop was bugged for me. The developer posted a guide about how to accuse the cop, but between the game’s posting in June 2025 and my playing it sixth months later, the guide was broken and the spreadsheet it linked to apparently scrubbed; there are no extant let’s plays that show the cop ending, only the one where you target the black man. Whether ending support for the game such that the game implies as strongly as possible that ~black on black crime~ is the real problem was intentional or just Unfortunate is a riddle I leave to you the reader.

It also fundamentally misunderstands the nature of police violence against African Americans, which is that: it’s not hidden. Cops beat, murder, and harass black Americans in broad daylight, with impunity, on camera and in photos, and it does not matter. The idea a cop would have to resort to shadily blackmailing other black people instead of just fucking murdering the guy getting on their nerves is such an astronomic blindness toward what actually happens that it feels like propaganda. It’s certainly willful ignorance in the age of the internet.

This game is both broken and mindbogglingly irresponsible, unplayable and ahistorical. It is galling to me as a researcher that a university could not just produce but end up awarded for something like this. I can’t always get my students to use JSTOR, but at least they google things.

Kona
(Parabole, 2017)

Speaking of appropriation…

Let’s do the good first. I thought the gameplay here worked — I’d call it above-average. Granted the caveat there is that I tend to like the slower games and walking sims, so someone who needs like, GAMEPLAY, in the redditest sense, may not like it, but it worked for me. I liked the atmosphere, and I thought the narration stayed juuuust restrained enough to be helpful and not hokey. I enjoyed searching all the properties and snooping into people’s lives and that the town was empty definitely made it feel less intrusive and more detective-y. I also liked the scrapbook-style journal, both aesthetically and practically, although I wish it had more tabs — you can skip from “Investigations” to “Townies” but can’t easily scroll through the investigations, meaning if there was one page I wanted to see I sometimes had to flip through like 20 pages to get there.

My one complaint about the gameplay was that I wish there was a hint option for missing journal entries. Because of the way the townies are moving around, you don’t fill out pages all at once when you investigate a property. So for like Jill Smith, you may do 2/4 of her entries at the Smith household, but the other two entries may be at her workplace or her friend’s house. I would have loved a thing where if I clicked on an empty entry it said like, “Hmm, maybe if I check out The General Store I can find out more about this…” As it was, it was hard to know when you had found everything at a given place, and toward the lategame I just did not have the wherewithal to go back and comb over every tiny detail hoping to find missing stuff. (I actually think a postgame cleanup mode with fast travel would have been a great thing for QOL too, as I wanted to see everything but, well, I have other things to do, so I just ended up looking up what I missed.)

But on the whole, from a purely experiential perspective, I enjoyed this more than I thought I would, and I can see why it was a hit.

HOWEVER.

So, first, the good, again. It was competently written. The writing was, again, solid-to-above-average. I also appreciated, as I did in Obra Dinn, that it was pretty immediately obvious something supernatural was going on, and the mystery is about why the town was targeted. It also makes the very good choice to ground the supernatural part in human conflicts, which I always support.

The first issue is a writing issue, which is that the game provides the solution insanely early. So early, in fact, that I don’t think talking about this is a spoiler. I had actually initially theorized that the protagonist dies in the car accident at the very beginning, and you’re investigating the town as a ghost, which would honestly have been pretty fun, but the truth is far more cliche. In the first third of the game, you just find a book about wendigos that explains what they are, why they appear, and how to stop them, and it’s like… oh. Okay. And for the remaining several hours there’s just… no mystery. You know exactly what the issue is and why it’s happening and the game just kind of acts like you don’t despite spoonfeeding you all the info in hour 2. This was so bizarre that I almost wonder if the dev was having people in playtest say they couldn’t tell what was happening and felt like they had to cater to those stupid people and add in an item that just goes, “Here let me tell you the game’s plot”? It was really weird and instantly vaporized all the mystery and suspense for me. The entire game would have been eons better if this one interactable didn’t exist.

The second issue is that this is a really basic Magical Native story, and as they often are, one that fundamentally posits indigenous people as savage, violent, and other.

I did some brief research, but this is not my area of expertise, so please take my claims about NA folklore with some salt here and do your own digging if you want more info!

But broadly, the wendigo seems to be a particularly appropriated bit of NA folklore (Anishinaabe, in the game specifically Cree). And the game uses it in a way that’s extremely typical of the way white people have used it in their fiction historically — the Wiki page is pretty robust here, including both examples and critiques from indigenous scholars, so check it out for details.

Indeed, the game seems to play on a supposed psychiatric illness, Wendigo psychosis, a thing which does not exist; the wendigo as an diagnostic symbol is so pervasive that one scholar called his book about the construction of indigenous mental illness “Revenge of the Wendigo‘ — it argues that “anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry–have together constructed a profoundly distorted portrait of Aboriginal peoples.” On the literary side, here’s an article just about wtf is going on with white people and wendigos.

My point is that this game made a choice that placed it in the midst of a long historical clusterfuck, and it doesn’t do anything meaningful to react to its own context, instead just becoming another iteration. While the full reckoning with this is outside my scope here, there is one thing I want to flag. Based on what I’ve seen, traditionally the wendigo is associated with greed, gluttony, and excess — it’s typically insatiably cannibalistic and has thematic ties to winter famine and antisocial behavior. Per wiki, “Ojibwe scholar Brady DeSanti asserts that the wendigo ‘can be understood as a marker indicating… a person… imbalanced both internally and toward the larger community of human and spiritual beings around them.'” Chippewa writer Louise Erdrich, for example, has a rapist become a wendigo.

Kona completely rewrites this, deciding instead that wendigos are creatures of vengeance. The spoiler book you read talks about someone turning into a wendigo to avenge the killing of their fiance, and it’s strongly implied this is also what happens in Kona. A few things about this aside from the fact that it is completely ahistorical:

One. This means the game is predicated on the fridging of a Cree woman, which, great.

Two. I think it’s really… notable, let’s say, that the game takes a piece of folklore that’s fundamentally about how important community and mutual respect are in Algonquin cultures and turns it into this ‘they may turn into violent monsters at any moment and kill all the white people’ thing that’s both far more individualistic and far more savage than the truth of the mythos. The game makes the extremely significant decision to have the fridged Cree woman — who is only ever referred to as “the Cree woman” by the narration despite being named Laure — killed by accident, by a stray bullet during a hunting expedition. This characterizes the ‘revenge’ narrative as completely irrational and, on a larger scale, characterizes indigenous reactions to white violence as unreasonable and dangerous. Further, and I shouldn’t have to say this, white people did not ‘accidentally’ genocide Native Americans.

The result is that this is just a really, really typical entry into the incredibly large pantheon of “fiction about how Native Americans are magical and also violent and irrational.”

Part of the problem with the game spoiling itself wasn’t just that it destroyed the mystery. It was also that it chose the most boring, rote, utterly exhausted story to tell, and does nothing with it. This is what I was getting at above when I said I was hoping it would turn out we’d died — I don’t think I’m a genius at twists or anything, just that would have been a far less cliche and retrodden twist than ‘it was magical natives,’ and as such to me would have been more interesting. Plus I like ghosts better than racism. But part of the reason these types of stories are so exhausting is because they get done the same way over and over, partially because people copy what they see but also because the structures that they support are synthetic and as such have to be constantly reified (see also my line about how Golden Idol was the same as a dozen movies from the 1950s).

So yeah it’s easy to say “I liked the gameplay here and on a technical level the rest was solid,” but for me at least, gameplay can only carry a game so far. It’s also a game that does nothing original, makes no critiques, and offers no insight into itself or its own genre.

Also, diegetically spoiling your own mystery story is a really fucking stupid choice.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
(Sierra, 1993/Pinkerton Road Studio 2014 [Remaster])

You know that genre of media from the 1980s through the early 2000s where the entire premise is, “Wow this mediocre white guy sure is a piece of shit, isn’t it great?” Like every sitcom from this era? Yeah that’s this. The game manages to double down on this premise by somehow making witch burnings and lynchings all about a white guy, which is certainly a choice they were within their rights to make. But the important thing is: black women are evil seductresses who deserve to die!

This has aged poorly, is my point.

Honestly this game was just so goddamn boring. I couldn’t finish it. Kona was problematic(TM) but I finished it in 6.5 hours and the time went quick; with this game I started using a walkthrough after about 30 minutes and even with that was so bored I quit at 4.5 hours, just under halfway through the game. It was just so much inane banter, so much navigating through endless menus, so much moon logic, and the story was so telegraphed and so cliche that I just couldn’t take it anymore.

And look, I play a lot of old games. One of my favorite jRPGs of all time is Romancing SaGa 2, which came out in the same year as this game. It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for the old shitty Dragon Quest Monsters, I cut my teeth on Total Annihilation and I think Planescape: Torment was genius. This being old is not the issue. The issue is that it’s a boring story told badly.

Everything is so, so drawn out. Every scene is a million times longer than it has to be, the 10-day structure could easily have taken place over three days, and there’s so many inane sidequests you have to do. Like, what was the point of having to do a weird fetch-quest chain to get the artists to draw a sketch of the symbols? Why wasn’t it just a puzzle the player could solve themselves? There was a real dearth of puzzles in this game, in a way that was really quite weird — almost everything you have to do involves just choosing dialogue options. Like the $20 from the squirrel — you don’t do anything clever to direct the squirrel or use an item to kick over the vase; you just talk aimlessly at a gravestone until by sheer coincidence a squirrel knocks the vase over. That’s not interesting or satisfying, because it doesn’t make sense; your actions have no bearing on the outcome. So little of what you do has any bearing on what happens. And I cannot stress how terrible the excess banter was. And the game’s dedication to giving me useless dialogue options was just. Why.

I stuck it out as long as I did on the off-chance it was going to take the story in an interesting direction — by which I mean black people and voudou not being evil — and as soon as it became clear that wasn’t going to be the case it just had nothing left to offer except a protagonist who assaults women in graveyards and a tsundere secretary, who both suck in their own unique ways.

I’m especially glad I quit because apparently shortly after the point I was at the whole thing takes a hard turn into the supernatural, which you may recognize as the stupidest thing a mystery can do. “Actually the murder weapon was magic,” is the worst twist. It was bad in 1929 when Knox was writing rules and it’s bad now. It’s also worth remembering that Knox’s rules prohibit relying on lazy ethnic stereotypes and what we’d now call ‘magical POC’ tropes. That these things makes for bad detective stories was a 65-year-old criticism when this game originally came out.

Kona and Final Print were frustrating in part because they should have been better than they were; they were good premises and design let down by an unwillingness (or, I suppose, inability) of the writers to think seriously about their own subject matter. But this? There’s nothing worth salvaging here. It just sucks, and as someone who was there, it also sucked in 1993.