CBGSCNB 2: Duck Detective

The 22^nd May 2025 was an exciting day in our household. The hotly-awaited sequel to the highly acclaimed Duck Detective: The Secret Salami was launching, and we were downloading The Ghost of Glamping within an hour of its release.
The Secret Salami was the first game my wife had ever played all the way through with me, and it went down splendidly.
It was the inaugral CBGSCNB, and in a way was her introduction to video games as something more than just a way for me to pass time.
It checks off our first two boxes with ease, but I did worry as we made our start that it would lose her before it could get its hooks in.

Clearly, the case is closed on the Cute Bird and Simple Controls criteria. You play as Eugene McQuacklin, the Duck Detective (a melodramatic duck PI who waddles his way to the truth through DeDUCKtive reasoning).
The isometric POV and the option to control the whole game with just the mouse mean it's an ideal candidate from these perspectives.

The risk was that the game has lots of dialogue. There's a chance in those cases that my wife will get a bit bored of it and will fall off before the game is able to catch her attention.
The issue was alleviated by the excellent writing. We loved all the characters in both games, and the way the Duck Detective has a habit of coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons is always a laugh. The humour was great, and this kept it engaging.

The result with both games was that she was hooked and eager to keep playing, and so both games were finished in just a few sessions, without needing to take many breaks.
Both The Secret Salami and The Ghost of Glamping are essentially the same framework - not much changed mechanically between the two, and this makes a lot of sense for games like these. The innovation and novelty comes in the writing, and Happy Broccoli have proven the quality of that writing in both cases. Especially impressive is that their comedy writing genuinely lands, which we all know is quite rare in games.

I owe a great deal to these games, since they were a perfect doorway for my wife to join the hobby I love - even if her tastes are a little niche.

Duck Detective 1 & 2 were the two first entries into our hall of fame: Cute Bird Games with Simple Controls that are Not Boring.