Team Soda’s ex-quack-tion parody Escape From Duckov launched last week, and has proven rather popular, with over half a million players on Steam. If you’ve yet to have the pleasure, it’s a top-down survival shooting pisstake of Battlestate’s loot sim Escape From Tarkov.
You are an Average Duck with a gun, trying to survive one of five maps against shifting enemy patterns and weather conditions. Gathered resources are spent on home base facilities and upgrades for your “over 50” weapons. You have to worry about fog of war, hunger, and thirst. Yes, you can also make your duck look like an item of human genitalia in the character editor. This will not help you endure the wilds, but it might see you getting featured on Rock Paper Shotgun Dot Com, a site that used to take pride in its work.
A routine pillaging sim with an absent-minded meme element and a few renegade schlongs in the Steam forums? Probably, but Steam user reviewers do seem keen, and especially players from the developer’s native China. That’s despite some technical problems, which the devs have now patched out and/or troubleshot in a Steam post.
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The update makes a bunch of smaller changes to the maps. There’s now a new spawn point in the Laboratory, which features slightly more enemies and loot containers. Key items are easier to find in Farm Town. The Storm Zone now has a few more roaming enemies in underground areas. They’ve changed the rewards for a couple of missions, reduced the required kills for others, and tweaked a couple of the crafting recipes. Players using mods can now edit the mod load order, restarting the game to apply changes. All this, plus fixes for incorrect weight display, hostiles being unable to open doors, and the game’s field manual missing a few blueprints.
The devs also include tips and advice for players who encounter black screens at launch, run into pronounced frame-rate drops, or find themselves unable to extract from the tutorial. Standard “turn it off and on again” stuff, for the most part. In more serious news, the developers have also apologised for an issue on Mac that has caused some players to lose progress. “Due to an issue with cloud save settings, some of Mac players have experienced unexpected save file loss,” they write. “This was the result of an operational error on our end, and we deeply apologize for the inconvenience and negative experience.”
I’m interested to see whether Escape From Duckov stays popular. It’s got that Untitled Goose Gamey virality that could taper off sharply, but for all the ability to turn your pecker into a pecker, your mallard into a member, your wildfowl into a winkle, it seems fundamentally serious about scrap-hoarding logistics and sniper scope etiquette. Could it be one of those Good Games our seers whisper of? Perhaps Rock Paper Shotgun Dot Com, a site once renowned for its acumen, could find the time to investigate further.
