Magret & FaceDeBouc: “The buddy-buddy case” review

If it walks like a duck and talks like a goat, it’s probably this entertainingly offbeat if sometimes overly crass cartoon animal mystery

Comically incompetent police officers have come in many shapes and sizes over the years, from blundering Frank Drebin to bumbling Inspector Clouseau, but Magret & FaceDeBouc: “The buddy-buddy case” perhaps marks the first time since Sam & Max that they've stumbled into the animal kingdom. In this, the third outing by Adipson Studio (aka solo French developer Romuald Serrado, who previously made GrandMa Badass and the French-only 3Geeks), we're introduced to Inspector Maig…, err, I mean Magret, a down-on-his luck duck, and his reluctant goat partner, FaceDeBouc. Thrust blinking into the unaccustomed limelight of a murder case, it'll take a little deduction and a whole lot more dumb luck for them to succeed. There’s a heap of earthy humour smeared on top, but if you dig down there's a surprisingly intricate plot hiding underneath, strung together by puzzles that mostly make sense, in a ridiculous kind of way. Short and not-so-sweet, it’s nothing if not unique.

Inspectors Magret and FaceDeBouc are an odd couple, and not just because of the whole duck and goat thing. That's actually pretty normal in their world, where everyone's an anthropomorphic animal, from lionesque Captain Hishiro to poor Monsieur Couane, the porcine victim of the piece. No, their real issue is that, while Magret is an upstanding if spectacularly ineffective police officer who's been busted down to Archives for his troubles, FaceDeBouc is an oaf who breaks every rule but gets the job done. At least sometimes, kind of. If they hadn't been thrown together by a resource-starved police department to solve a brutal murder, they wouldn't even want to be in the same room together. As it is, when Monsieur Couane is found hacked to death by a chainsaw and turned into sausages in his own butcher’s shop-cum-café, there's literally nobody else available, so it's up to them to unravel a tale of illicit antiquities, counterfeit paintings, romance, and blackmail.

Before we go any further, a quick PSA: As I hinted above, those of a delicate disposition should probably stay well clear, because Magret & FaceDeBouc leans heavily into crude humour right from the start. As a breathless reporter intones in the opening cutscene, the town has ground to a halt due to a horrible stench that (we soon discover) is the scent of burnt goat. Or, more specifically, FaceDeBouc sunning his private parts under an office lamp for too long. His poop is involved in not one but two puzzles, dropping in for a cameo in a third. There's swearing, a dash of BDSM, and a vulture forensic scientist who can't quite resist nibbling on the victim during his examination. It’s not really my thing, but if you chortled even a little while reading all that, you'll probably get on well with our unlikely inspectors.

In sharp contrast with the R-rated content, the graphics have the crisp, colourful look of a Saturday morning cartoon, balancing clean simplicity with just enough detail and shading to bring them to life. The animation is a little awkward and most scenes are fairly static, but (especially given the cast of superficially cute animals) the results are still endearing. Our not-so-dynamic duo flit around a fairly picturesque but unnamed French town, heading from their office at the police station out to cafés, bookshops, hacker panda Landroch's cyber den and (to add a touch of class to the finale) a lupine duchess's grand mansion.

After you're welcomed to the game by a bouncy bit of café jazz, the soundtrack thankfully settles down to a range of gentle melodies ranging from classical piano to synthwave. These provide a relaxing and unobtrusive background, keeping the mood light without becoming too distracting. French-speakers get full voice acting, provided by a volunteer cast that actually do a pretty good job. Even though my French was way too rusty to really follow along, I enjoyed the lively energy of their performances, though I could maybe have done with a little more variety between characters. The English subtitles are generally clear, if a little eccentric in places, full of curious expressions (literally translated idioms?) such as "Now you're getting my full attention, beloved fried chicken!" Fortunately, that just adds to the charm.

The interface is pretty familiar and streamlined, with hotspots to click and objects to drag from an auto-hiding inventory at the bottom of the screen. You switch between controlling Magret or FaceDeBouc by clicking on their portraits in the top left, and can bring up the map, ask for a hint, or look through your case notes via icons in the top right. Additional icons show your percentage of progress and bring up a combined settings and save menu, while pressing space activates a hotspot highlighter. This sounds like everything you could reasonably want in a point-and-click game, but as with everything else here, the implementation is... quirky.

Magret & FaceDeBouc: The buddy-buddy case

Genre:	Mystery
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Crime solving, Team-up, Animal
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Investigative
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

First off, the hotspot highlighter is part of the hint system, so it only brings up the ones you strictly need to make progress. That's a genuinely interesting idea, particularly handy for stuck or impatient players, but rely on it too much and you'll miss all manner of jokes and offbeat observations. Then there's the tourist map of the town, which allows for quick travel, as you might expect. But where most games have room exits that take you to the map, Magret & FaceDeBouc doesn't. For example, early on you go from the police station reception to your office, but there's no way to exit back through the office door; instead, you have to first find the map and then use that to leave. That really threw me on my first playthrough, and it took a while to realise it wasn't a bug!

The hint system is adorable (provided by a snarky worm that slithers in, summoned by a horn blast) but not the most useful. Only one hint is available at a time, and they're vague at best. For example, one told me that I was missing an item, but not what or where it was. Gee, thanks! The note-taking system isn't the most reliable either: Like buses, you can have none appear for ages, only for half a dozen to pop up at once. Likewise, my progress was stuck at around 20% for the longest time, only to shoot up to more than 70% in a matter of minutes. I didn’t run into any issues with the actual gameplay, thankfully.

Inevitably as you progress through your investigation, wacky hijinks ensue. You'll have to trick your way into your own crime scene, deal inappropriately with a giant carnivorous guard plant, and distract a duchess with some rock and roll. You'll also have to put yourself in Magret and FaceDoBouc's shoes, and play to their (dubious) strengths. For example, Magret is too squeamish to rifle through dustbins or deal with blood, but FaceDeBouc has no such issues. He's also great in an insult-hurling contest, but less adept at questioning witnesses or appreciating art. And they're both equally lousy at doing the good cop-bad cop thing to get a confession.

For such a broadly comic game, the puzzles are (for the most part) logical and fair, at least once you realise (in classic point-and-click fashion) that the only way to get a stranded turtle some water is to smuggle one particular glass across town, or that you'll need to dismantle a suit of armour to put together a saucepan. Even so, a couple of puzzles did stretch my credulity to the breaking point, another relies on failing at the same action over and over until it finally works, and one has a (loosely) timed element.

Look past all the goofiness, though, and you'll find an unexpectedly coherent story underneath, which could easily have been turned into a more conventional detective mystery if we'd had more, uh, conventional detectives. Monsieur Couane, we rapidly discover, was no mere butcher and pastry provider, but rather an Indiana Jones figure who traveled the world to retrieve antiquities for secretive black market buyers while neglecting his wife. There are alibis and timelines to untangle, mysterious strangers who aren't all they seem, and a twist or two along the way. So many threads are left dangling, in fact, that it takes multiple post-credits scenes to resolve them all. For a game with a modest three to five hours of playtime, that's a lot, and it does help to ground the more outlandish moments.  

We’re on more well-trodden ground with the characters, which are a diverse and very French mix of stereotypes, from the moustache-twirling villain to the over-sexed wife and the charismatically old-world countess. Decades of cost-cutting mean that in place of a forensics department, we have Landroch, who cobbled together his Windows 98-powered “Skainaiteu” system in his living room and can’t seem to stop it from vaporising everything it analyses. Magret and FaceDeBouc love to break the fourth wall, too, reassuring each other that since this is an indie point-and-click game, not many players will see all their mistakes. There’s a general air of amiable incompetence that would be quite endearing if it wasn’t for all the poop jokes.

Final Verdict

Magret & FaceDeBouc: “The buddy-buddy case” runs the gamut from highbrow to low, taking a story that could have made for a quirky cosy crime caper, packing it with eccentric puzzles, and then drenching the whole lot in blood and scatological humour. It presents a brightly coloured cartoon world of adorable-looking anthropomorphic animals who (it turns out) would attack you with a chainsaw if provoked and fills it with offbeat puzzles. The odd bug and logical leap too far aside, it has a very definite personality that's as French as wine and croissants and unapologetically bawdy. Like snails in garlic, it's definitely not going to be to everyone's taste, but it may be an intriguing delicacy for some.

Peter played Magret & FaceDeBouc on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.