Escape from Duckov isn’t what I was expecting at all. Soaring concurrent player-counts and extraordinary sales are usually reserved for Steam games with multiplayer. Those are the games that tend to catch hold and burn hot, then burn out, some months later. But Duckov is a single-player game, or at least it is in its standard form (there are co-operative mods). It’s a single-player extraction shooter, which even to write feels like a contradiction – extraction shooters are multiplayer! But not here. You leave your bunker to explore an aggressive world and loot everything you see, returning to base to build and upgrade. Then you do it all over again.
It’s surprisingly chilled out – that’s the other thing that wrongfoots me about it. That’s not to say there’s no tension, mind you. Duckov reminds me a lot of Hotline Miami in how there are sudden bursts of frenetic, bloody action. You’ll be walking around and flicking your top-down conical field of vision around you, then you’ll hear a quack and an enemy will come at you – and come at you hard. The moment you glimpse them on your screen, they’ll already be shooting, so unless you mash the mouse-button and quickly return fire, you’ll be dead. There’s a lot of dying in Duckov. Death is unceremonious and swift.
But there’s no gritty oppression here, no teenage angst, or self-serious military grizzle. There’s a brightly coloured world and you are a duck – that’s probably all I need to say. You’ll meet a muscular duck with a six-pack who wants you to collect eggs so he can keep his protein uptake up, which is silly and, come to think of it, not a little strange considering he’s eating duck eggs. Let’s not dwell on that; the game doesn’t dwell on that. It’s lighthearted – everything about Duckov projects lightness, except perhaps the tense tip-toeing around as you pre-emptively cover every nook and cranny an enemy might suddenly spring from.
I didn’t expect as much base-building and crafting either. This adds a sedate side to the game where you waddle around your bunker base seeing to various pieces of busywork: quest hand-ins, trading, storage organisation, crafting, upgrading. All while accompanied by a jazzy lounge track that would work perfectly with a bath on a Sunday afternoon. And these innards give the game a feeling of substance, of quality, perhaps, and development time, which helps Duckov feel like actually it’s a genuine thing. That it’s not just an opportunistic rip-off of big-bucks extraction shooter Escape from Tarkov. Indeed, there doesn’t seem to be anything rip-offy besides the name about it. Duckov feels like it has a purpose of its own beyond parody. I can see why people like it and why they’re sticking with it.
Moreover, it’s another extraordinary Steam success story no one saw coming. See also the success of Megabonk – a 3D take on Vampire Survivors. These are small projects that are trouncing, and perhaps embarrassing much larger ones, on an infinitesimally smaller budget. Games, really, they have no business stepping into the ring with. And yet they do, and yet they win. It’s remarkable. Successes like Duckov and Megabonk pierce this insistently gloomy cloud that hangs above us in this industry, lancing it like sunbeams, and demonstrate that incredible success is still out there, still possible. Riches do, potentially and maybe more sporadically, await. All that’s changed are the kinds of games people want to play.
