An 'Overwhelmingly Positive' idle game about plastic ducks floating in a pool has a collectible card-game successor, and there's a demo you can play now

I am often in a state of delighted befuddlement at the games which prove popular on Steam, but few have simultaneously thrilled and baffled me as much as the success of Placid Plastic Duck Simulator. The game, which is really more of an interactive screensaver, involves guiding a rubber duck around a pool filled with other plastic ducks. There are 50 rubber ducks to find and a few other things to see if you can be bothered. But if you can't, that's OK too. As the game's own Steam description reads "live in the present moment, enjoy life".

Since it released in 2022, Placid Plastic Duck Simulator has racked up an 97% 'Overwhelmingly Positive' Steam rating out of more than 15,000 reviews, making it the 127^th top-rated game on all of Steam, according to SteamDB.

Any game that well regarded is likely to spawn a successor, and Placid Plastic Duck Simulator is no different. But dual developers turbolento games and Fantastico Studio haven't just knocked out 50 extra duck models and called it Placid Plastic Duck Simulator 2. In fact, while the developer's next game shares the plastic duck theme, it is otherwise completely different and substantially more involved.

Placid Plastic Deck – A Quiet Quest is a card-battling adventure placing you in the shoes of Zoi, a teenage girl who has fallen out with her best friend, and aims to reconcile their differences by entering a regional card game tournament (which is, in my opinion, how all personal rifts and, indeed, diplomatic incidents should be resolved).

There's an exploration phase that resembles a classic JRPG with top-down, sprite-based graphics and branching dialogues. When it comes to throwing down cards, however, the game switches to a 3D, first-person perspective where you engage in turn-based battles on connectable, animated boards.

Although the theme is heavily duck-centric, there are actually multiple decks that you can play with. I downloaded the demo and waddled through the tutorial section where you acquire your starter deck. After answering a bunch of questions in a spoof mashup of Pokémon's opening and the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, I ended up with the Void deck, which centres around dark, ethereal creatures rather than synthetic waterfowl.

The card game itself seems similar to Inscryption, which is an interesting, if perfectly reasonable template to adopt. I do hope the game uses its theme to build upon the basics as it progresses, however. The script could also do with a little tuning up, as some of the phrases Zoi says in responses to your choices don't wholly line up.

Nonetheless, it seems like a fun little package, and quite the glow up from the idle simplicity of Placid Plastic Duck Simulator. There's no set release date for Placid Plastic Deck yet, but the developers aim for it to take flight toward the end of this year.