Placid Plastic Duck Simulator Review

Placid Plastic Duck Simulator is a new one for us. It’s the first time that we’ve unlocked an achievement while writing a review. We don’t have a gamepad in our hands – it’s downstairs on the coffee table – but the game is running, generating us passive Gamerscore while we tap our thoughts away on the PC. 

You see, Placid Plastic Duck Simulator isn’t really a game. Not properly. It’s got some gamified touches that make a vague gesture towards video games, and there are moments where you might think that you have control. But trust me: you don’t. Instead of a game, Placid Plastic Duck Simulator is a screensaver. It’s the equivalent of those virtual aquariums, fake fireplaces or bouncing windows logos. 

We’re half-wondering how it passed Microsoft certification. Like Aabs Animals before it, it’s devoid of interaction, which makes us wonder how a case was made for it being, you know, on the Game Store. You’d certainly have a hard time explaining why achievements should be attached to it. But there they are, 1000 of them, plinking away on our Xbox App as we write. 

To be fair to Placid Plastic Duck Simulator, the comparison with Aabs Animals is an unfair one. That ‘game’ was a grift, with no effort put into it whatsoever. It was just an animator’s portfolio from LinkedIn, attached to a £7.99 price tag. Placid Plastic Duck Simulator has a bit more to it, but whether that ‘bit’ is enough to warrant £7.49 is up for debate. 

In the very first moments of Placid Plastic Duck Simulator, you are watching a single plastic duck in a swimming pool. It bobs away, gently moving in one direction or another. You can view that duck from a deckchair, or poolside by a radio. You can activate a cursor and lock onto the duck, zooming in and out to see it in all its glorious detail. 

What you can’t do is move it. You might think you can, and you may go through the stages of grief as you realise you can’t. We jammed the analogue sticks in various directions, wondering if we saw the duck move, almost imperceptibly. Alas, no: the ducks are at the whims of the physics in the pool, and all you can do is watch. 

The worst moments are definitely in these opening sections. Once you’ve got over the hump of understanding that no, you can’t move them, and yes, it is a screensaver, you are stuck with a single duck. And a single duck is not where it’s at. You need a lot of plastic ducks (what’s the collective noun for rubber duckies? A honk? A bob?) for Placid Plastic Duck Simulator to have any merit whatsoever, and that requires an investment of at least half an hour, admittedly without you needing to actually watch. 

You see, new ducks get air-dropped into the swimming pool at a rate of about one every two minutes. Those new ducks are pulled from ‘The Collection’: a handy guide of every duck in the game, accessible from the pause menu. Which duck is entirely random (although we suspect there is some rarity attached to them, as ‘Special’ ducks get added less frequently). One of the miniscule joys of Placid Plastic Duck Simulator is seeing what duck will arrive next, whether it’s one you’ve had before, and spotting if it has a unique property. 

That mention of unique properties is Placid Plastic Duck Simulator’s saving grace. On occasion, a duck arrives that has an effect on other ducks. A propellor-hatted duck can fly, momentarily, into the air. That’s useful, as it can knock an ice block out of a tree or land on a flamingo lilo. A flaming duck can set flammable ducks alight, as well as – spoiler – melting that ice block. There are ducks that sink, and ducks that spray water; ducks that gang-tackle other ducks, and ducks that magnetise. 

Obviously you can’t encourage these interactions, so you’re left hoping they will happen, which – if we’re being honest – wasn’t that often, as we mostly played Placid Plastic Duck Simulator AFK. But the fact that the designers coded these interactions gives us a little glow in our hearts. It isn’t a complete grift. 

There are some moderately neat environment interactions too. A cable-car waits at the bottom of one of the two levels, and invites two ducks to float inside and take a trip back up to the top parts of the pool. A zomboni pushes ducks around, while a puck waits for a feisty duck to knock it into a goal. And there are slides and Futurama-style pipes. If you’ve seen them once you’ll likely be done with them, but they’re a small flourish that makes things initially interesting. 

A completionist will enjoy The Collection. As mentioned, it’s an exhaustive list of every duck, and there’s some satisfaction in seeing it slowly get populated with rubber duckies. In Placid Plastic Duck Simulator’s second-best feature, you can rename all of the ducks. We took great delight in naming horned-demon ducks after exes, and letting our daughters name each duck after schoolmates. If you have someone in your house who enjoys creating Sims families based on their own acquaintances, then they might get a kick out of the customisation here. 

But all of these hooks, these little points of interest, have a shelf life. They’re nice touches, and we appreciate the effort that’s gone into them, but what remains – the persistent experience in Placid Plastic Duck Simulator – is pretty damn dire. It’s not only the brain-numbing concept that’s the problem: it just doesn’t deliver on that concept.

If you leave Placid Plastic Duck Simulator running as a screensaver, it doesn’t really work. The camera clips into flamingos and pipes, leaving you staring at polygons. If you lock to a duck, the game gets bored after a while and moves to another perspective. It doesn’t manage the frame well: there’s no way to get a soothing, satisfying view of the pool. Instead, the camera is jittering about, like it’s sellotaped to a housefly. 

But what jumps the rubber shark is how inexcusably measly it all is. There are two pools to bob around in, and they’re no bigger than a few parking spaces. They should be overflowing with secrets and interesting interactions, but they are mostly just picture-postcards. Sure, there are plenty of ducks, but too few of them do something interesting. Considering how simple Placid Plastic Duck Simulator must have been to make, you would have thought the devs would be eager to add bells and whistles. 

(Oh, there we go, we’ve just unlocked another achievement. Apparently a ferry passed in the background while we were writing.)

‘Simulator’ is probably stretching the definition a little too far. Placid Plastic Duck Simulator is a screensaver, with no interaction outside of renaming your ducks. It’s like watching a summer holiday by the pool via CCTV, as you passively accumulate ducks and achievements. If that’s enough for you, then fair play: hook a duck and dive in. For us, it was about as exciting as watching a wet duck drying.