Game: Duck Side of the Moon
Genre: Adventure, Casual, Indie
System: Nintendo Switch (Also on Steam (Windows, and SteamOS + Linux))
Developer | Publisher: Starbrew Games
Age Rating: US Everyone | EU 3+
Price: US $19.99 | UK £16.74 | EU € 19,99
Release Date: May 7th, 2026
Review code used, with many thanks to Starbrew Games.
Starbrew is a small indie game studio, based in the Netherlands and Duck Side of the Moon is their debut release.
Will this be a quacker of an adventure?
Ground Control to Duck Side of the Moon
After choosing a name for the spaceship (which doubles as the save filename), Duck Side of the Moon opens with a cutscene showing Doug, an overworked and very tired duck astronaut, falling asleep and crashing his spaceship. Playing as Doug, you are given an overview of the controls and guided to pickup the mining gadget. The starting tasks are clear and concise and the conversation between Doug and the ship’s computer is amusing. Once some of the rubbish has been blasted away, you repair the control panel (with duck tape, of course!) to enable the exit hatch to be opened.
No sooner is it repaired, than one of the local inhabitants enters the spacecraft. Unable to communicate with him, you are guided through repairing the crafting station and creating a translator. Billy, the intruder and local inventor, has a plan to help get you back into space, but you’ll have to collect the resources needed.
Starting with Billy’s quest to find the pier, Doug waddles and flies out into the unknown.
Duck Side of the Moon is a structured adventure; fulfilling requests to progress the storyline, although you can explore as much as you like within the bounds of that area. The main adventure takes about 4 to 5 hours to complete and with lots of quests and mini-games there is a good variety of activities to keep you busy.
Upgrading and Repairing in Duck Side of the Moon
There are numerous floating islands in the world of Duck Side of the Moon, some large, some small; so there’s lots to explore. Doug, being a duck, can fly around, as well as waddle and there are spring boards at various locations, which catapult him through the air. It took a while to get use to the flying, and at some points, needing to use both the R and ZR buttons was tricky.
Hidden around the rocky islands are treasure chests, music discs and pages of lore. You will also find bolts, some floating in space, others given as a reward for helping a local resident and scattered across the rocky islands are lots of minerals to collect.
The bolts are crucial for repairing and using the ship’s upgrade bay. Here you unlock new rooms on the ship enabling Doug to change into one of the many costumes you find, play a music disc or read the pages of lore. One of the early upgrades is a much needed storage room, but annoyingly the minerals don’t stack and if you’re not careful, you’ll run out of space. Luckily most resources can be dropped, and they stay floating in mid-air, until you have space to store them.
Without giving too much away, you end up leaving the lighthouse area and continuing your adventure in a much brighter set of islands. It follows a similar principle of completing tasks to help both the locals and make repairs to your ship. There are some great mini-games to play, including a version of ten-pin bowling and a rock shooting minecart race.
The next major repair will allow you to unlock even more on the ship, including the achievements. I like achievements in games and with 40 to aim for in Duck Side of the Moon, I was impressed. Until, that is, I realised that some of them were back in the lighthouse area. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way back there. Maybe I missed something, but there was no clear path to return, and I completed the rest of the main game feeling somewhat disappointed.
Gameplay
The controls are explained, and interaction points are given on-screen. Duck Side of the Moon generally played smoothly in docked and handheld modes, although the colours and font used for the text made it slightly awkward to read on the Switch Lite screen. Some text was too small to clearly read, but the main conversations were fine. There is limited touchscreen functionality.
Unfortunately, there were some issues with the version I played. To complete one of the main quests, I needed to shoot a key, but I couldn’t change to the tool I needed. After using the jukebox, I lost the ability to look at the trophies and the icon for the bomb tool was the mining laser. In all cases, reloading the game resolved the issue. However, when talking to Rika and Elise the dialogue consistently froze and I needed to crash to the Switch home page to restart. At another point, I reloaded my main game to discover the landscape had vanished. This took several attempts to correct, eventually, going into the volcano triggered the necessary ‘re-draw’ function.
Duck Side of the Moon autosaves, and there is a manual save in the pause menu. There are several save slots, to allow for multiple playthroughs. There is no time of day or clock.
Conclusion
There is a lot to enjoy in Duck Side of the Moon, the storyline is witty and charming, the exploration is expansive, and the crafting is well structured. At times, flying as Doug was great fun, but I also found it frustrating, especially when needing greater dexterity than my fingers wanted to demonstrate.
However, there is a disconnect between the upgrade path and access to the various areas, and together with the issues I encountered, my overall enjoyment was reduced.
Final Verdict: I Like it 
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