Who would've guessed that a spoof extraction shooter based around ducks would become a million-selling gaming phenomenon? That’s the extraordinary fate of Escape From Duckov, a duck-themed action game that’s—on some level at least—parodying 2017’s Escape From Tarkov, and yet is also a very entertaining game in its own right. We spoke to developer Team Soda to try to fathom how on Earth any of this splendid strangeness came to be.

While the soldier-based no-nonsense PvP combat of Escape From Tarkov has been around for the better part of a decade, single-player PvE game Escape From Duckov’s timing really couldn’t be much better. Escape From Tarkov is set to hit its 1.0 version after over eight years of Early Access, ensuring the game is top-of-mind again. Escape From Duckov managed to sneak out a month prior, ensuring it had a clear runway for its extraordinary take-off.

And its success is well-deserved. Despite the silly name and cartoonish presentation, Escape From Duckov is a joyfully compelling experience of panicked exploration, combat, and the gathering of loot, gambling how much longer you can survive against chickening (ducking?) out and returning to your base. You have a constant stream of quests to tick off, new stations and equipment to craft, skill levels to buy, and further reaches of the overground to explore, ensuring every run feels vital and every loss is a heartbreaking blow.

Team Soda, the five-person team behind Escape From Duckov, are based in China, working under the nation’s media platform Bilibili—think YouTube meets Netflix, with a gaming division. The team was started by Jeff Chen, who told me he’d dreamed of making games since he was a child, and was then blown away when Bilibili was willing to let him create his own game idea. That was 2021’s Snake Force, a top-down shooter loosely based on the classic early mobile game Snake, which was followed up in 2022 by side-scrolling shooter Soda Crisis. 

The same five people then went on to make Escape From Duckov—but how did they come up with such a peculiar idea?

“This has two parts,” said Chen. “Initially, we wanted to make a PVE game that retained the essence of Escape From Tarkov. I’m a hardcore Tarkov player myself, with over 1,400 hours, but I spend most of my time playing PvE.” 

His reason for this is clearly a driving factor behind Escape From Duckov: removing pressure. “I personally feel that PvP is very high-pressure and provides a lot of negative feedback for me and many other players. At the same time, Tarkov’s barrier to entry is very high, and it’s extremely hardcore. I wanted to let more people experience the fun of character progression in extraction shooters and appreciate the essential design elements found in Tarkov.” Team Soda streamlined those barriers to entry, but maintained the “core shooting experience, like recoil control, ballistics, and so on.” 

As for the name? “That was originally just our internet project codename, but we all thought it was fun, so we stuck with it.” Why ducks? “When we were done choosing the art style of the project,” Chen explained, “we tried many different styles and themes. One day, our artist drew a duck, and it got unanimous approval from the whole team, so we kept it.”

I wondered whether there was any fear as the game was put together that it might be dismissed as simply a spoof—a joke but not a "real" game—but it seems Team Soda were pretty confident throughout. 

“I don’t think the cartoonish and spoof style will discourage players’ desire to play,” Chen told me, his answer likely buoyed by the game’s having already sold over a million copies. “Players know we are a game that pays homage to Escape From Tarkov, and is purely PvE. Therefore, what players may be more interested in is how the game provides challenges, and how it delivers a sense of accomplishment and surprise through looting and progression. And what we need to do is find ways to create moments that exceed players’ expectations.”

Of course, I had to ask about those sales. With just five people making a game, and then seeing this level of success, it must be quite the experience. “To be honest, these results have definitely far exceeded our expectations,” said Chen, modestly. “We didn’t have a clear expectation for sales, but we were hoping to achieve a 90% positive rating from players. Right now, both the sales figures and the player reception have blown away our expectations.”

Escape From Duckov launched with modding tools already available and implemented, so I wondered if any early mods had already caught their attention. After explaining his delight that people were already choosing their own ways to play the game, Chen then specifically called out one mod. “The one that impressed us the most is the ‘KillFeed’ mod. It gives players better feedback on kills, leading to greater satisfaction from the game’s combat.”

As for developing the game, I wondered whether there was anything about creating this superb combination of the very silly and the very solid that surprised them. “The biggest surprise for me,” says Chen, “was probably the character creation tool we developed to [design] in-game NPCs faster. After getting feedback from our team and our publishing partner, it evolved into the character customization system you see when you start the game now. Using this system, players have already created all kinds of hilarious or cute creatures.”

Escape From Duckov is available now on the Epic Games Store.