Dodo Duckie is a puzzle platformer about a duck who can't fit in — and it's out now on Xbox and PC

BornMonkie, a small indie studio from India run by siblings Samhith and Samveda, has launched its debut puzzle platformer Dodo Duckie on Xbox Series X|S and PC via Xbox Play Anywhere. The game follows a duckling raised among chickens who believes something is wrong with him because he simply can't fit in.

The studio originally pitched a much larger, more ambitious game to publishers, but rejections forced a practical rethink: what could a small team actually finish on their own? The answer was Dodo Duckie, a project that began as a prototype back in 2019 and was chipped away at for years between client work. One of the earliest and boldest design calls was removing the jump mechanic entirely from 3D space, replacing it with a perspective-flip system that lets players switch between 2D and 3D views to discover hidden paths and solve puzzles. Playtesting revealed something the team hadn't fully anticipated — players were charmed by Dodo's personality before they even engaged with the puzzle mechanics, which shifted how BornMonkie framed the whole experience: the character is the front door, the puzzle design is the reason to stay.

Getting the visual style right took two to three months of iteration the team wasn't satisfied with, until art director Vincent Boichut joined and identified the core problem. Because the budget only allowed for a single set of assets that had to read clearly from both 2D and 3D perspectives, the art direction was pushed toward clean shapes, rounded edges, and vibrant colors — a constraint that ended up defining the game's distinctive look. What reads as a deliberate stylistic choice was largely born from necessity. BornMonkie is part of India's indie scene, where securing publisher backing for large-scale projects remains genuinely difficult, and Dodo Duckie represents the studio's answer to that reality: a focused, personal game they could see through to the end entirely on their own terms.

Dodo Duckie is available now on Xbox Series X|S and PC with Xbox Play Anywhere support, meaning a single purchase covers both platforms.