The Plucky Squire | Review

Jon "Sikamikanico" Clarke September 17, 2024Last Updated: September 16, 2024

0 5 minutes read

The Plucky Squire certainly caught my attention back when it was revealed by publisher Devolver back in 2022. A first release from new developers All Possible Futures, The Plucky Squire is – at least on the surface – a wonderful adventure that combines 2D and 3D gameplay in unique and imaginative ways.

While it genuinely is incredibly charming and absolutely gorgeous to look at, the gameplay on offer here is sadly, rather unengaging.

Let’s get into it.

Once Upon A Time…

In The Plucky Squire, you play as Jot, the hero of a children’s story book. The game initially sets itself up as a Zelda-like-Link-to-the-past-style adventure that takes place between the pages, complete with a narrator and a whole host of great characters.

Set in the ‘Land of Mojo‘, Jot and best friends Violet (a colourful mage) and Thrash (a heavy metal mountain troll) are facing off against the evil wizard Humgrump, who of course, is up to no good.

The story is nicely written stuff, full of zany one-off characters and returning appearances. It’s told via in-game cutscenes all voiced by a very amusing narrator. There are wizards, Shakespeare obsessed snails and an entire world based on various artists, from Salvador Dali to Banksy.

Following a fairly mellow and overly lengthy introduction to the Land of Mojo and it’s various inhabitants, the game soon breaks the 4th wall and things start getting interesting. Humgrump has learned the truth about the world – that it’s all pre-written, all of them merely characters in a book, and that Jot, by being the hero of the story, will always win the day.

Humgrump has had quite enough of losing, thank-you-very-much, and has managed to break out of the book by utilising ‘meta-magic’, which he employs to kick Jot out of the book, and worse, bring things into it from the real world, and indeed, other books.

Against this new threat to their very existence, Jot and pals set off to save the day, and over the course of 10 chapters (and around 8 hours) you’ll experience more imagination and charm than in any other game I’ve played this year. And I really mean that. However, before we get into what it’s like to play, I have to wax lyrical for a bit about how The Plucky Squire looks.

A Sight to Behold

Had The Plucky Squire remained a purely-2D adventure, it still would have been drop-dead gorgeous to look at. The sheen across the pages of the book in which we play are perfectly rendered, the art-style and animations of all the characters completely capturing the look and feel of a printed work.

I lost count of the number of screenshots I took throughout my playtime, and each one of them could have been a promotional image for the game. The quality of the presentation is without reproach, and is equalled by the music, with a variety of themes and styles for your listening pleasure – it’s all just lovely.

However, one of the unique aspects of The Plucky Squire is that we don’t always play in that 2D world. As the story unfolds, the wicked wizard Humgrump kicks Jot out of the book using ‘meta-magic’ and into the real world.

We can stroll across the books pages, and the various real-world items and objects strewn across the kids desk upon which it rests. The texture work here is equally impressive, and it’s great fun seeing 2D characters brought to life in 3D as you navigate the various ‘challenges’ ahead.

Genre Mash-up

At first, the different puzzles in The Plucky Squire revolve around the initial and central book concept, with certain narrative passages appearing in the play space, and having words players can swap around to solve puzzles.

Swap the word ‘forest’ for ‘ruin’ and watch the pages change in real time, a forest blocking your path usurped by a ruined castle. Replace the word ‘stacked’ for ‘scattered’ and watch books magically pile up so you can access the next page.

This is a recurring mechanic throughout the game, and it’s never not particularly obvious as to what the solution is. There’s some playfulness every now and then with the book allowing certain words to be swapped and having an effect, even if the effect doesn’t solve the puzzle, but there’s always only one solution to move forward.

Following Jot’s ejection from his own story-book, the swap to 3D introduces other amusing mechanics, turning The Plucky Squire from top-down Zelda-like, or 2D platformer to a full on 3D platformer instead. Jot’s navigation and transition across both 3D and 2D spaces is certainly playful, with him being able to jump in to various 2D planes, from post-it note doodles, RPG-style playing cards to the side of a coffee mug.

There really is wonderful variety here. The Plucky Squire is chock full of brilliant references and homages to all sorts of different games, past and present. You’ll face-off against a honey-badger in a Punch-Out style brawl, shoot evil bugs in the eye in an amusing riff on Duck Hunt, play match 3-style games against evil wizards, participate in rhythm games against heavy metal eagles and even fight aliens in side-scrolling shoot’em ups.

Throughout the adventure, thanks to your wizard pal Moonbeard, you’ll gather new items to help you manipulate the book, be it flipping pages to back-track to different sections to find a way forward, or tilting the book entirely to cause objects to move on the page on their own. The game is always throwing new mechanics at the player, and then, to my dismay, immediately providing the solution.

The Answer is…

This sadly is the other recurring theme in The Plucky Squire. For all of the inventive brilliance on display from the development team at All Possible Futures – and seriously, the switch up between genres and perspectives, the writing, the graphical fidelity – it is all absolutely fantastic – the game seems to scared to let the player loose with those mechanics, and just experiment.

I can count on one hand the number of times the game introduced a cool new mechanic and then didn’t immediately signal the solution to me. There’s an argument to be made that this is just great, inclusive game design – but for me, it removed virtually all challenge and made the gameplay feel frustratingly stale. All the imagination on display, and yet the game is so depressingly linear.

It also has a tendency to frequently take control away from the player, either to deliver slowly-doled out exposition (via un-skippable cutscenes), played out as pages in the book, complete with animated speech bubbles.

A Game For Everyone

Again, I need to be clear here, the writing and artwork itself is great. It’s funny, charming, everything I should want it to be – but it’s also obvious and slow, and combined with the general lack of challenge that permeated throughout my 8 or so hours, the game for me committed the worst possible sin – I got bored.

The Plucky Squire truly prides itself on being a game for everyone, and offers some wonderful accessibility options. Invincibility, one-hit kill options, auto-jumping – it’s all there to make the game as open as possible for every type of player. It even has a “story mode” to make things easier.

My ten year old son, (who watched with some jealousy as I played over the last couple of weeks) is absolutely looking forward to playing it upon release. I know that he will enjoy and adore playing through The Plucky Squire.

It’s a wonderful medley of the games of yesteryear, all encased in a heart-felt and joyful shiny wrapper. For veteran gamers (us old grey-beards) it’s overly simple, and we won’t find much challenge here.

Happily Ever After…For Some

The Plucky Squire is a game clearly made with a serious amount of love for the wonderful medium of glorious interactivity that is video games. And for it being the first title from development team All Possible Futures, it’s a staggering achievement in art, design and ideas. It’s just a shame the gameplay didn’t get as much attention as the nostalgia it so skilfully indulges.

Code for review was provided by the Publisher.