Summary
The Plucky Squire looks lovely. Its charming cartoonish art style caught the eyes of thousands when the first trailer dropped in 2022, and the namedrop ofPokemonalum James Turner brought yet more fans on board. It seems strange to call people fans of a game that hasn’t been released yet, but judging by the amount of fanart and excited social media posts, this game already has just that.
I waslooking forward to the quirky action adventure, but treated it with cautious optimism. While the art direction looked stellar and the switch between 2D and 3D gameplay is an intriguing hook, the cosy genre has its pitfalls. Too often, in my experience, cosy games forgo interesting mechanics in case they grate on the player or cause frustration. While I hoped playingThe Plucky Squirewould feel like a warm hug and a bedtime story, it would need more than an adorable charm to win me over. Thankfully, I needn’t have worried.
Genre Crossing
The Plucky Squire mostly plays like an old-schoolZeldagame. Guide Jot, the eponymous squire, and his gang of pals through the pages of his own storybook. Much like A Link to the Past, you fight your way through each screen before moving off the edge of the page to load the next one. The Plucky Squire modernises this nostalgic mechanic by furnishing it with the physical pageturns of the book you’re moving through.
Stabbing, sword throwing, rolling, and jumping are your staple options here, but just as you’re settling into your goblin-slaying rhythm, The Plucky Squire turns its back on the Zelda-esque gameplay it calls home and throws in a few pages of side-scrolling platforming. Then there’s a vertical descent where you avoid falling boulders like an anti-Donkey Kong. And a boss fight with an over the shoulder third person camera in which you dodge side to side and throw punches at an angry honey badger?
Every few minutes, The Plucky Squire throws a new genre at you. Who knows if any of them will return after the minutes you spend with them the first time round? Who cares? If I was worried about this cosy adventure being mechanically light or its adorable premise getting old after a few hours, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The Plucky Squire is constantly reinventing itself and throwing fun, new challenges in your direction.
My favourite mechanic is one of the most simple. Jot will periodically come across unfinished sentences in the world, and must find the missing words in order to progress. The earliest example is “The ____ swung ____” writ across the floor. A swarm of goblins guards the word “open” and the word “gate” is hidden in a nearby bush. Physically grabbing these words, the very script of the story Jot is living, and ordering them correctly will reward you with a gate obediently swinging open.
This is where The Plucky Squire steps up to the next level. Every mechanic, every genre-crashing double page spread, is folded into the narrative. The game never ceases to remind you that you’re reading a storybook. This is a children’s tale of courage and adventure. Whether you’re flipping to the back of the book to find the tutorial area or dragging the author’s sentences into place with brute force, the mechanics and narrative blend seamlessly together.
Dimension Hopping
But something’s gone wrong. A wizard breaks the fourth wall briefly, mentioning that this isn’t how the story usually goes. Something is seriously wrong, and it’s probably the fault of an evil sorcerer unleashing unstable magic in the world. And, as expected, Jot is one of the only fellas capable of stopping them.
The story is only hinted at in the three chapters of my preview, but Jot quickly understands that he must save this story, and the consequences of failure are far grander than he could have ever imagined. It’s this fear that pulls him from the pages and into the 3D world around the storybook you’ve exclusively played inside until that point.
Suddenly, a whole new world opens up to you, and The Plucky Squire is a 3D platformer set in a child’s bedroom. We knew that this would happen from countless trailers, but when it occurs naturally as you play through the game, it feels nothing short of magical.
Incisive, varied, mechanically dense, and narratively layered, The Plucky Squire is a truly special game. If the second and third acts live up to the brilliance of the first few hours, we’ll have a pageturner on our hands. After three chapters of heartwarming joy and surprises on (and off) every page, I have no doubts that Jot will finish the masterpiece that he’s so eloquently started with a flourish.
