The Plucky Squire (PC) review "There's more to the story..."

I’m all for iteration. Most of my favorite games over the years have iterated the heck out of a concept I’ve enjoyed dozens or maybe even hundreds of times. But sometimes, I want something that feels truly fresh. And that means that sometimes, I want something like The Plucky Squire.

There have probably been a few games before The Plucky Squire that explored the notion of hopping between a fantasy world in a storybook and the real world, then manipulating the pages of the physical book to impact events in the fantasy world it contains. There are too many thousands of games in existence to leave anything truly new under the sun. But if I’ve ever played something that explores that exact concept, I certainly don’t remember it. That’s my pick for the very best thing about the game: how fresh it feels, with developers who committed to the central idea and built a worthwhile experience around it. They didn’t always get things exactly right, in my opinion, but I admire the effort and I enjoyed my time spent playing the game.



In The Plucky Squire, you are introduced to the eponymous hero, who must face off against a joyless wizard to save the world he loves and to inspire a boy outside the books to go on to lead a creative, fulfilling life. There’s a lot at stake here. The game’s themes are pretty easy to get behind, through and through. Players learn the value of self-fulfillment, and of believing in yourself and working to reach your potential, even if some of the people around you have their doubts. Of course, there’s also a lot of emphasis on heroism.

The game’s themes perfectly suit a younger audience (with the possible exception of some late-game stuff that goes fairly dark), and so does the general art style. Players navigate storybook pages, dotted with villages and mountains and underground facilities that are presented as basic drawings suitable for an early audience. But don’t make the mistake of believing the game is just for kids. There’s a lot of humor throughout, and liberal breaking of the fourth wall. Most of the game’s best bits rely on an older gamer’s knowledge of tropes and pop culture and such. The audience for the whole affair is larger than might be immediately apparent. I don’t know how anyone can listen to the expressive narrator for long without being utterly charmed by the story he shares.

Play is divided into “chapters,” as feels appropriate. A full, non-rushed run through the campaign will require somewhere around 9 or 10 hours of play. There are numerus collectibles, but most of them don’t hide far off the beaten path. I got around 40 of the 50 concept art scrolls without devoting a lot of extra energy to the matter, for instance. And I found more than half of the more deviously hidden creatures. But I was plenty happy to let the story take me where it liked without extra meandering. And it led me at a fairly brisk pace.



Once the early tutorial-type stuff is out of the way, a typical chapter settles into a bit of a routine. You generally have to wander to a new part of the kingdom, meeting friends and solving their problems along the way. At some point, you’ll probably have to venture outside the book, by way of the various magical portals you stumble across. Then you can find some new tool that allows you to manipulate the book from the outside.

As an example of the puzzles at play, you might find a rubber stamper you can use to spread ink on a page. This prevents movement from that object within the game world. Maybe you want to stop a particular block from sliding when the pages of the book are then lifted on their side. And maybe sliding that block provides access to a hidden staircase that leads to a dungeon area? Hmm.

The game features combat at key moments. You’ll encounter weak mobs as you wander the world, and you can usually dispatch them pretty quickly with either close-quarters swordplay, or by chucking your blade like a boomerang. Outside of boss battles, these conflicts rarely prove especially satisfying, but your squire moves nimbly and controls remain generally tight. Health refills are also pretty numerous, and checkpoints generous. There are only a few places where you might run into frustration when dealing with whatever the game throws at you.



Outside combat, there are lots of puzzles. These tests of your ingenuity feel like they are the game’s main content, with combat serving as filler. The puzzles require you to think outside the box a bit (or should that be “outside the book”?). For instance, you might scamper across a page with a block of text describing two blocks made out of metal. Hit the text with your sword and you’ll learn some of those words can be replaced with words you gather from other pages within the book. Mixing things up in that manner might add to the number of blocks, or break them so you can manipulate them better. If the clues provided in general aren’t enough to help you, then you can visit little jack-in-the-box devices that offer more explicit advice.

There also are a few mini-games, with quality that varies. I liked one of them that basically served as a Punch-Out! clone. I had to box with a honey badger, hitting it with body blows and uppercuts while dodging telegraphed hits that could have sent me to the mat. In another mini-game, I had to fire bubbles at a descending wall of magic baubles to clear them and inflict damage on a magic-wielding foe. And there was yet another mini-game that had me tap a button in time with the rhythm to send debris flying back at an eagle that had tossed it my way. None of these mini-games are especially deep. They borrow their ideas from more satisfying, fuller experiences I’ve enjoyed in the past. I appreciate their inclusion here, even though they don’t excel, simply because they add to the fun by keeping players on their toes. Happily, there is an option to skip past them if they disrupt your good time, without penalty.



I’m not sure how easy it would have been to build the world The Plucky Squire occupies, but it seems like it might have posed some unusual challenges to the folks responsible. Those developers seem mostly to have responded as well as one could hope. The worlds aren’t expansive, but they’re tightly constructed and more than get the job done. I played the PC version and didn’t encounter any performance issues of note. My only difficulty came when I managed to move around an object and got stuck outside the intended play area. But it was easy enough to reload from the last save, and I didn’t lose any progress worth mentioning. I’ve read online that some people encountered soft locks and such. I didn’t have such issues myself, which leaves me to assume the issue has either been fixed, or isn’t particularly common.

Ultimately, the amount of fun you have with The Plucky Squire will likely be determined by your desire for new ideas that are competently executed. I suppose a larger team might have done more with the concept (and that’s a big “maybe”). But I came away mostly satisfied with the execution. I can happily recommend it to anyone who has read this review and feels intrigued. I’m glad the game exists and I’m glad I played it.

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Staff review by Jason Venter (September 25, 2024) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.