The Plucky Squire is a joyful, beautifully visualized adventure game, bursting with inventive ideas that will make you feel like a kid again.
By Steve Watts on September 17, 2024 at 9:00AM PDT
The Plucky Squire is a game that will rightly receive a lot of attention for its eye-catching visual gimmick, which merges the worlds of 2D and 3D art around a clever story hook. But more than just its whizbang artistry, The Plucky Squire is a game that takes full advantage of its premise–telling a kid-friendly and heartfelt story, filling its well-realized world with lovable characters, and delivering constant surprises. It is a reminder, appropriately, to never judge a book by its cover.
You play as Jot, the titular “Plucky Squire” in a series of children’s books of the same name. The series of picture books is popular enough to have inspired a large fan base and merch, which is absolutely believable given how playful and inviting it is. While Jot himself is the classic silent protagonist, the surrounding cast of characters are exuberant and frequently funny, and the world of Mojo itself, which the characters occupy, is colorful and imaginative.
Initially, the game presents itself as a simple top-down adventure, complete with the creative visual effect where transitions and scenes change as if flipping through a book’s pages. The narrative takes a twist when the antagonist, Humgrump, discloses his scheme to expel the hero, Jot, from the book to the real world. This transition introduces a new gameplay layer where Jot must find his way back into the book and subsequently discovers abilities to enter and exit the book using “Metamagic” portals. Jot ventures into the real-world space on the desk of Sam, a child who is an avid fan of the Plucky Squire series.
The shift between the two dimensions is enchantingly fluid. Inside the book, Jot and his companions are rendered in charming 2D, reminiscent of classic illustrated children’s books, complete with lively animations. Once outside the book, Jot takes on a three-dimensional form and the perspective shifts giving a detailed view. Both artistic styles are captivating and harmonious. As the game progresses, players can transport objects from the real world into the book, where they seamlessly adopt the 2D style.
The narrative arc of Jot being expelled and then fighting to return and confront Humgrump is engaging by itself. Yet, The Plucky Squire enriches this plot with emotional depth by positioning you not only as a hero within a book but as a source of inspiration for Sam, who cherishes Jot and crafts his own creative stories. The stakes are heightened with the realization that Humgrump’s victory would affect not just Jot’s universe but also Sam’s creative aspirations, which are evident throughout his room.
Gameplay-wise, The Plucky Squire combines elements reminiscent of both 2D and 2.5D Zelda games, integrating puzzles that leverage the unique book-jumping feature. Players need to interact both inside and outside the book to alter their surroundings, and the narrative motif is continuously enriched by an omnipresent narration, including in-game text that players manipulate to solve puzzles.
One moment you may be rearranging the words on the page to change an impassable barrier into a broken gate. A few minutes later and you’re hopping outside of the book, trying to find an object that can help you inside the story. Sometimes you’ll need to flip back a few pages to find a missing word you need to complete a word-puzzle. Occasionally the book will even change perspective, turning on its side to present a piece of the stage that is more vertically oriented.
Your ability to manipulate the book gets increasingly complex–eventually you can tilt the book to let objects inside it slide around, freeze certain pieces of the environment to keep them from moving, and even close the book to transfer an object from one page to another. The puzzle solutions hit a sweet spot of tickling your brain without venturing too far into the overly taxing or frustrating. If you do get stuck, there’s almost always a hint totem nearby that will point you in the right direction without entirely spelling out the solution.
The hint system is Minibeard, a miniaturized simulacrum of your wizard mentor, Moonbeard. In the real world he manifests as a piece of merch: a My Talkin’ Minibeard doll. Your other friends, a young witch in training named Violet and a rock-and-roll mountain troll named Thrash, round out the main cast. The land of Mojo has the surreal, comical stylings of a show like Adventure Time, with fun little touches throughout to give it a sense of personality and place. The city of Artia, the royal center of Mojo, is not only composed of artistic tools like paintbrushes, but also full of characters who visually reference famous works of art like Edvard Munch’s The Scream or The Son of Man by Magritte. The mountain trolls are old-school metal-heads, and so many of the trees in their environment take the shape of throwing horns. Every time I thought I had seen everything the world of Mojo had to offer, it threw a new surprise that made me smile.
That’s true for the gameplay as well. The Plucky Squire takes full advantage of its meta-breaking premise to introduce loads of variety that break up the pacing. In one early example, you need to venture outside the book to find a bow from a nearby elven huntress, only to discover that the one you’re searching for resides in a Magic The Gathering-like CCG card. So you leap into the card and engage in a simple turn-based RPG battle to earn her bow. This only happens once in the game, and then it’s off to the next activity. At another point, you jump into a spaceship mug and the game briefly turns into a side-scrolling shoot-em-up. Jot and his friends take part in boss battles that resemble Punch-Out, a color-matching puzzle game, and a rhythm game. It’s genre tourism, but each of them is so well-crafted that they’re more than welcome as breathers for the main adventure.
The result is a game that feels anchored safely in classic Zelda-like mechanics, while also allowing itself to be bursting with new ideas and creative touches that make the world lively and distinct. Those ideas continue right up until the final boss encounter, which introduces yet another new gameplay type that feels wholly different from everything that came before. This can be a risky proposition, as often games that venture too far outside their core mechanics at the very end can feel tacked on or lacking confidence in a finale. Thankfully, The Plucky Squire put just as much care and craftsmanship into this as it did its other genre experiments, helping it to feel like the culmination of a grand storybook adventure.
The Plucky Squire is a joyful story about creativity and inspiration that is itself both creative and frequently inspired. In the world of the game, The Plucky Squire is a beloved franchise and popular character with multiple entries in his long-running series. Here in the real world, he deserves to be a star too, and I can only hope this is the start of his success story.
