The Plucky Squire review

Kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it. Sure, the planet’s on fire and they’ll spend most of their future looking after me in a retirement home as I ramble about how good I used to be at Balatro, but have you seen the games they’ve been getting lately? Back in my day, children’s games were dismal 3D platformer movie tie-ins—not magical storybook adventures made with real love and care that ingeniously riff on 2D Zelda, yet also have tons of personality all of their own. Bah!

You play Jot, the titular squire and star of a series of children’s books in which you foil the dastardly plans of a right git of a wizard called Humgrump. At first, the game is a wonderfully animated 2D storybook. You’ve got an upgradable sword that delightfully makes words like POW and WHAM appear when you hit enemies with it—it's that sort of vibe.

After a brief spot of monster-bashing, you soon meet Jot’s adorable friends Violet and Thrash and the scene-stealing Moonbeard, a music-loving mentor figure who helps himself to some of the game’s best lines. Traditional light combat, puzzling, and platforming are elevated immensely by the beautiful presentation, honey-voiced narrator, and lovely little details like how each screen transition is literally the book flipping to a new page.

Ah, but The Plucky Squire has higher aspirations than being ‘just’ a gorgeous 2D game. As you’re about to save the day for the umpteenth time, Humgrump reveals he’s pulled a Truman Show and discovered that they’re both characters in a children’s book, one in which he always loses. So naturally, Humgrump takes the only logical course of action and casts a spell that banishes you from the book entirely. Suddenly the game transforms as you’re tossed rudely out of the 2D book and into a fully 3D platformer set on the desk where the book is being kept.

It’s a terrific hook, as Jot now has to deal with platforms made of lego, stationery (not stationary) obstacle courses, and some of the best use of a real-world aesthetic in a 3D platformer since the excellent It Takes Two. You soon meet a friendly bookworm who teaches you how to leap back into the storybook, but it’s honestly too much fun just wandering around these arts-and-craft levels full of cute touches like oh Christ, giant beetles to avoid, why why why?!

Arghhh! What’s something that grim doing here? And come to think of it, what was that name we saw in the opening credits? Why, it’s our horrible old friend Devolver Digital! Didn’t we pass some sort of law saying the publishers of Hotline Miami could never publish a children’s game? It sounds like something we should have done. But amazingly, it’s a combo that works. You can see the Devolver influence in the sharp writing and those horrible horrible beetles, giving the game enough edge to stop its storybook setting becoming insufferably twee. And while it can tend to ramble, dialogue is witty and clever without any of the smug or lazy reference humour of, say, a Dreamworks production. It’s consistently hysterical and one of the most heartfelt games I’ve played, even if its giant beetles make me want to whimper and throw things at it.

Jot will eventually find tools that let him manipulate the storybook, in the form of a stamp that can freeze objects on the page, a bomb stamp that can blow things up and would likely get you banned from the library, and the power to ‘tilt’ the book, essentially lifting the page to make objects slide across it. There’s some terrific puzzling here, wherein you’re constantly leaping in and out of the book to solve conundrums, and while it’s occasionally a little hand-holdy, there’s enough confident stretches where you’re left to figure stuff out for yourself.

I think my favourite power might be the ability to manipulate the very text of the book itself. You can use your sword to bash certain words out of sentences and then replace them to change things. E.g. turning ‘a metal crate blocked the way’ into ‘a broken crate blocked the way’. What a broken idea! I mean, great idea! I’d honestly have played a whole game of just this.

Squire prefers a more scattershot approach, constantly mixing things up rather than digging deep on just one mechanic. That’d be more disappointing if it didn’t keep the pace up and the ideas weren’t so fun. It does a nice line in referencing other games for a quick gag or welcome jolt of variety, like a rhythm combat section in a heavy metal-obsessed mountain community, or a brief jetpack-fuelled shmup on the side of a coffee mug. A stealth section where you play as a mouse that cribs from Crypt of the Necrodancer, of all things, is just one of many unexpected but welcome surprises. I’ve had to seek out a bow and arrow in tons of games, but this is the first one I can recall that’s made me get it by fighting a Magic the Gathering card in a turn-based RPG interlude.

Here’s a good way of testing whether this is for you: Imagine not liking a game wherein at one point two of the characters pause a conversation about the nature of their reality to look out of the book and wave hello to you. I… I can’t. It’s too charming. Let me go back to reviewing horrible FPS’ about angry boys filling aliens with even angrier bullets, I beg you.

It can be a little glitchy, or sometimes very glitchy, such as when it refused to load my save file and eventually wiped it from the face of the Earth. That’s far from an insignificant issue, though hopefully something that can be put down to a pre-release build (I’ve not seen anyone report similar misfortune in other reviews, and a patch full of fixes has already been released). The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if it deleted the save in the hopes I wouldn’t discover that the mostly brilliant climax of this game for children (children!) ends by introducing our vulnerable impressionable youths to the irredeemable sin of surprise second phase boss fights (boo!). Nonetheless, maybe keep an eye on the Steam reviews/developer updates to see where the PC version is at if you don’t want to risk not seeing the story to its conclusion.

That frustration aside, this is a great idea executed with true style. Jot is the star of the Plucky Squire series of books. Based on his excellent debut, I’d love him to become the star of a series of games too.