If I was a father, I think I’d love playing a game like The Plucky Squire with my kid–based on a few of the early chapters I played, its plotline seems straightforward and it’s mechanically simple while also offering some fun variety in its assortment of minigames. Plus, the game features a story that intriguingly deals with themes about fate and choice, and then frames that against childhood passions and interests. The Plucky Squire feels like one of those stories I so clearly remember experiencing when I was 10 or 11 years old and loving for how it broached symbolism and metaphors in a way that was more complex than what I had experienced at age five.
The Plucky Squire has a fantastic set-up: You’re playing as the hero of a children’s book written by a kid destined to be an author one day. You’ve been preordained to beat the evil wizard not only in this story but in every book by this author. Said wizard isn’t a fan, and so instead opts to magically eject you from your picture-perfect world, giving him the leeway to change the events of the book. But his actions unintentionally provide you with the opportunity to fight him–no longer confined to an author’s machinations, you can return to and exit the book to leapfrog between pages and rearrange words. This lets you circumnavigate roadblocks, find new weapons, and solve puzzles.
It’s a pretty cool story, albeit one that I didn’t see delve into its narrative themes as much as I’d like in its opening hours. There’s a fascinating throughline here about people defined by their fate–the hero is doing all he can to return his book to what it once was and secure the predestined roles that he, his adversary, and his allies must play. And at the same time, the hero is specifically doing this because he’s been told that if his story ends differently, the child who wrote the hero’s books will become depressed and uninspired and give up writing, a loss for the real world and the stories he will write one day. That’s an incredible premise that questions the nature of free will but the game seems to drop it. In the first few hours at least, the game largely ignores the terrifying implications of book characters realizing they are nothing more than a collection of paper and words.
But I also feel like the shift away from that plot point is in line with The Plucky Squire, which is clearly aimed at a younger audience. So, as much as I would like for it to dissect the horrifying reality of characters learning one day that they are merely drawings and words in a children’s book and doomed to live out their days at the mercy of a god-like entity that’s beyond their understanding, it’s possible that the hero’s ally mentioning how difficult that truth is to grasp could be the extent I’m going to get. I hope the game attempts to explore that storyline in its later chapters but, admittedly, if it doesn’t, I think that will only be a missed opportunity that older players will lament. I can’t imagine kids will care.
The Plucky Squire doesn’t languish in existential dread; instead, it delights in charming visuals and entertaining puzzles. The main crux of the gameplay revolves around the titular hero being able to enter and exit his own book and affect its contents. A locked gate magically opens once you remove “locked” from the sentence and replace it with “open,” for example, and you can find a way to shoot down enemy wasps by exiting the book and speaking with an elven archer in a Magic: The Gathering-inspired card on the author’s desk.
For the most part, these puzzles are pretty simple to figure out, though a handful did force me to stop and really think about what I needed to do to transform the page and find the way forward. In those cases, the solution took a bit of creativity and outside-of-the-box thinking–I cheered in victory after figuring out how to stop some singing frogs from moving about the page whenever I changed the scene from day to night–but no puzzle was too difficult. I never felt frustrated during my two hours with the game.
From what I played, these puzzles hit you one at a time, making for a game that’s very linear in its progression. Again, this feels like an aspect that’s aimed at the game’s younger audience, because it simplifies most of the puzzles and makes progression straightforward. There’s no need to think about which word in a sentence needs to be changed because only a handful of words can, and the hero’s allies are quick to point out when the solution forward likely lies outside of the book, meaning you don’t have to figure out when is the best time to leave.
The Plucky Squire has features to make the game easier for those who need it. A hint system provides insight into what you have to do next to solve the puzzle in front of you, and an easier difficulty setting makes the already simple hack-and-slash combat laughably easy. I do wish there was a harder difficulty that made the game even less hand-holdy when it came to figuring out what you needed to do next and made combat a deadly threat. That’s not a game-breaking complaint for me, however. And it’s entirely possible that the normal difficulty spikes in terms of its challenge after the opening two hours.
I’m looking forward to playing more of The Plucky Squire. It’s not the most challenging game and I don’t think its storyline is going to dive as deeply into its narrative themes as I would like, but that’s also not the experience I think it’s trying to be. The Plucky Squire seems to be a delightful romp through a children’s book in which good always overcomes evil and the way forward is only waylaid by your intuition when it comes to creatively mixing and matching words. A lot of parents are going to love playing this game with their children, I just know it.
The Plucky Squire is set to launch for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Switch, and PC on September 17.
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