IThere’s a whole subgenre of video games that use crafting as the basis of their aesthetic, landscapes, and narrative: LittleBigPlanet, Chicory, the Paper Mario series, Yoshi’s Woolly World, and Kirby’s Epic Yarn, to name a few. The Plucky Squire takes things a step further, and then things get very meta.
Roughly two-thirds of this game takes place in a gorgeous, hand-illustrated children’s picture book style, with the player helping the titular squire and his two friends (a witch’s apprentice with an affinity for painting and a rock’n’roll mountain troll with a knack for rhythm) deal with the chaos raining down from the evil Humgrump. But despite these cutesy beginnings, it gets pretty postmodern pretty quickly. The remaining third of the game takes place at the boy’s desk. around The Book. The Squire has the power to jump from the 2D world of his story into reality. Here he can turn pages, tilt the book, and smuggle objects from the chaotic, cluttered desk into the story to help him.
It’s hard to say whether this game is intended to be for kids, or for adults who are kids at heart. At first, the game is a little slow-paced, the tone sweet and simple as we make our way through the bucolic first pages of the picture book. Then, the moment we’re able to jump out of the book, the difficulty ramps up pretty quickly. There’s a particularly tricky stealth section involving menacing beetles that seems at odds with the bright, silly interior of the book’s world. This may well be an intentional juxtaposition of tone, but I’m not quite sure it works; as the game progresses, the challenge remains inconsistent and hard to gauge. Younger players may take advantage of the low-conflict story mode, for a more sedate ride.
Each boss fight functions as a minigame: There’s a punch-up-style showdown, a set of shooting-range-style battles, a rhythm game, all with varying difficulty. Puzzles, meanwhile, are executed in delightful ways that really make you think: often, the game lets you use the descriptive picture-book text written in and around the scenery to shift and rearrange pages. The squire uses his sword to pluck words out of sentences and move them around to swap their meaning: changing “block” to “staircase” in the text, for example, will literally turn a block into a staircase. I’ve only seen this kind of semantic puzzle once before, in 2019’s great postmodern puzzle game Baba Is You. Here it’s used more lightly, to great effect.
The Plucky Squire is a wild concept, and as the hours pass, it becomes clear that it’s trying to say something really interesting about the importance of storytelling and the power of narrative. I’d recommend experienced players take the first few hours with patience, as it takes a minute to find the rhythm. As the game evolves, it becomes very rewarding, even if the controls are a little finicky at times. The Plucky Squire is heartening, fun, and impressive to behold – it’s not perfect, but it’s still a wonderful title.
