The Plucky Squire is the debut indie adventure game from a team of veterans at All Possible Futures. The elevator pitch is that it’s an adventure game that takes place on the pages of a children’s book, but the book is literally a rendered book sitting on a cluttered desk in a kid’s room and that’s where the game takes place. Exposition is narrated as the words of this in-universe book appear on the pages, and transitioning between rooms typically comes with a big page turn of this 3D book in the game. The twist is that pretty early on the protagonist Jot (the eponymous Plucky Squire) gets physically ejected from the book by an evil wizard, which then unveils a whole second side of the game, where a 3D Jot now gets to explore the Pikmin-esque world of the desktop.

Both the 2D and 3D art styles are fantastic. The the book’s playable illustrations are a vector cartoony style with chunky unevenly-broken stroke lines and bold colors. Out on the desktop Jot looks like an Amiibo-sized toy running around in a realistic world. Basic combat is also wonderful in both, Jot has a short sword, and has a couple basic moves you unlock over the course of the game, and they translate between 2D and 3D perfectly to the point that they feel the same which helps keep up the illusion that you’re a single character traversing two worlds.

But the game isn’t primarily about combat, it’s about “playing” the story first, then puzzles, then combat, so lets talk about the puzzles. There are three major genres of puzzle elements at work here:

  • Basic Maze Traversal / Lock & Key Puzzles
  • Word Puzzles
  • Book Interaction Puzzles

The Maze/Lock stuff is Zelda-esque “how do I get from A -> B?” / “Where do I find the key for this locked door?” stuff, it’s fine, it’s here as a baseline. “Word Puzzles” are a bit more involved, certain sentences on the page of the game have words that can be interacted with. You can bump them off the page, and swap them with other similarly-bumpable words to create BABA IS YOU-style effects in the world. “Book Interaction” is a wholly unique category of puzzles, where you interact with the book itself, by interacting with portals in/out of the book world, flipping pages, tilting pages, etc.

Individually these are all fine, but most page spreads in the game use elements across these categories, often mix-n-matching between them in a series. So first you might just be doing some traversal, then you have to find where some word puzzles are, then you have to jump out of the book and slide things around by tilting pages back and forth. Or maybe you’ll get to that second sentence you want to change on the page, but the word you need was on a previous page, well you search around in the world to find a portal, hop out of the book, flip back a page, find the word, then bring it back to cause an environmental effect to lead to more traversal… and then all this is broken up by occasional combat sequences and big expository spreads.

Most chapters of the game follow a pretty common pattern: introduce to a new area, do some traversal and puzzle rooms to get the lay of the land, encounter a currently-insurmountable challenge, pop out onto the desk to acquire a way to surmount said challenge, then pop back in, beat a boss, move to the next chapter. This is fine, it’s a decent structure, and some chapters are more book-heavy, some are more puzzle heavy, and some are more desktop-heavy, so there’s some sort of variety.

Where the game falls a bit short is the level of depth of the puzzles. The vast majority of this game is some shade of puzzle, and most of them are bite-sized. The game does an amazing job of giving the very strong impression that you could do anything the systems of this game provides. Like, wow, I could go get a word from the previous page! I COULD GO GET A WORD FROM 3 CHAPTERS AGO! ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE! …but then you just don’t need to. Only a handful of puzzle interactions involve flipping more than 2 pages, for most puzzles it might be a chain of things you need to do, but it all fits on one page spread.

The more I think about this I can’t make up my mind if it’s a good or bad thing or just a thing. It’s not so shallow it feels insultingly trivial (as some have tried to claim), but most of the time it feels just shy of a satisfying level of complexity or difficulty. But there are some slightly clumsy or just slow interactions where if they were going to make the puzzle require more hopping between worlds / flipping pages / picking up and dropping words over and over, then they’d have to spend some serious time adding some quality-of-life improvement to those systems. It’s a good thing they never make you flip back and forth 30 pages at a time, because it would be infuriatingly slow. Same problem for puzzles that require lots of hopping in / out of the book, it looks awesome, but it’s just slow enough to be frustrating.

I played on PS5 because Kiddo wanted to watch this game, and the Downstairs Console Options are the Xbonx, Switch and PS5, and despite being out on basically everything, there’s no Xbox One X version (but yes Series S & X), and the Switch version can’t maintain 60fps, so that left me with the PS5. From a graphical standpoint I had zero issues with the game, it looked wonderful all the way through, super smooth, no slowdowns, everything felt very responsive which it sounds like is not the situation on the Switch.

I had a few issues with puzzles and gameplay, though. I had two instances where I soft-locked myself in a puzzle, and one where I soft-locked during exploration. There’s no way to just directly reload the current checkpoint, and sometimes the state would persist because it saved after breaking, but thankfully deep in the guts of the menu there’s an option to load a previous autosave, so you can roll back until just before completely screwing yourself. The non-puzzle soft-lock was a weird situation around coming out of a cutscene, where I was apparently holding stick forward and it got stuck that way, with no way to control. It was fine once I knew where the setting was, rolling back was easy, and considering the level of physics/puzzle interactions with this game I’m honestly a little surprised I didn’t find more ways to soft-lock myself. But before I figured out how to roll between autosaves, I was super worried I had completely screwed my savegame. There’s not even seemingly a way to just restart a chapter while you’re in it. There’s replay for chapters, but you can’t just restart a chapter you’re in.

Overall though, it’s still a pretty good game. I enjoyed it. There are ways that I think it could have been better, but as-is it’s fine. But also it’s only $30. If this was a $60 game I would’ve been disappointed, but at $30 it’s perfect. It’s short, it’s a little shallow, but the art is great, the puzzles are creative, and it’s over well before it overstays its welcome. Highly Recommended.