There is a whole sub-genre of video games that use arts and crafts as the basis for their aesthetic, landscapes and storytelling: LittleBigPlanet, Chicory, the Paper Mario series, Yoshi’s Woolly World and Kirby’s Epic Yarn, to name but a handful. The Plucky Squire takes things one step further, and then things get very meta.
About two-thirds of this game takes place in a gorgeous children’s picture book with a hand-illustrated feel, wherein the player helps the titular Squire and his two friends – an apprentice witch with an affinity for painting, and a mountainside rock’n’roll troll with a knack for rhythm – face up against the chaos raining down from the evil Humgrump. But despite these twee beginnings, it gets pretty postmodern pretty quickly. The remaining third of the gameplay takes place on the child’s desk around the book. The Squire has the power to jump out of the 2D world of his story into reality. Here he can turn pages, tilt the book itself and smuggle objects from the chaotic, messy desk into the story to help him.
It’s hard to tell whether this wants to be a game for children, or for adults who are kids at heart. At first the game is a little slow, the tone sweet and simple as we meander through the bucolic early pages of the picture book. Then, the second we become capable of leaping out of the book, the difficulty ramps up quite quickly. There is a particularly tricky stealth section involving menacing beetles that feels at odds with the bright and silly interior of the world in the book. This may well be an intentional juxtaposition of tone, but I am not quite sure it works; as the game progresses, the challenge remains inconsistent and hard to gauge. Younger players can take advantage of the conflict-light story-mode, for a more mellow journey.
Each boss fight operates like a mini-game – there is a punch-out style showdown, a shooting-range style set of battles, a rhythm game, all with variable difficulty. Puzzles, meanwhile, are executed in delightful ways that really make you think – often, the game lets you use the descriptive text of the picture book written in and around the landscape to change and re-arrange the pages. The Squire uses his sword to knock words out of sentences and move them around to swap their meaning – swapping “block” with “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 is used more lightly, to great effect.
The Plucky Squire is a moon-shot of a concept, and as the hours go by, it becomes clear that it’s trying to say something truly interesting about the importance of storytelling and the power of narrative. I would recommend seasoned players approach the first few hours with patience, as it takes a hot minute to find its pace. As the game evolves it becomes highly rewarding, even if the controls are a little finicky at times. The Plucky Squire is heartening, funny and impressive to behold: not flawless, but still a treasure of a title.