In a beautiful fantasy world, a wizard wearing sunglasses brews a𝐆 weed-killing potion so a noble hero can pass through a particularly prickly plant. After doing so, the wizard wearing sunglasses looks out of the page, straight at you, and than🅷ks you for your courage and skill in controlling said noble hero.
Then the noble hero, AKA Jot AKA 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Plucky Squire, jumps right out of the page, grabs his own storybook, flicks forward a page, and hops back in, weedkiller in hand. This one minute sequence is emblematic of The Plucky Squire's fourth-wa🌊ll breaking humour, game design, and shifting aesthetic.
It's these factors that take this 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:anticipated indie from a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:clichéd RPG to a clever puzzler that will have you smiling to yourself as🐽 it turns classic mechanics on their head (sometimes literally) to tell its story of bravery and heroism. There are times when the illustrative art direction and genre-hopping mechanics aren't enough to gloss over tired fetch quests and flat characters, but for the most part, The Plucky Squire is a joyous exploration of artistic flair and mechanical brilliance.
The Plucky Squire gets a lot right, and it starts with the vibes. From the beaꦅutiful illustrations penned by Pokemon alum James Turner, to the brilliant score, to the funny dialogue, this is a game that envelops you in its fantasy world quickly, capturing your imagination with brilliant character designs and a tale as old as time.
The souꦍndtrack is phenomenal, and I hope it doesn’t go unnoticed amid eve🦩rything else that The Plucky Squire does right.
Setting off on a noble quest, trusty sword in hand, Jot’s journey to save the world starts as any other c🌸oming﷽ of age RPG. Sure, it’s got the additional pizazz of a fancy page turn whenever Jot moves to a new screen, but it’s an otherwise standard affair. However, it’s only when the evil wizard Humgrump gets his hands on the very storybook that Jot inhabits that things start to go wrong, and the game comes to life.
Humgrump is sick of losing to Jot in every Plucky Squire novel, so he sets himself on rewriting the story so he can emerge victorious for once. If you thought that was meta, a bookworm tells Jot that, if this dastardly plan comes to☂ fruition, the child who owns this book, Sam, will put it away on a shelf in disgust and will never become a children’s writer when he grows up, and therefore will never inspire a new generation of kids. There’s a lot on the line, and Jot takes it well.
If the meta narrative is reminiscent of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Toy Story (Jot’s friend Violet takes the role of Buzz Lightyear, the only one to freak out about the fact she’s a character in a book rather than a real person living her own l💫ife), the gameplay brings back memories of A Link Between Worlds. As Jot departs his own story to walk the real world of Sam’s bedroom in glorious 3D, The Plucky Squire contextualises its metanarrative with matching mechanics. Gameplay is completely different in 2D and 3D, items can be brought between the two worlds, and this is where the game’s cleverest ideas c♐ome out to play.
The characters themselves are pretty two dimensional. Pu🧸n very much intended.
The real world mostly consists of 3D platforming and light combat, but you occasionally nip into 2D journals or notepads to pass through different areas. In the 2D world, puzzles are more varied. Both involve grabbing keys to unlock doors and other standard RPG conventions, but my favourite is the wordplay. Occasionally you’ll stumble across impassable obstacles in the 2D world, along with a sentence writ across the floor describing what’s going on – you are in a storybook, after all.
However, sometimes you can edit these sentences, switching words with those from other narrated lines on the same page or others. The world reacts accordingly, turning tiny frogs into huge frogs and glowing mushrooms into cheese mushrooms. Not every word works in every sentence – some are rejected outright – but there are plentiful funny opportunities to make gates larger🔯 than int▨ended and unlock Achievements by purposefully messing up.
Even when you’re doing it right, though, the word puzzles are incredibly clever. And, like many of the game’s mechanics, they work best when combined with the 3D world. One particularly smart example is when you turn a tall pillar into a crumbling pillar, before hopping out of the storybook to tilt the page and let gravity tip the now fragile stone onto an enemy. While the word puzzles are only used sporadically and I’d liked to have seen more of theꦅm, these are the moments that make you smile. It’s a combination of mechanics I’ve never seen before in a game – a word puzzle turned physics puzzle – and in these moments The Plucky Squire feels truly brilliant and wholly original.
That’s not always the case, though. As much as I like meeting all the cartoon artists in Artria, rounding up lost pigs is hardly riveting in 2024. Combat is simplistic too, and I found myself resorting to throwing Jot’s sword rather than using any of his other attacks. Nothing in The Plucky Squire is challenging, not puzzles nor fights, but that’s not the point. The Plucky Squire offers mechanical interest over technical cha𒆙llenge, and I love the fact that boss fights might be a shmup level or a rhythm game, but I♊’d still like to engage my brain on occasion.
It’s also plagued by technical issues. The frame rate drops alarmingly when fighting multiple enemies, the game freezes randomly, and some levels stꦬraight up don’t work on Steam Deck. The Plucky Squire never claims to be Deck Verified, but it’s a game perfect for Valve’s portable and it’s unfortunate that the developers couldn’t make it work in time for release.
While it could serve to offer more of a challenge and some quests feel a little rote, the times when The Plucky Squire twists genre convention and🎀 blends 2D and 3D puzzles are a sꦚparkle of imagination in the genre. Every level feels fresh, the puzzles are satisfying, and it’s all wrapped up in that gorgeous art style that put the game on so many people’s radars.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: The Plucky Squire
Reviewed on PC.
- Top Critic Avg: 82/100 Critics Rec: 85%
- Released
- September 17, 2024
- ESRB
- E10+ For Everyone 10+ // Fanta♛sy Violence
- Developer(s)
- ☂ All Possible Futures
- Publisher(s)
- 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Devolver Digital
- Clever story makes its metanarrative approachable
- Beautiful art direction in both 2D and 3D worlds
- Fun, innovative mechanics that buck genre conventions
- Some quests feel tired, especially when compared to the mechanical innovations elsewhere
- Performance issues
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