Watching protagonist Jot leap from the 2D illustrated pages of his storybook into a beautifully rendered 3D world immediately sells players on The Plucky Squire’s hook. This transition between gameplay styles is an awesome mechanic that truly feels magical, making me hopeful the adventure designed around it would be equally as enchanting. Unfortunately, that’s not quite the case. The Plucky Squire has oodles of charm and imagination, but the gameplay isn’t always as engaging or inspired.
This classic Zelda-esque adventure puts you in the shoes of a cheerful swordsman joined by his two friends, a timid witch-in-training and a metalhead mountain troll, to rescue their storybook world from peril. In some humorous meta writing, the book’s villain becomes self-aware of his fictional reality and discovers how to turn his predestined cycle of endless defeats in his favor. A pleasantly sassy narrator guides players through a lighthearted tale. But despite the intriguing setup, the story winds up being more saccharine than memorable.
Within the storybook, The Plucky Squire largely unfolds like a top-down Zelda game (with occasional side-scrolling segments harkening back to Zelda II). Traveling through eye-popping, colorful overworlds and cutting down foes feels and looks good, but combat lacks challenge, making battles feel like rote exercises even after obtaining upgrades like a sword throw and spin attack. Fortunately, combat is secondary to The Plucky Squire’s main draw of letting players manipulate their pagebound world.
Exiting the book and using a magic glove to flip between pages not only serves as a clever form of backtracking, but engenders neat ideas like grabbing an object from a previous page and bringing it into the current one. I also like tilting the book to cause certain objects to slide wherever you need them to be. Changing entire scenes by swapping certain words from descriptive sentences (e.g. replacing “Forest” with “Ruins” in a sentence to transform the surroundings accordingly) is another fun idea that adds a playful, interactive take on an unreliable narrator. Overall, the puzzles built around these tricks are clever in concept, but tend to be disappointingly simple in execution. I often solve riddles at first glance, and they rarely feel as substantial as I’d like even late-game.
Leaping off the page into the fully rendered 3D bedroom of the child who owns your story is the biggest treat. Not only does the bedroom look awesome and feels believably lived in, but the transition is largely smooth from a technical standpoint. Traversing the 3D sections consists of simple, and, frankly, unremarkable, platforming segments, but it’s the way they’re dressed up that make them feel more interesting than they are. Jumping into certain illustrations pinned on objects is a cool-looking way to scale vertical surfaces, as is sliding down a rope and seeing Jot cruise down inside the multiple flags hanging on it. Unfortunately, the presentation can’t prop up the barebones stealth sections tasking you to sneak around bugs, and being spotted results in immediate death. These sequences lack the creativity of the rest of the package and feel present for the sake of it.
The Plucky Squire also sprinkles bespoke minigames that appear once and offer brief snippets of variety that I usually welcome. I appreciate the cuteness of a simplified take on a Punch-Out-style battle against an angry badger and a turn-based RPG battle against a character from a Magic: The Gathering-inspired trading card. These segments are far from robust departures and more like breezy genre change-ups to add little spice without overstaying their welcome.
Though I admire everything about The Plucky Squire’s art direction, the lax difficulty robs it of stimulating engagement. The Plucky Squire is an easy game to a fault, made more so by the annoying number of tooltips and forced tutorials plaguing the adventure. In addition to seizing control away from players too often, it holds their hand for too long. The Plucky Squire may be trying to appeal to kids, but I’d wager all but the youngest children would grow weary of these aggressive training wheels.
Thankfully, The Plucky Squire has received an optional streamlined mode shaving away the glut of these forced tutorials. It makes a noticeable difference, allowing me to enjoy the game a little more with less interruption and more room to think. Streamlined mode doesn’t make The Plucky Squire any more difficult, but consider it the new default gameplay setting and reserve the game’s original incarnation, which is still available, for only the least experienced players.
Although The Plucky Squire has become better at trusting players to figure things out, it remains a disappointingly simple trek wrapped in a killer presentational wrapper. It’s one of the coolest-looking games of 2024 and has inventive ideas I wish were more substantially fleshed out. Jot’s big adventure is presented as a children’s story, and it’s hard not to feel like a kid playing it in the best and worst ways.
This 2025 review reflects our thoughts on the game’s current state at publishing. As such, post-launch updates were factored into the final score.
