The Plucky Squire is a world-hopping action and adventure videogame that cleverly connects two-dimensional, sprite-based spaces with three-dimensional, polygonal spaces to create its worlds and tell its story. I play as Jot, the star of the titular children’s picture book that tells his tale of saving the kingdom of Mojo by defeating the evil wizard Humgrump. Jot’s latest confrontation with Humgrump is spoiled when the wizard reveals he has discovered his nature as a fictional character. Using a new power called metamagic, Humgrump ejects Jot from the picture book and sets about rewriting its narrative to suit himself. Using some metamagic absorbed from his experience, Jot leaps between the pages of the picture book and a talented artist’s cluttered desk to gather tools and solve puzzles needed to confront the evil wizard. Only by defeating Humgrump once and for all can Jot ensure The Plucky Squire survives to inspire a generation of children.
Most of my time playing The Plucky Squire is spent in its picture book world, which takes advantage of the medium to portray the kingdom of Mojo from a variety of perspectives. Spaces are presented as two-page spreads in a picture book opened on the surface of a worn art desk. They can occupy one or both pages, ramble horizontally or tower vertically, and adopt a perspective where I control Jot from a top-down or side-scrolling view. Whenever Jot leaves one space and enters another, the pages turn and I cannot be certain what form the new space will take. All of this is created with vibrant and distinctive color palettes that do a wonderful job selling the illusion that The Plucky Squire is a marvelously illustrated picture book come to life.
Jot is a simple player character in the action and adventure mold. I can move him in all directions with the joystick, or left and right if the current page is a side-scrolling space, and jump with a button. To defend himself against Humgrump’s goblins and corrupted soldiers, Jot is equipped with a sword. Combat is rudimentary. Jot is able to defeat most enemies by throwing himself in their direction while swinging his sword wildly. Any damage he does take is quickly healed by the hearts that reliably drop from defeated enemies once his health is low.
While Jot explores the picture book, he periodically encounters a vendor dressed in a bizarre tent costume named Martina. Martina sells sword upgrades in exchange for light bulbs found by slashing away Mojo’s numerous bushes and from defeated enemies. The flat damage upgrades are the most essential, but she also sells special attacks that expand Jot’s repertoire. Over time, he can learn a spin attack, a downthrust, and to throw his sword like a boomerang.
I appreciate the attempt to add some variety to the combat through these upgrades, but they feel extraneous. Enemy behavior is too mindless to necessitate anything more than basic sword attacks. Only a few enemy types require the sword throw to be eliminated. The spin attack and downthrust have no practical use at all. There is little reason to purchase or use most of Martina’s upgrades beyond the reach for one hundred percent completion.
The puzzles Jot must solve in the picture book are much more engaging than its combat. Most pages he explores have their features described in narration that scrawls itself on the ground. Some words in this narration may be manipulated to change the page. This puzzle variety is introduced early on by an incomplete sentence in front of a closed gate. By foraging in the overgrowth for the missing words “open” and “gate,” Jot can insert them in the sentence’s gaps to cause the gate to open.
Word puzzles grow in complexity over time. Later in his adventure, Jot visits an ocean beach with unreachable islands visible just offshore. By searching the environment for the word “frozen,” Jot can compel the ocean water to freeze, letting him walk across its surface to reach the islands. The scenario is further complicated when Jot discovers that many of the islands’ puzzles cannot be solved while the water is frozen, forcing him to use the few new available tools to improvise other ways to reach their shores. The Plucky Squire’s best puzzles all involve these word-swapping exercises, sometimes requiring Jot to cycle several words through the same sentence multiple times to open the way forward.
As Jot explores the picture book, he comes across swirling green vortexes. These are the metamagic portals he may use to leave the picture book and enter the art desk it sits upon. While exploring the art desk, Jot’s sprite transforms into a polygonal figure that may fully interact with its three dimensions. His capabilities are identical to his form in the picture book, including the rudimentary sword combat. All of Jot’s special sword techniques may be used on the art desk, though there is still little call for them.
In contrast to the picture book’s deliberate and elegantly painted spaces limited to two page spreads, the art desk has a ramshackle construction that sprawls in every direction. Its surface is the dumping ground of a fruitful and scattered mind. The environments Jot explores are constructed from plain blocks, disused model pieces, and well-used art supplies, all accented by toys and knick knacks like puzzle cubes, chess pieces, and poker chips. This space reconfigures itself as Jot progresses through the picture book. On one visit, he must climb his way to the top of a doll’s house. On another, he ascends a toy volcano decorated with stickers of dinosaurs and prehistoric plants enchanted into life by Humgrump’s metamagic.
Many of the objects that create the art desk’s environments are themselves decorated with smaller, more pictureseque environments. Some contain metamagic vortexes Jot may use to enter. These explorable surfaces lack the intricacy of the picture book’s pages. They contain few enemies and fewer puzzles. Their main function is to bridge between the art desk’s tiers and create shortcuts back to the picture book when Jot’s business in the 3D world is done. Some of these smaller spaces do contain surprises, like a coffee mug painted with the moon’s surface that becomes an endlessly scrolling shoot ’em up sequence. These are the exceptions. Jot rarely spends more than a few seconds inside most.
Despite its grandiose scale, the art desk feels small when compared to the many things Jot may interact with inside the picture book. When Jot first arrives, he is unarmed and must sneak past predatory beetles that stalk the desk’s dark corners. The beetles are hyper alert, their perception range is difficult to read, and they can easily outrun poor Jot and devour him in an instant, so thankfully this scenario is brief. Once Jot recovers his sword, exploring the art desk becomes as mindlessly hack-and-slashy as any page in the picture book, only without the interesting puzzles. It is big. It is not complex.
Despite its prominence in The Plucky Squire’s premise, the art desk is ultimately a small part of the overall world. Jot only ventures there when he needs a new power to solve a puzzle in the picture book. If he tries to wander away from the picture book at any other time, the art desk’s bric-a-brac is inconveniently configured to bar his path. The art desk is always subordinate to the picture book, never the co-star it appears to be from the outside looking in.
Shortly into his adventure and with increasing frequency as he comes closer to confronting Humgrump, Jot encounters some impassable barrier inside the picture book. The way to overcome this barrier is found nowhere within its pages. Instead, he must use metamagic to leap out to the art desk and manipulate the book itself.
Jot’s ability to manipulate the picture book is limited when he first learns of his nature as a fictional character. At the start, he may flip through the picture book’s pages to access previous vortexes as a convenient and diegetic method of fast travel. Every page in the picture book may be viewed this way, including the ones that at first glance are expository or cinematic. Some of the cleverest puzzles require Jot to use metamagic to visit an image or location I would take for granted as a scene-setting device in any other videogame.
As Jot gains more abilities that manipulate the picture book, the puzzles grow in complexity. Since the images in the picture book are alive, they still follow rules like gravity, so Jot may force a heavy object to slide across a room by tilting the picture book on its side. He can also use stamps on a page’s surface to freeze objects in place or make them explode. By the time Jot is storming the castle for his final confrontation with Humgrump, nearly every puzzle requires him to leap out from the page and manipulate the book itself and not just the objects it contains.
When I think about all the design possibilities suggested by metamagic, I am particularly excited to experience their resultant boss encounters. My greatest disappointment with The Plucky Squire is when I discover that none of its boss encounters incorporate metamagic into their design at all. Instead they discard all established design elements and present the fight as a minigame utilizing an entirely different set of tools.
The first of these minigame boss encounters occurs just a few minutes after I begin playing. Jot encounters honey badger raiding a bee hive. Jot’s arm muscles suddenly bulge and tear away his sleeves as he leaps in to slug it out with the honey badger, whose honey-covered claws now resemble golden boxing gloves.
The ensuing fight borrows its ideas from the classic Nintendo boxing videogame Punch-Out!! Jot occupies the center of the screen, facing away from the screen and towards his opponent. Button prompts in the screen’s corner tell me that Jot can throw jabs and hooks at the honey badger, though most of these will bounce harmlessly off the beast’s forearms if they are used indiscriminately.
The honey badger towers over Jot, its exaggerated proportions making it easier to identify the subtle animations which indicate it is about to throw a punch. When I identify a telegraphed attack and successfully prompt Jot to sidestep away from it, then the honey badger’s head and torso is briefly vulnerable to a few punches which drain the green stamina bar at the top of the screen. After a few moments, the honey badger returns its defensive stance and the fight resets. If I can correctly guide Jot in dodging and counterattacking until the honey badger’s stamina is drained, then the fight is won.
None of the elements of this boxing minigame feel right. Jot’s reactions to my button presses feel sluggish, making it difficult to correctly time his dodges. His counterpunches also feel awkward. The buttons prompted onscreen seemingly control only one of Jot’s fists, causing him to repeatedly strike the honey badger with just his left or right fist instead of alternating between both. This doesn’t sound like much but it has a surprising impact on my ability to time Jot’s punches. By the time Jot struggles through the honey badger’s entire stamina bar, his own is almost depleted. I come out the other side of this boss fight-minigame hybrid feeling disconcerted and underwhelmed. There is no satisfaction gained from my accomplishment.
The honey badger boxing minigame sets the tone for every subsequent boss battle minigame across The Plucky Squire. Future minigame encounters are plagued with their own particular difficulties. An archery minigame has fast enemies and a lethargic, joystick-guided cursor. A rhythm-based minigame is soundtracked by a hard-driving metal tune with a clear beat, though following it is made more difficult by poor visual feedback to my button presses and, yet again, unresponsive controls. A battle that models itself after Puzzle Bobble is made more difficult by a slippery cursor and a random number generator that seem to deliberately withhold the puzzle pieces I need to break up the oncoming stack.
The minigames reach a nadir where I begin to dread their appearance. The Plucky Squire seems determined to end my experience with negative feelings, as the final confrontation with Humgrump begins with rematches of three minigames at an increased difficulty. As though aware of the minigames’ aggravating shortcomings, an option in the pause menu lets me skip them. I am sorely tempted to take it.
I am saddened to be disappointed by so much of The Plucky Squire because its premise is so intriguing. One of Jot’s early quests in particular inspires me with hope for the rest of his adventure. Shortly after Jot learns to use metamagic, his path through the picture book is blocked by a stump filled with mosquitos. His sword is useless against these flying bloodsuckers, so he ventures out into the art desk to find a weapon that can defeat them. He finds it in the form of a bow wielded by Alowynia, The Elf Ranger, a character from a trading card game that resembles Magic: The Gathering.
Convincing Alowynia to part with her bow requires Jot to use metamagic to enter her card. This is The Plucky Squire’s premise at its most exciting: The hero of a children’s picture book exits his own world, wanders through ours, and stumbles upon entrances into other worlds that exist not only as completely different stories, but in completely different mediums. My imagination runs roughshod over my managed expectations as I wonder what other worlds Jot may explore before he defeats Humgrump.
What disappoints me most about The Plucky Squire is these other stories, other worlds, other mediums for Jot to enter wind up being a trading card, the surface of some mugs and a tin can, and the surface of a toy volcano. All of them are small, with little to explore or interact with. I can’t accuse The Plucky Squire of over-promising and under-delivering. The expectations I get from marketing and a videogame’s introductory hours are my own and nothing or nobody else’s. I still come away feeling like there should be much more than I am given. There’s an incredible premise here that feels underutilized, whether by a lack of resources or imagination.
The Plucky Squire falls into the familiar trap that bedevils many videogames with a lot of ideas: It spreads its effort too thinly, developing all its ideas to minimal functionality but not taking the needed steps to make them feel fun and responsive. Minigame boss fights are let down the most, feeling slippery, unresponsive, and unsatisfying. The three dimensional art desk looks splendid and is the star of the trailers but its transforming environments have little depth and are ultimately forgettable. The two dimensional picture book segments are by far the best elements because they feel like they received the most refinement. Yet no matter which dimension Jot occupies, the sword combat is repetitive and dull. All of this is nothing compared to the disappointment I feel at The Plucky Squire’s incredible potential and the small final product where I see too little of that potential explored.