A children’s storybook sets the stage for the dimension-warping journey of The Plucky Squire, an animated interactive fable which plays out like an The Swords of Ditto – whose veteran development team even includes of All Possible Futures – but its comparatively reduced scope and challenge can cause this literary action-adventure to fall a bit flat at times.

The Plucky Squire stars Jot, a mute hero whose sword is prominently shaped like a fountain pen nib. A guardian celebrity of the magical Land of Mojo, Jot drafts his escapades for posterity alongside lifelong buddies Violet and Thrash, a painter princess and drumstick-wielding heavy metal mountain troll, respectively. The three link up to foil the plans of malevolent sorcerer Humgrump and ally with the benevolent Moonbeard, a Merlin-like mentor sporting wraparound shades.

If names are any indication, The Plucky Squire’s world and narrative echo the stuff of silly Saturday morning cartoons, where good triumphs over evil, alliterative puns prevail, and villains best beware. As a game of roughly ten hours, its generally low difficulty can risk compromising any dramatic intentions, even when things get slightly darker and more satisfyingly meta. Its unabashed good-times charm and vibrant presentation are unmistakably effective and creative, even if I wish its most experimental aspects were expanded upon a little further.

A Sword-Swinging Animated Adventure

Jot’s basic moveset comes straight out of the classic Zelda games, with a sword that can slash at enemies, be flung like a boomerang and retrieved, then charged up for a recognizable spin attack. Unlike the Zelda games, though, there aren’t a bagful of special items to find that change how the game functions or its character traverses its world. Instead, the book-bound threads of the Land of Mojo’s basic reality open up at certain junctures, allowing players to solve puzzles and progress further by leaping off the page or changing its contents.

The crux of The Plucky Squire is this living storybook concept, exemplified in how the drawn characters scamper over artwork in lieu of a formal overworld, all experienced as an opened book on a table. Sometimes a page's text can be edited akin to an oversimplified Baba is You, with swappable words that bend reality and solve simple roadblocks, like changing the size of a monster blocking the path.

The way a turned page transitions into new gameplay encounters is one of The Plucky Squire’s most reliably satisfying flourishes.

Reaching the edges of any page conjures new areas, angles, and events. The section could be a stretch of illustrated narrative, a perspective-swapping boss fight minigame, or a brief 2D platforming dungeon sequence cast in shadow. The way a turned page transitions into new gameplay encounters is one of The Plucky Squire’s most reliably satisfying flourishes, and offers enough incentive to keep the otherwise by-the-numbers fantasy plot fresh enough on its own.

Tiptoeing Down The Fourth Wall

The Plucky Squire never delves too deeply into its characters, apart from the main cast. As a result, most NPCs are one-note word-bubbles who materialize for a quick gag or banter before vanishing. Reaching Queen Chroma’s village offers fun dialogue opportunities with caricatures of artists like Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, and René Magritte, but most of the game’s environments aren’t similarly dense with characters or exploration, which adds a focused but on-the-rails quality.

The action, while serviceable and responsive, also comes off as comparably thin. Once Jot is able to leap from 2D into 3D and explore the desk space around his book, I was excited to dig into this new unseen playground. However, 3D Jot functions mostly like 2D Jot, and any resultant platforming through this world in miniature (or the occasional ill-fitting stealth segue) is straightforward. While seeing the character squash down into scribbled notes or scamper over his painted friends on the page are immediately cool visual effects - reminiscent of reminiscent of A Link Between Worlds - the desk feels more like an incidental detour than a fully realized environment, another flimsy obstacle between story beats.

This relates to the insubstantial difficulty, something which could be alleviated if the game didn’t strain to outline every single puzzle and roadblock. Moonbeard’s diminutive mascot Minibeard can offer hints if players get confused about what to do next, though Violet, Thrash, the game camera, and the narrator himself will usually spell out what’s needed to progress to the next page unprompted. If The Plucky Squire had an option to tune down the constant tutorializing and hand-holding, it would arguably hasten and improve the experience overall.

An Easy, Breezy Storybook Adventure

Maybe it's just that The Plucky Squire is geared more towards younger players, and early readers in particular might best appreciate its whimsical tone. There’s a faint whiff of irreverent sarcasm throughout the game that tempers its saccharine nature somewhat, but its difficulty – despite the stunning fourth-wall-breaking approach and all that might entail – is almost nonexistent, and its weirder reality-warping mechanics are less expansive than they first seem.

When the game begins to experiment with text-swapping puzzles or page-escaping, it feels like things will get stranger and more complicated from there, but the experiment loses its footing at times. This might be due to how The Plucky Squire’s challenges are encapsulated rather than iterative, pegged to individual pages and scenes before being promptly forgotten at the next gameplay turn. Even the 3D world outside the book morphs to serve the current chapter, acting more as an incidental dungeon than a detailed environment to learn over time.

If Thrash’s drumsticks are indication enough, there are a few rhythm games to play, as well as riffs on Punch Out!!, shmups, Bust-A-Move, and even a terrific 3D desk sequence using an ersatz jetpack. However, many of these are one and done, easily bested on a first try, and left me wanting for more (or more depth therein). While The Plucky Squire features "Adventure" and "Story" difficulty options at the start, most players will breeze right through the former with nary a hiccup.

This overall ease could be intentional by design, and The Plucky Squire’s beautiful hand-drawn animation and happy-go-lucky mischief serve as a great counter to the cynical edginess sometimes found in modern titles; in this respect, it pairs wonderfully with recently released crowd-pleaser Astro Bot. A latter sequence when the storybook seemingly turns on Jot is a great example of the game digging deeper into its own premise, and the narrative breadcrumbs that insinuate the "real" world beyond the book come off as thoughtfully weird abstractions, even if they don't fully pay off in the end.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

At its best, playing The Plucky Squire feels like cracking the spine of an old thin hardcover children’s storybook, with each page another jaunty step to new adventures. It's light but engaging, and any apparent threats described within are quickly softened by the narrator’s easy-going paternal British cadence, reminiscent in ways of the voiceover found in 2021's Biomutant, but nowhere near as tedious or repetitive.

At times, though, the game can feel synthetically sluggish, as when any obstacles are over-explained, or in how its text speed is firmly measured, unable to be skipped through quickly or adjusted in settings. Entire pages of the game are devoted to the gang slowly climbing a hill or walking a road, and the careful animation and precious narration can grind the pace down somewhat, even as they set the stage for another interactive treat.

Still, the essential excitement of turning the page to discover what's next is so powerfully represented in The Plucky Squire, and the game retains this energy into its final chapters, even while otherwise lacking notable tension or danger. It’s an entertainingly busy book to play through, but it's a pity that many of The Plucky Squire’s best ideas are ultimately underexplored. Perhaps these are just being held back for any plucky printed new worlds to come.

Screen Rant was provided with a digital PC code for the purpose of this review.

Source: Devolver Digital