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An overhyped new game?

The Plucky Squire is a very unique-looking game. It mixes different genres and gameplay styles together. It is developer by an indie studio All Possible Futures and published by Devolver Digital. It got mixed reviews, but mostly very positive, making me interested of this game even more.

Plot

The story of The Plucky Squire is about a young hero Jot, who is a main character of a story book. But the evil Humgrump wants to disrupt everything and kicks Jot out of the story book to our reality. So, Jot and his friends Violet and Thrash, goes to the adventure to defeat Humgrump once and for all. Overall, the plot and storytelling were good. It had lots of story and side characters. It did starts nicely and developed steadily all the way to the end.

Gameplay, controls, audio and visuals

The gameplay is where The Plucky Squire shines. It first starts with 2D gameplay but soon everything changes as the characters is kicked out of the story book and goes full 3D. It little bit reminded me of The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. That was a 3DS game which made the main character Link to be able to go from 3D to 2D and flat himself on the walls. The game is not just killing the enemies with weapons Jot got, but also lots of puzzles that are word and environmental puzzles. Yes, there are words that player must mix to create meaningful sentences to make items and areas appear to the story book. Other puzzles requires to mix the 2D and 3D world, maybe little bit diffcult to explain, but everything in the gameplay just worked perfectly.

There are two options for the diffuclty: “Adventure Mode” for more challenge and “Story Mode” for easier gameplay.

Controls were simple and very easy to understand. Player can move around, jump, push items, kill enemies with sword and with other moves, collect light bulbs (that are the game’s currency) and that’s pretty much it. I don’t think the game needed anything else control-wise.

The game is partially voice acted. The only voice acting was the narrator that did a very good job, but maybe the game would’ve benefited it being fully voice acted.

Visually I loved how the game looked. It goes for the nice 2D-realistic-paper-like-top-down-to-fully-3D-world. Sometimes the game looked so good I wanted them to be printed on a paper and hang on my wall. But there were some bugs in the game, though, I had to restart my save twice as the game got some game-breaking glitches.

The end

The Plucky Squire was very interesting experience—and I did enjoyed it tremendously! The game isn’t too difficult to play and the puzzles were nicely done. Also the mixture of 2D and 3D gameplay were executed perfectly. I played this through in about 8-9 hours and I didn’t had any dull moments with it. With all this said; I do recommend The Plucky Squire to everyone who even slighlty enjoys these types of games.

The Plucky Squire is available on PS5 (reviewed using PS5 Pro), Nintendo Switch, GeForce Now, Xbox Series X|S and Windows

SCORE:

5/5

“The gameplay is where The Plucky Squire shines”

RELEASE DATE: September 17, 2024
GENRE: Action / Adventure
DEVELOPER: All Possible Futures
PUBLISHER: Devolver Digital
PLATFORMS: PS5 (reviewed)
Xbox Series X|S
Nintendo Switch
Windows

 

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