When I first saw videos on The Plucky Squire my thoughts were that it looked curious, but the game risked being way too average to be interesting… Yeah, it is, unfortunately, very average and not particularly interesting.
The big gimmick of The Plucky Squire is the fact that instead of being just a The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past inspired title, it’s a mishmash of not just genres but also dimensions. After the few chapters, the game introduces the concept of going outside of the storybook all the events leading up to that point happened in and becoming a 3D action adventure. And a few moments of stealth later, introduces you to the concept of manipulating the storybook world from outside by flipping pages or tilting the book. A couple more concepts get introduced later to this “thinking outside the box” puzzle solving. While within the storybook 2D world the game often switches to mini-games, evoking lots of well known classic titles to work as boss battles.
Which is all cute and looks very well, with the wonderful physicality to the game world, constantly reminding you that most of the time you’re looking at pages printed on paper. But, sadly, none of the ideas that The Plucky Squire has are done well or pushed far enough. Most of its 2D or 3D action adventuring, for example, is “functional” at best with 3D segments controlling quite poorly and often featuring quite ridiculous “invisible walls” that respawn you if you try to pass them. Mini-games range from passable to outright tedious and thankfully you can skip them (which I started doing more and more as the game went on, because of how bored I was getting). The game also doesn’t quite know when enough is enough and prolongs said mini-games and boss battles minutes over the time when they should’ve ended.
With the highlights in gameplay usually being centered around the puzzles where you either manipulate the words of the story to change something or manipulate the book from outside. There are several moments where this is getting genuinely interesting and I was very happy to see some puzzles do, what I’ve previously only seen in adventure and puzzle titles made for Nintendo DS. But these moments are exceedingly rare, so if you were hoping that this title would go into the Scribblenauts or Baba is You territory, you’d be disappointed. And it’s not that this game needed to, it’s more that it doesn’t really do that much with the concept in terms of gameplay. So the whole “you go outside of the book” most of the time is just visual flavor and nothing more.
The Plucky Squire doesn’t do anything bad… Apart from numerous game breaking bugs it currently has, I suppose. But those are fixable and what can’t be fixed or updated is the fact that this game is just “fine” at best. It lasted me around 6 hours, with me finding most of the hidden secret things in the game and many a time I felt like I was ready for it to be done. It’s cute. It might probably be more entertaining if you’re a kid or an early teen. It’s an acceptable videogame that brings some entertainment. But it’s also not something I would go out of my way to recommend playing.