The Plucky Squire Review
Overall - 90%
90%
Official Score
The Plucky Squire oozes creativity and charm on every page. It stands aside Balatro and Animal Well as one of the best indie games of the year.
2024 has already proven to be a great year for indie games, and All Possible Futures and Devolver Digital’s The Plucky Squire has the potential to be another great. Does the game have enough charm to promise a good ending?
The Plucky Squire Review
The Plucky Squire follows the adventure of Jot and his friends throughout a storybook. Jot is The Plucky Squire, and is a bit of a hero in this world.
As said hero, you have to help out the citizens. As luck would have it, a local wizard needs help finding an item. It’s a simple mission and acts as a tutorial for the game. Once you find the items, you have to fight a Honey Badger boss to get them. The fight plays out like a boxing match and is pretty fun, but since it’s the first boss, you get through it quickly.
After winning the fight, a different wizard casts a spell and starts to spread a bit of darkness in the world. You drop the items off, set out with your friends, and go to stop Humgrump before he does anything bad.
When you finally get to the top of the tower to meet with Humgrump, he reveals that this is all a storybook, and Jot always wins in the end. Using his magic, Humgrump throws The Plucky Squire out of the book and into the real world so that he can change the story to his liking. From there, you need to get back into the book and stop Humgrump.
To do this, you need to get back into the book. The game is mostly split up into two parts: the storybook and the room.
The room is when Jot is outside the book. He’s a little miniature in a room full of paintings, supplies, and other art. Enemies out here will take Jot down quickly, since you don’t have your sword to start with in the art room. This risk is worth it, though, because Jot can bring items from the real world back into the book and vice versa. Once Jot can help alter the book from the outside, he can then fight back against Humgrump and save his story.
The combat in The Plucky Squire is simple, yet impactful. You have a basic attack and a roll to start with, but you can get more moves and upgrade as you progress. One of the early moves is a sword toss. This will let you hit enemies far away and help to cancel their attacks so you can reach them.
There are other upgrades like spin attacks and jump attacks as well, but I mostly spent my cash on upgrading my damage to finish off enemies more quickly. While I wouldn’t call the combat system deep, it has some combos for those who like that type of thing.
Outside of combat, you will mostly be doing puzzles. The puzzles in The Plucky Squire are not hard, but they will make you think. One of the early ones I ran into had me doing a few different things.
First, there are words on the page since this is a storybook. You can remove certain words and then replace them with other words to change the scene. By doing that, I was able to switch the page from a forest to some ruins, and it gave me an opening to push my block through.
From there, I switched a couple more words and made a small frog a big frog, for no real reason, minus getting an achievement. Most of the puzzles are very creative all around.
Then there are the boss fights. These are really more like mini-games than actual fights, and you can even skip them if they are too hard. The Honey Badger boxing match had you dodging and using two buttons to either jab or hook. Another boss fight had me shooting arrows at the boss while shooting down his projectiles.
They are all more than just hack-and-slash arenas with extra enemies spawning, which is excellent. You won’t get super hard Dark Souls-type bosses here, but you’ll still get some very memorable encounters during your playthrough.
Honestly, I don’t have much to critique about the game. You can’t skip cutscenes, which is always a bummer, but they’re all really short. The biggest annoyance I had was during a stealth part (it’s always stealth, right?).
Outside the book, I had to sneak around some bugs that would instantly kill me if they saw me. So I got to a point and ran because I knew I could make it. Well, the bug got close, a little kill cutscene played, and I died. I could have made the run if I had been given a choice, but the kill animation caught me and forced my character to stop. It annoyed me, but you don’t have to do those sections for very long.
The Plucky Squire oozes creativity and charm on every page. It stands aside Balatro and Animal Well as one of the best indie games of the year.
The Plucky Squire Review
Reviewed On: PC (A digital code was provided)
Release Date: September 17, 2024
MSRP: $29.99
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, PC
Developer: All Possible Futures
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Alternative Reviews: Push Square, GamingTrend, TechRaptor
Aggregate Scores: Metacritic, OpenCritic
Review Policy | Scoring Policy
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