A Video Game Review: The Plucky Squire, Plus Some Thoughts About Other Video Games I’ve Played

As my de facto personal curator of all things games, my spouse probably has more video, board, and card games than I have books, and he rarely strikes out with his recommendations. To memory, only Terra Mystica and Twilight Imperium put me into a stupor, but both board games take upwards of 4 and even 8 hours to play.

Before our attempt at Terra Mystica, he sat me down to watch a thiry-minute YouTube tutorial on how to play it. About fifteen minutes in, I asked him at which point the game was supposed to start being fun. Eight hours into Twilight Imperium, I finally forfeited when I fell asleep face down on the floor.

But he’s knocked it out of the park with other board games, like Terraforming Mars and Mind Management. Bangers, both. And Hades, a video game and a masterpiece. Plus plenty of others over the past ten years.

So on the 19th of this month, when he asked if I’d play a game he thought I’d like, I said, “Sure,” and he downloaded The Plucky Squire, a Zelda-inspired action-adventure platform game developed by All Possible Futures and published by Devolver Digital.

It was released only two days before I started playing it, and I did encounter a couple bugs (like a block glitching into an area of the map I couldn’t reach without said block), but I was hooked pretty quickly and played it every free moment I could until I finished it on the 23rd.

Setting, Gameplay, and Story

Gameplay alternates between 2D and 3D settings. 2D happens within the pages of a children’s book, and 3D happens outside of the book, in the bedroom of Sam, a 10-year-old child. You play as Jot, the fountain-pen-wielding hero of the Land of Mojo and the main character of Sam’s favorite book, The Plucky Squire, which is splayed open on Sam’s desk.

Sam is the unseen owner of everything you interact with in the game, and it’s their imaginative constructions Jot must navigate in the 3D realm, as well as a shocking amount of enormous and disturbingly aggressive beetles.

The overall vibe is adventure, charm, and humor, and I experienced the game’s storyline and premise like a quest to rediscover what it felt like to play and create as a child. It also felt like an ode to art and artists. Not only is the Kingdom of Artia, the capital of Mojo, populated by cartoonified icons like Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dalí, but the main objective of the game is to protect Sam’s creative future.

It’s a game that’s suitable for all ages, but I really hope a lot of adults play it, especially adults who haven’t created anything in a while and want to start a new creative project or pick up an old one. Fighting for Sam will feel like fighting for yourself. 

Verdict

With a 9/10 rating on Steam and an 84 on Metacritic, The Plucky Squire is surely hitting a chord with a broader demographic than the 35–45 y.o. childless dog lady set, but this childless dog lady loved it! I’ll also give it a 9/10.

Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild remain firmly at the top of my list of favorite video games, but Plucky Squire was a good time. Its puzzles don’t reach a Zelda-game’s level of difficulty or complexity, but they were still challenging enough to keep me engaged.

It’s a short game, too, with a defined story that takes several chapters to tell, so you don’t have to worry about getting hooked and sinking too much time into it. It’s also fun to play with a group, even though it’s single player. During the weekend I played it, I had three of my nephews over and they hung out with me and my spouse while I solved a few puzzles.

While watching me play any game, my spouse likes to read the dialogue boxes in different voices for each character, and this time my nephews joined in, picking characters and taking turns. I loved it. It not only made the story more immersive, but made it more of a group activity for them than just waiting around for their turn with the controller. 

Play now for a fun time!

Some of My Favorite Video Game Memories

• One year in junior high, I spent my entire Christmas break playing Starfox Adventures on the GameCube. I developed an eye twitch from either lack of sleep or record-levels of uninterrupted screen time. It was amazing—the experience if not the game. I learned later how poorly reviewed it was, but I still had a great time.
• One of my family’s first computer purchases came with a game called 3D Movie Maker. I still grieve for the self-made masterpieces we lost when that computer finally died, namely Tinbot & Lisa, the story about a plane hijacked by intergalactic aliens that featured voice clips from me and most of my siblings, and a murder mystery in which I painstakingly paired the sound of a footfall with every step the characters took. 
• As a teen, I sunk weeks and months into the first The Sims game. I hadn’t cared for SimCity, but The Sims had a goofiness I appreciated. Every time I started a new life, my character’s name would be Bek SnakPak and I’d always pair her with a dude I’d name Maximus Powers. (My horny teen ass also learned about a hack that would let you uncensor the shower so you could see their naked, undetailed pixels through the glass, or freeze them when they were doing “woohoo” under the bedsheets, and pull them out to inspect their twisted naked limbs for answers you weren’t getting from church or from school.)
• I’ve played a little of Link to the Past, but Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda game I played all the way through. The next would be Twilight Princess, then Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. I took two days off of work when TOTK came out. It’s one of the best franchises of all time.
• Rollercoaster Tycoon was a blast. You could almost never have too many janitors for all the throwup on the walkways, and there was nothing like spending hours designing a ride every park-goer was too scared to get on. 
• My favorite party games: Mario Party, Smash Bros., Doom, and Excitebike. These games were the primary way I bonded with my brothers during the phase between adolescence and adulthood.
• Going further back, my younger brothers and I would go to my grandparents’ house after school almost every day and play the Atari. I don’t remember the names of those games, but think variations of Pong. I also played a lot of Worms and Lemmings around this time. 
• Going even further back, I have a memory of a sibling putting a big floppy disk into a khaki colored anvil of a monitor and some kind of Barbie game flickering onto the screen. 
• The Mario games, namely Super Mario Bros and Super Mario 2 & 3. And Donkey Kong Country, which I played nostalgically with my now-spouse on our first date exactly 10 years ago this month.
• Soul Calibur: I played this one in my later teens and found every character painfully sexy, holy shit. The jiggle tech in that game is something else. Every character except maybe Voldo *shudder*
• Street Fighter, of course. I’d mostly play as Chun Li or Blanka. Vega was super hot. Even hotter than Ryu and maybe even Chun Li.
• Balder’s Gate II: I haven’t played the third installment yet, but I played this one a ton with my cousin, and then with my first husband before we got married. He played the dwarf and I played the human. I remember telling him once to rush a laser-shooting pillar, knowing it would disintegrate him, and laughing my ass off when it did. After the divorce, I’m sure it was something he looked back on as a sign he should’ve paid attention to. 
• I played Ori and the Blind Forest during COVID lockdowns. Loved this one. Beautiful and challenging.
• Other more current favorite party/group games: Towerfall, Overcooked, Crawl, and Heave Ho.
• My spouse and I have almost beat Cuphead together but it’s vein-poppingly difficult.
• Favorite mobile game: Plants vs Zombies
• Other current great gaming experiences: Katana Zero, Untitled Goose Game