The Plucky Squire

The Plucky Squire brings us back to our childhood, when we were still learning about videogames. Despite its ambitious premise, the game makes you fall in love with it with innocence and simplicity, remembering us why we even like games after all.

The Plucky Squire manages to expertly craft an adorably interesting story full of lovable characters, enjoyable narration, and near-perfect parallels between its 2D and 3D worlds. While some parts need just a bit more polish, it exceeded my already high expectations and gave me nearly a dozen hours of laughs, fun, and mental exercise. Plus, well, seeing its cast of cute little characters suddenly turn into buff badasses is a great bonus.

The Plucky Squire is evidently a game created with the younger generations in mind: it’s easy to approach, never particularly complex, and the most challenging parts, well, they’re not very challenging in the first place, but just in case they can be easily skipped. This isn’t a bad thing or a criticism: it’s a great game that even adults that just want to have a fun time in a beatifully drawn 2D world can easily enjoy. Just make sure you’re not looking for something that might put your skills to the test.

There’s a lot to enjoy about The Plucky Squire. It really is a gorgeous game, the art design is stellar, the voiceover work for the narrator is well done, and again it just nails the storybook presentation so well. While the puzzles aren’t particularly hard, they are inventive, making use of the 2D to 3D space extremely well. There’s certainly room for improvement in The Plucky Squire, but at the same time I think it’s a game worth checking out when you get the chance.

If we put aside for a moment the fact that this is a rather short experience, what we have here is a stunning indie game that does what it wants to do very well which makes the overall experience you will get from it a successful one, and personally I think it is one of the sweetest surprises of 2024.

The whole third act will especially leave you smiling like a fool, because at its core, The Plucky Squire is good, simple fun. It presents an earnest story with enough twists, fun references, and jokes to keep you looking for more, and it inspires us all to be more than we are.

I wish All Possible Futures luck in their future ventures, but here, in today’s hyper-crowded indie scene, there are dozens and dozens of games that deserve to be plucked up ahead of this Squire.

Me hizo recordar cuando jugaba en mi Nintendo DS cuando era pequeño. Se ve el cariño que le pusieron los desabolladores.

Great game in general, would rate it higher if there was no frame drop in the 3d world. Too easy, too childish

Empieza muy bien y es muy original, incluyendo varios mini juegos dentro del gameplay principal y rompiendo la cuarta pared. No tiene una dificultad muy elevada y tiene una historia facilona y entretenida, perfecta para los más pequeños. A medida que avanzamos podemos conseguir más tipos de ataques aunque estos quedan en segundo plano porque realmente no aportan nada positivo al combate y terminas por siempre utilizar los ataques básicos. En la mitad final del juego se vuelve bastante repetitivo.

I'm convinced the high marks this game has received are based solely on the art style (which is admittedly super cute). The aesthetics are lovely, but the gameplay doesn't live up to the looks. What you're getting is a clunky, substandard Zeldalike with a smattering of mini-games (ranging from okay to frustrating, though you at least have the option to skip them) and some very light puzzle solving. The most frustrating aspects for me were the linearity (no exploration at all, just go here, then go there) and the incessant text boxes. You get maybe two minutes of gameplay in between text and cut scenes, so there's no opportunity to really get into sort of rhythm. Yeah, it's trying to tell a story, but I eventually got to a point where I was mashing buttons to get through conversations as quickly as possible because I was tired of not actually playing a game. There was potential here with the whole storybook and 2D/3D thing, but nah.

Good concept, bad execution. Infuriating flow, the game keeps interrupting you for bad dialogue and unskipable "cutscenes" (for example, a door opening) almost every 5 seconds. The game is laughably easy, both combat and puzzles. I was dying to end it by chapter 6, it just felt so cumbersome to play, there's probably like 30% overhead of not actually playing in the playtime. Not to mention the bugs in this game which made me quit to main menu and restart a chapter multiple times throughout the playthrough. I don't get the praise for this game, it's extremely mediocre.