The Plucky Squireis a jolly little game. Its storybook visuals in 2D and cute chunkiness in 3D combine with bright colours, whimsical enemies, and shamelessly silly plotlines combine to make a very happy experience. Five chapters in, I’ve seen some clever mechanics - theMagic: The Gatheringcard being my favourite (a sentence I’ll never write again) - but nothing that has fully sold me on The Plucky Squire’s hook. However, I have met an enemy I hope never to see again. Irritation, thy name is beetle.
In the game, you start as a storybook character going about his storybook life. He beats the evil wizard, every time, and saves the day. However, the wizard grows tired of this dynamic and goes rogue, using his magic to force the Squire out of the book and into the world itself. This is whereThe Plucky Squire gets to show you how clever it is, with a variety of platform puzzles that often include taking objects from one dimension and using them in another to progress. It’s smart, but has one of the worst introductions of any game mechanic I’ve ever seen.
The Plucky Squire Introduces Its World In The Worst Way Possible
As you go through the game, the bedroom in which The Plucky Squire’s book rests is transformed by various beasties the wizard unleashes, so there’s a little bit of variety in these sections. The first time you’re kicked from your hardbacked home though, the beasties are yet to be unleashed. Instead, you face regular issues a Borrower-sized squire might face, like needing to knock over dominoes to form a ramp. One of these problems is the humble beetle. Humble, and very, very annoying.
In this first trip to the real world, the squire is without his sword, and so has no means to defend himself. These beetles are the same size as him, which is a truly terrifying concept when you think about it for a few seconds. Without any means to attack, he needs to sneak by them. Which means you need to complete a forced stealth section. In 2024. In a game whose major deal is ‘I am very smart at doing the gameplay things’.
It feels in violation of the deal you’ve struck in playing this game. You’ll get generic characters, a simple narrative, challenges that are a little too easy, and an occasionally grating overuse of whimsy, but at least it’s going to play great. That’s the sell here. But with this beetle section, it all comes tumbling down. Sometimes literally.
To get past the beetles, you need to hold R2/RT to walk quietly. Naturally, this also makes you walk slower. It’s tough to make this sort of simplistic stealth fun, and The Plucky Squire fails to do so, but there is at least a balance at times. When you need to go through a maze, you need to mix between going slow when you don’t want to attract attention, and dashing between obstacles when a gap opens. I died here more than I should have, but it was probably my fault.
It was actually the game’s fault for having these sections.
However, another part of this section has you jumping over ledges. The beetles are beneath you, so you don’t actually need to sneak. But at this point, you’ve been trained to sneak, and you don’t know what comes next, so you still sneak. And then you’re too slow to make the jumps, so you fall to your death. Once you’ve learned that lesson and dash through, the beam is too narrow to run along, so you fall to your death. It’s a truly spiffing time, I tell you.
This is not a reason to stop playing, and indeed, it didn’t stop me as I pushed on past the tiny frog you can make huge just because (and because you looked at the Trophy List), past the bullied snails, past the Magic: The Gathering turn-based battle. Parts of The Plucky Squire are still as clever as they promised, and those beetles have not come back so far, but it’s an awful first impression for the very thing that people are playing the game for.
The beetles soured me on The Plucky Squire and I still haven’t been fully won over by it, but it does at least feel like it’s worth pushing on with. If I see another beetle around these parts though, I might change my mind.
