To say I was looking forward to playing The Plucky Squire after it was first announced in 2022 is an understatement. With modest promises of a 2023 release that became a late 2024 release, I became a little obsessed with following any crumbs of news about it, just hoping that this little game with big promises would see the light of day. When it finally did just that in September, I dropped Ace Attorney in a heartbeat (apologies to Apollo and Athena) and scooped up The Plucky Squire without hesitation. I couldn’t wait to see what adventures it had in store.

As The Plucky Squire opens, players take the reins of the plucky squire himself, Jot, the main character in a book that’s loved by a nameless figure in the “real world.” In Jot’s world, which is centered around a kingdom named Artia, he spends time with friends Violet, an artist and trainee witch, and Thrash, a troll with a talent for drumming and taste for hard-hitting music. Guided by a powerful wizard named Moonbeard and his rodent sidekick Pip, the trio embark on adventures of their own, as it’s implied that in the “real world,” The Plucky Squire is a rather popular book series. Popular books are read the most and therefore keep their characters alive and kicking. So what happens when Jot is literally kicked out of his book by an evil wizard with plans of storybook domination named Humgrump? That’s where the players come in. By maneuvering Jot in and out of his storybook and tackling various challenges that both take place within and apart from the books pages, players seek out Humgrump’s minions and battle the dastardly wizard, all to save Jot’s world, and the storybook itself.

There are a lot of good things to say about The Plucky Squire. For one, its extremely creative approach to gameplay is very appealing, and it helps keep things lively. Most of the game is a 2D adventure that takes places on the pages of a book, and that’s solid enough. But it’s when the mode of play departs from the book’s pages that the gameplay really shines. Describing the game as a “storybook come to life” is accurate, but the phrase alone doesn’t quite do it justice. The Plucky Squire is almost its own game genre, mixing traditional 2D and 3D adventure game mechanics with those of action, rhythm, and puzzle games. And it’s all wrapped up in a spirited and heartfelt story. Also welcome is that The Plucky Squire trots at a steady pace and comes in at about 8-10 hours to complete. The game doesn’t linger on aimlessly and isn’t filled with fluff. There are moments of levity within the story, and some bits of storytelling are accomplished through narration of text from The Plucky Squire, the book. These breaks in the action keep the gameplay from feeling stale.

I don’t have many, if any not-so-good things to say about The Plucky Squire, but I do want to point out that my copy of the game was a bit…buggy. Bugs tended to take two forms. The more annoying of them was simply when a vital mechanic didn’t work properly. On several occasions, for example, Jot got stuck outside the storybook because the mechanic for him to pop back in didn’t appear. Restarting the game generally fixed this. The other bug concerned Jot’s companions. For most of the Jot’s journey, he’s joined by either Violet or Thrash, often both, and sometimes with a fourth temporary teammate in tow. As The Plucky Squire is a book, players can flip between pages within given chapters. Well, it happened a little too frequently that when flipping between pages, which was sometimes required for puzzle-solving purposes, Jot’s companions would get stuck at some past point in a chapter and not progress with Jot. This led to some unusual “cut scenes” in which Jot would interact with his companions as if they were with him, but they weren’t, and neither were their text bubbles. These odd scenarios only affected storytelling, and were again solved by restarting, but they were unfortunate in what was otherwise a polished game.

The Plucky Squire is an adventure game that’s delightful, unfussy, and imaginative. It’s a game that displays a love of video games, books, storytelling, and friendship. I’ll admit that I had hoped from its trailer that it might have been a little more groundbreaking in terms of re-inventing the adventure games, in a vein like what It Takes Two did for co-op games, but its creativity was nonetheless impressive and its resolution satisfying. The Plucky Squire isn’t here to change the world; it’s meant to entertain and enjoy, and that it accomplishes perfectly.

All images, including lede, and video were captured by author during Nintendo Switch gameplay of The Plucky Squire (© All Possible Futures, Devolver Digital).