Jot is the Plucky Squire and the titular hero of a series of children’s books in the game.  In the books, he goes on all sorts of adventures with his two best friends: an artist wizard named Violet and the rock n roll mountain troll Thrash.  With guidance from the wise wizard Moonbeard, the trio are able to defeat the evil Humgrump every time.  But one day, Humgrump figures out how to break the fourth wall and take over the book, sending things in from the real world and kicking things out.  So now it’s up to the Plucky Squire to hop in and out of the book, manipulating the pages himself while solving puzzles and defeating enemies.  The Plucky Squire is a (mostly) 2D action adventure game similar to Zelda, and it’s available on most current consoles and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

As Jot, you’ll be able to run, jump, and swing your sword in 2D top-down fashion.  As you defeat enemies, you’ll collect lightbulb shaped coins you can use in a shop to buy moves and upgrades.  These let you throw your sword, or do charged and jump attacks.  Since you are in a children’s book, sometimes you’ll see words and you can pick some up and place them in other areas to affect the story.  This can open up paths for you among other things.  When you see a green swirl, you can jump out of the book and move in 3D space on a child’s desk.  But the controls are still the same.  Here you can bring in things from the outside world, as well as turn the pages or tilt the book to manipulate objects in the story.  You can even dive into post it notes, dioramas, and other things on the desk, too.  Sometimes, usually while fighting a boss, you’ll play a mini-game like a Punch Out style boxer, rhythm game, or bubble popping puzzler.

As you can probably imagine, The Plucky Squire is as charming as all get out.  But unfortunately, it has a laundry list of problems, too.  The game saves automatically, and when you quit it’ll tell you the last time it saved.  But I think there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to save at any time, or at least saved more often.  And the green swirls that let you hop in and out of the book are hard to see sometimes, especially since they are on green grass in the book a lot of the time. Normally framerate drops don’t bother me, and I usually don’t even notice them.  They didn’t bother me here either, but I certainly noticed them!  The font is sometimes a little too small and narrow to read well in handheld mode, and goals and objectives are not very clear at times.  Lastly, the game is buggy as all get out.  In fact, the game froze up on me right after I defeated the last boss, so I had to fight him twice!  The game is still charming enough that I saw it all the way through, but it really needed a few more months in the QC oven to iron out some of the kinks.

Kid Factor:

The Plucky Squire is rated E-10 with an ESRB descriptor of Fantasy Violence.  You hit cartoony enemies with your sword and they just fall over and say ‘argh’ and disappear in a puff of smoke when defeated.  This game has selectable difficulty levels, and you can even adjust things like one hit kills, automatic jumping, and removing collapsing platforms.  You can even skip mini-game boss fights if they get too hard.  Unfortunately, I had to do that a couple of times at the end myself because they were too difficult for me, even on the Easy setting!  Reading skill is a must since you must use words to solve puzzles, too.

Tags: Game Reviews