Two years ago, developer All Possible Futures announced The Plucky Squire with a Nintendo Switch gameplay trailer equal parts charming and stunning. The Plucky Squire takes place in two different worlds: the real 3D world of a young boy’s bedroom and the world of a 2D storybook, between which the protagonist can hop to solve puzzles while slashing monsters much like in a Zelda game.
Jot, the titular squire with pluck, is on a quest to save the land of Mojo from the evil sorcerer Humgrump once again. Jot, you see, always wins. However, this time around Humgrump learns the secret of their world: they’re in fact characters within a storybook. As such, he casts Jot right out of the pages, which puts the happy ending of the story in jeopardy.
Fortunately, Jot’s funky wizard friend helps him find his way back into the storybook, and with newfound powers that allow him to leap from the pages, he sets off to reign in Humgrump once more on a fourth-wall-breaking quest with a couple of adorable friends along for the ride.
Much as advertised, the story is delightful. From poetic snails to heavy metal trolls, every single character Jot and friends meet will put a smile on your face, and so too will the plethora of minigames and clever use of real-world methods to solve storybook puzzles.
From a rhythm game to a Contra-like run ‘n’ gun set on the side of a toy container, The Plucky Squire brings creativity to each of the minigames that close out chapters, which motivated us to press on. An early minigame sees you invade the world of a fantasy trading card to convince the elven warrior within to lend her your bow in order to shoot down bugs terrorising snails in the storybook. This triggers a turn-based battle against her that, while not difficult, had us smiling the entire time.
The puzzles, however, are the star of the story, and while they never stumped us too hard and there aren’t too many of them in the short-and-sweet 10 hours it’ll take you to finish Jot’s quest, they’re all a joy to figure out. A sentence on the page of the book might read, “The moat was completely drained of water.” To cross over to a switch, you’ll have to find the word “full” from a sentence elsewhere, pick it up, and bring it over to swap it out for “drained.” Thus the moat will fill with water, raising up some lily pads for Jot to cross to reach the switch.
You can also swap out words for some humorous effects that don’t impact the puzzle at all, like switching the word ‘huge’ into the sentence, “The tiny frog observed the bug,” making the cute frog large for no other reason than it’s fun.
It’s never as simple as swapping around two words, however. There’s often multiple words and sentences at a time to swap, and to reach them Jot will have to hop through portals into the real world to manipulate the book itself. He can turn the pages back to pull items from earlier in the story, for instance, or stamp items to stop them from moving within the book. It all comes together to create a wholly unique and charming experience.
Unfortunately, for us, the Nintendo Switch version looks and runs nothing like advertised, which may have been why Switch codes weren’t available in advance from publisher Devolver Digital. Playing version 1.0.2, when Jot is within the storybook or hops into a drawing elsewhere in the real world, the game manages to stay at its 30fps target most of the time, though it’ll dip every now and then, with flipping between pages — more or less the ‘screens’ of the world — hitching and taking a few seconds too long to load.
When Jot jumps out of the storybook to acquire a new power, such as being able to lift either half of the book to cause massive pigs and blocks of cheese to move within the story, the resolution drops to eye-wateringly poor levels and can flounder down to near single-digit frames per second when there are multiple enemies on screen. A lot of Switch games run a bit better in handheld mode but here we found it more difficult to follow the action on our OLED’s screen, with no noticeable improvement to performance.
In turn, this makes the other aspects of The Plucky Squire — combat and platforming — a headache. Much like Link, Jot can swing his sword around and has a spin attack. When the game is hitching, however, it seems there’s some kind of delay that makes it difficult to know when your inputs register, causing you to attack when you want to dodge or to swing your sword a few too many times when cutting down goblins and bugs.
The platforming fares a little worse. In the storybook, it was mostly fine, but we struggled navigating the toys and paint sets of the real-world desk, often failing to make use of springboards that require precise button inputs to reach a higher area and even getting stuck in the geometry more than once.
Conclusion
Performance issues on Switch, at least at launch, bury an amazingly clever and charming adventure that we would wholeheartedly recommend otherwise. The Plucky Squire is certainly playable on the Nintendo Switch, but in no way can we recommend picking it up here if you have other means to play it. The fact that the Switch-branded trailers looked so great and that advance review copies weren’t available on the platform — despite them being sent out for other systems — indicates that this version of The Plucky Squire needed much more time on the drawing board before release.
Two years ago, developer All Possible Futures announced The Plucky Squire with a Nintendo Switch gameplay trailer equal parts charming and stunning. The Plucky Squire takes place in two different worlds: the real 3D world of a young boy’s bedroom and the world of a 2D storybook, between which the protagonist can hop to solve puzzles while slashing monsters much like in a Zelda game.
Jot, the titular squire with pluck, is on a quest to save the land of Mojo from the evil sorcerer Humgrump once again. Jot, you see, always wins. However, this time around Humgrump learns the secret of their world: they’re in fact characters within a storybook. As such, he casts Jot right out of the pages, which puts the happy ending of the story in jeopardy.
Fortunately, Jot’s funky wizard friend helps him find his way back into the storybook, and with newfound powers that allow him to leap from the pages, he sets off to reign in Humgrump once more on a fourth-wall-breaking quest with a couple of adorable friends along for the ride.
Much as advertised, the story is delightful. From poetic snails to heavy metal trolls, every single character Jot and friends meet will put a smile on your face, and so too will the plethora of minigames and clever use of real-world methods to solve storybook puzzles.
From a rhythm game to a Contra-like run 'n' gun set on the side of a toy container, The Plucky Squire brings creativity to each of the minigames that close out chapters, which motivated us to press on. An early minigame sees you invade the world of a fantasy trading card to convince the elven warrior within to lend her your bow in order to shoot down bugs terrorising snails in the storybook. This triggers a turn-based battle against her that, while not difficult, had us smiling the entire time.
The puzzles, however, are the star of the story, and while they never stumped us too hard and there aren’t too many of them in the short-and-sweet 10 hours it’ll take you to finish Jot’s quest, they’re all a joy to figure out. A sentence on the page of the book might read, “The moat was completely drained of water.” To cross over to a switch, you’ll have to find the word “full” from a sentence elsewhere, pick it up, and bring it over to swap it out for “drained.” Thus the moat will fill with water, raising up some lily pads for Jot to cross to reach the switch.
You can also swap out words for some humorous effects that don’t impact the puzzle at all, like switching the word ‘huge’ into the sentence, “The tiny frog observed the bug,” making the cute frog large for no other reason than it’s fun.
It’s never as simple as swapping around two words, however. There’s often multiple words and sentences at a time to swap, and to reach them Jot will have to hop through portals into the real world to manipulate the book itself. He can turn the pages back to pull items from earlier in the story, for instance, or stamp items to stop them from moving within the book. It all comes together to create a wholly unique and charming experience.
Unfortunately, for us, the Nintendo Switch version looks and runs nothing like advertised, which may have been why Switch codes weren't available in advance from publisher Devolver Digital. Playing version 1.0.2, when Jot is within the storybook or hops into a drawing elsewhere in the real world, the game manages to stay at its 30fps target most of the time, though it’ll dip every now and then, with flipping between pages — more or less the ‘screens’ of the world — hitching and taking a few seconds too long to load.
When Jot jumps out of the storybook to acquire a new power, such as being able to lift either half of the book to cause massive pigs and blocks of cheese to move within the story, the resolution drops to eye-wateringly poor levels and can flounder down to near single-digit frames per second when there are multiple enemies on screen. A lot of Switch games run a bit better in handheld mode but here we found it more difficult to follow the action on our OLED’s screen, with no noticeable improvement to performance.
In turn, this makes the other aspects of The Plucky Squire — combat and platforming — a headache. Much like Link, Jot can swing his sword around and has a spin attack. When the game is hitching, however, it seems there’s some kind of delay that makes it difficult to know when your inputs register, causing you to attack when you want to dodge or to swing your sword a few too many times when cutting down goblins and bugs.
The platforming fares a little worse. In the storybook, it was mostly fine, but we struggled navigating the toys and paint sets of the real-world desk, often failing to make use of springboards that require precise button inputs to reach a higher area and even getting stuck in the geometry more than once.
Conclusion
Performance issues on Switch, at least at launch, bury an amazingly clever and charming adventure that we would wholeheartedly recommend otherwise. The Plucky Squire is certainly playable on the Nintendo Switch, but in no way can we recommend picking it up here if you have other means to play it. The fact that the Switch-branded trailers looked so great and that advance review copies weren't available on the platform — despite them being sent out for other systems — indicates that this version of The Plucky Squire needed much more time on the drawing board before release.
