The Plucky Squire Review (hawawa675)
Everything The Plucky Squire tries, it tries successfully. Whether in or out of the storybook, every moment of this game is a delight.
Inside the book is a top down 2-d Zelda clone with the gimmicks of changing nouns and adjectives to shape objects, as well as tilting and stamping the book itself to solve puzzles. It all comes together wonderfully and the controls feel really good.
Outside the book the game adds a little more (but admittedly not as much as I thought) platforming into the mix, and takes a page from Mario odyssey and A Link Between worlds, wall mechanics to meld into the pages of anything hand drawn to progress. I genuinely loved when the game told me I needed to leave the book and find an item, because whatever shape the desk you explore took was exciting. Jetpacking in a space themed desk or scaling a dinosaurs tail in a Jurassic one, really it’s tough to decide which form of gameplay is the best.
Between both sections there’s also a lot of gameplay diversity in some fun mini games. Punch out, puzzle bobble and even rhythm heaven, these moments are really great and none really stink (though I had a controller issue with one or two)
All of this is packaged in one of the most appealing art styles I’ve played through in a long while. The storybook just looks so freaking good. Outside the book doesn’t slouch either, with life size objects reminding me of finding objects in Pikmin. Style can go a long way to boosting a games quality and Plucky Squire doesn’t let you down
…where it DOES let me down is the length. This game took me 6 hours and at a $30 price tag, I’m prepared to say that feels a bit steep. The game is mostly a straight shot of linear game design (also very easy I should mention) with the only bonus objective being finding concept art and glitch birds. Miss any and you gotta use chapter select to go back and look. Even with this though, I feel like there should be more game here. One could make the argument that if that happened, the game could end up feeling bloated as a result but considering things stay the same level of quality throughout, I think a few more hours could have worked.
After all, of the games 9 chapters, only 5 of them feel like full length levels. The other 4 are actual minutes each which can lead to some really weird pacing problems. If every chapter was an equal length I’d think to call the experience complete.
Of course if the only argument I have for the game is in its length (and admittedly a few bugs and lag spikes) then clearly the journey with Jot and friends is worth taking. A wholesome family friendly experience that succeeds at what it set out to do. Current game of the year (but UFO 50 drops tomorrow and Zelda Echoes of Wisdom next week so…we’ll see how long that lasts)
(This review is a copy of my review from backloggd.com)