The Plucky Squire Is Just As Fun as It Looks [Preview]

We’ve played the opening hours of The Plucky Squire and if you’ve already been sold by the unique art style and gameplay that’s been shared then you’re in luck. The Plucky Squire seems to be exactly as advertised.

When you first start The Plucky Squire you’ll be invited into a unique storybook-style world with gameplay that should feel familiar for old-school action-adventure fans and platforming diehards alike. Flipping the pages of this story, the player is introduced to new challenges and unique ways to solve them.

Before reaching the 2D to 3D transition, The Plucky Squire introduces its unique puzzling elements some of which come in the form of sentence forming. On the ground, you will find words that can be carried and swapped with dialogue on the page to change the environment and allow access to paths previously blocked. The first time you do it you’ll instantly catch on, but it’s how this tool is mixed with more traditional puzzling elements that feels great.

From just its first hours, The Plucky Squire has an immediate feeling of nostalgia. There’s even a mini-game styled like Punch-Out!! so players have that to look forward to. Nothing about the early game platforming feels particularly unique until you’re thrown out of the story into the 3D world.

The 3D world is where puzzle platforming becomes more prevalent. Here you’ll be jumping across structures, moving items, and unlocking paths to continue the story. To do this you’ll often need to jump between the 2D and 3D realms which couldn’t feel more smooth, and will be your ticket to survival more than one time.

While the opening chapters of The Plucky Squire are incredibly fun, it hasn’t felt particularly difficult, even on the game’s hardest setting. These challenges may come later in the game, but for now, expect to solve these problems with little to no hassle.

As far as the story goes it has been solid, but not memorable yet. It’s basically what you would expect from a narrated action-adventure, but we’ll have to finish things off to provide a true verdict Expect that to be included in our review.

Let’s get real. The biggest thing that has attracted gamers to The Plucky Squire is its visuals, and All Possible Futures has nailed this. There’s just no way that this game could look any more perfect both in its 2D and 3D portions. It remains to be seen if we’ll get a variety of environments as the game progresses, but so far it has a lot of promise, so we’re optimistic there’s more eye candy to come.

Overall our first few hours with The Plucky Squire have been great and if this quality is maintained through the rest of the game this could be one of the best indie games of the year. The Plucky Squire is scheduled to release on PS5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and PC on Sept. 17.

A PC preview copy of The Plucky Squire was provided to Escapist Magazine from Devolver Digital.