In This Story
I really enjoyed The Plucky Squire, an action-adventure game in the vein of classic Legend of Zelda titles. It’s got not one, but two, whimsical art styles: one reminiscent of children’s picture books, and another in which the hero is presented as a miniature toy that comes to life in a child’s bedroom. The game is most often presented in the former, where screen transitions are accompanied by the turning of a page, and the middle of most stages appropriately folds where they meet. The eponymous hero goes on many adventures with his friends Violet and Thrash, who each embody noble and righteous virtues, while triumphantly defeating the forces of evil time and time again. At the close of these journeys, the Plucky Squire comes home and writes about it all, because naturally he’s also a bestselling author in the land of Mojo. It’s a game with all the fixings of a kids’ classic, something that can be shared with the children in one’s life to encourage them to dream big and boldly. As I played the game, though, I did find myself wishing that The Plucky Squire actually believed in its audience as much as it claims to.
You see, The Plucky Squire falls prey to one of modern gaming’s most well-intentioned, but still utterly annoying, sins and overtly tutorializes everything. When it deigns to allow the player to pop out of their storybook for a 3D platforming level, the camera pans across the entirety of the stage outlining the intended path before you’ve even really set foot in the world. Even within the confines of the 2D world in the book, The Plucky Squire will often deploy humorous narration via onscreen text and a corresponding voiceover, which adds flavor to the game but also explicitly communicates what is expected of you at every turn. At just about every step of the way, the game lacks any faith in your ability to figure out solutions and paths forward for yourself, preferring to bludgeon you over the head with answers before you can even be afforded a chance to think for yourself. It’s a frustrating wrinkle in an otherwise charming tale.
Due to this design decision, which feels borne out of the well-meaning developers at All Possible Futures making a game for kids of all ages to enjoy, The Plucky Squire can feel like it’s pandering too hard. Considering there is already a hint system that you can opt into by conversing with a character known as Minibeard on puzzle screens, this approach feels like an overcorrection, especially given the places from which The Plucky Squire mines its inspiration, particularly The Legend of Zelda.
The Legend of Zelda is, it goes without saying around these parts, a classic. It’s one of the most influential games of all time, and it is also hard as nails. The original title is dripping in mystique and opacity, which famously made it exceptionally tough to finish. It gave players a set of tools and trusted them to use every single one to explore the intricacies of its overworld and dungeons. Yes, there were rooms hidden behind walls that couldn’t be told apart from normal unbreakable ones, but back then, players relished the chance to bomb every single wall in sight in search of secrets, and The Legend of Zelda welcomed these player-fueled explorations.
A few years ago, I decided that, given my adoration for Breath of the Wild, I should play one of the seminal titles in the series and booted up A Link to the Past, which is handily available on the Nintendo Switch via the Switch Online service. In it, I encountered a pain in the ass called a Red Goriya, which mimics Link’s movement like a mirror reflection. Since it’s got armor on its front side, I couldn’t just fire an arrow or hit it with my sword and hope for it to die. It took me frustratingly long to figure out that I needed to shoot an arrow and then turn it to the side in order to land an attack on it, but the breakthrough has stuck with me for years because it made me understand what was expected of me without treating me like I lacked enough intellect and imagination to figure it out. The Zelda series has always rewarded players for solving problems by intuiting solutions to puzzles that actually challenged them, and overcoming those obstacles should feel like a genuine triumph.
The Plucky Squire begins to get at that vintage ethos by the end of the game, but given its short runtime, there’s very little time and space afforded to the very best of its puzzle and platforming designs. Most of it is reserved for the final two chapters, once the game has deemed you worthy of being unburdened by a narrator who refuses to stop holding your hand. They don’t necessarily stop dictating the game’s action, but they do take a bit of a backseat to a series of gauntlets that finally realize the game’s utmost potential. Otherwise, The Plucky Squire feels simplistic and even infantile in places, which feels like an insult to the kids that its themes purport to uplift.
I don’t think The Plucky Squire reaches the point of treating its players as outright dumb, but it also doesn’t seem to have any faith in them, be they kids or adults like myself, to understand it. And I think it can stand to! If children could cut through the obscurity of The Legend of Zelda back in the day, they can certainly solve The Plucky Squire without the game screaming its answers at them. There are ways to bake accessible design (which again, The Plucky Squire does feature as an optional mechanic) into a game without completely demystifying the novel experience of discovery that games of this ilk are often known for.
It could also stand to just let players experiment free of any reward or mystery, and indulge in the very creativity that it preaches. The Plucky Squire will introduce new mechanics that literally alter the world by allowing you to tilt pages and let gravity affect elements of the book, but then restrict you from using it in places where its designers deem it unnecessary. Even if the solution to a problem couldn’t be found in the use of that tool, I wish it didn’t only let me deploy it sparingly and worse, take it away from me. Let me bomb random walls and push huge blocks to and fro. Dare to let me or the kids playing this game dream a little bit. It won’t hurt anyone.
At the end of the day, I get that The Plucky Squire just wants to be inclusive. Its developers want to guarantee that any player can get through this adventure, fall in love with its themes, and continue to spread the very real joy I got from playing it. But along the way, it does undoubtedly lose something that made its forerunners as timeless and influential as they are, and that is a genuine belief in its players that’s more than just skin deep.
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