I recently sat down to play The Plucky Squire because I'd heard it was like Zelda, and I like Zelda. I didn't know it also had special powers.
Having not really seen much about the game outside of seemingly everyone I know and respect on social media saying how incredible it is, I was mere seconds into it before I found myself smiling at the clean, childish art style that, well, is the stuff of storybooks.
A few minutes later, when it became clear I was literally playing through a storybook, that smile grew even wider. The pages were turning as I moved across map tiles, there was a kind old British man narrating proceedings, and before long I was whispering "oh that's lovely" out loud.
Then, oh, another trick! We can interact with the story as it's written on the page! The bad guy of the tale has fucked with the pages and some of the text laid across the map isn't describing events, it's been switched up to block them, so you need to complete puzzles in the world (book?) that involve moving the text--and you're in the book, so the text can just be picked up--around to fix the sentences, which changes what they're describing, which then changes the world itself. Seeing this for the first time I am not just smiling or whispering, I'm looking at my cat and saying "oh this rules", to which she replies "mew" (yes, it does).
By the time The Plucky Squire is pulling its biggest party trick--leaping out of the pages of the book and into the real world, which presents a whole new axis of movement and a fresh set of puzzle possibilities--I was sitting bolt upright in my chair saying, quite loudly now, "ahhhh wow this is great".
As you can hopefully tell by now, The Plucky Squire is a game that made me feel something. I can talk about it as a game if you want, review-style, about how it's a cute little Zelda-like, about how it's got some interesting puzzles and a neat twist and some lovely voice acting. I could spend a surprising amount of time gushing about the little hand cursor you control in the main menu, which is pointing while you point, but once you click/press a button it stops pointing and gives a thumbs up.
But I'd rather just talk around this game, about how it's just pure joy. Playing it makes me smile, and laugh, and through its setting is able to deliver both the best of video games and the best of children's books at the same time. It's not that I feel like a child while playing it, there's a certain distance and reverence in its tone that requires you to have grown up already to appreciate it, but there's absolutely an echo, a child-like feeling of happiness--pure, warm, reassuring--to be found on each page.
Every time I play The Plucky Squire (which I haven't finished yet) brings a nice little surprise: maybe some fights, maybe a scroll with some unlockable art I can enjoy later, maybe some funny dialogue. It doesn't matter what it is, really; it's all good.It's also pretty short, but as we've established recently, that's fine. A game knowing its limits is a good video game, and one that's able to make a grown man smile like an excited young child is a very good video game.
