The Plucky Squire Feels Like The Ideal Game For A Parent To Play With Their Kid
If I was a father, I think I’d love playing a game like The Plucky Squire with my kid–based on a few of the early chapters I played, its plotline seems straightforward and it’s mechanically simple while also offering some fun variety in its assortment of minigames. Plus, the game features a story that intriguingly deals with themes about fate and choice, and then frames that against childhood passions and interests. The Plucky Squire feels like one of those stories I so clearly remember experiencing when I was 10 or 11 years old and loving for how it broached symbolism and metaphors in a way that was more complex than what I had experienced at age five.
The Plucky Squire has a fantastic set-up: You’re playing as the hero of a children’s book written by a kid destined to be an author one day. You’ve been preordained to beat the evil wizard not only in this story but in every book by this author. Said wizard isn’t a fan, and so instead opts to magically eject you from your picture-perfect world, giving him the leeway to change the events of the book. But his actions unintentionally provide you with the opportunity to fight him–no longer confined to an author’s machinations, you can return to and exit the book to leapfrog between pages and rearrange words. This lets you circumnavigate roadblocks, find new weapons, and solve puzzles.
It’s a pretty cool story, albeit one that I didn’t see delve into its narrative themes as much as I’d like in its opening hours. There’s a fascinating throughline here about people defined by their fate–the hero is doing all he can to return his book to what it once was and secure the predestined roles that he, his adversary, and his allies must play. And at the same time, the hero is specifically doing this because he’s been told that if his story ends differently, the child who wrote the hero’s books will become depressed and uninspired and give up writing, a loss for the real world and the stories he will write one day. That’s an incredible premise that questions the nature of free will but the game seems to drop it. In the first few hours at least, the game largely ignores the terrifying implications of book characters realizing they are nothing more than a collection of paper and words.