Ep 045: The Plucky Squire
A Beautiful Book You Kind of Want to Close
There's a moment about halfway through The Plucky Squire when a shoot-'em-up sequence drops out of nowhere — just a full shmup, mid-storybook adventure, no real warning — and something clicks. Oh. This is what they're doing. Whether it fully works is another question, but the ambition is undeniable, and the art is immaculate throughout.
Developed by All Possible Futures and published by Devolver Digital, The Plucky Squire launched September 17, 2024, with a physical release following on February 21, 2025. It holds an 83 on Metacritic for PC and 72 on Switch — a gap that matters here, because Alex played on Switch and ran into consistent frame rate drops, while Luke's Steam Deck experience was smooth enough to recommend that version outright. Both rolled credits. Metacritic HLTB clocks the main story around 8.5 hours, which tracks with both hosts' playthroughs.
The concept is genuinely special. You're Jot, the plucky squire of a children's storybook, navigating a 2D top-down world inside the book's pages while the villain Hump Grump tries to rewrite the story in his favor. But Jot can escape the book entirely, popping out into the real world — a chaotic, bug-infested kid's bedroom — as a tiny 3D figure navigating desk forts and pencil canyons. The game leans hard on this duality: puzzles that involve physically knocking words off the page to alter the environment, flipping chapters to change what's ahead, fourth-wall awareness baked into the story itself. The creative foundation is strong enough to carry the whole thing, which is good, because the execution is uneven.
The developer pedigree shows in the art. Co-creator James Turner is a former Game Freak art director — yes, the Pokémon people — and co-creator Jonathan Biddle brought the original concept from a comic book pitch. Every environment is gorgeous, the soundtrack is a genuine highlight, and the collectible art pieces are worth hunting for just to look at them. But that comic book origin may also explain one of the game's most consistent frustrations: the dialogue over-explains everything. Every beat, every joke, every puzzle solution gets narrated a beat longer than it needs to. Alex and Luke couldn't quite decide who this game was made for — kids would be better served by something more intuitive, adults are impatient with the hand-holding — and the game seems equally uncertain.
The mini-games are a microcosm of the whole. There are a lot of them: a metal-themed rhythm section with the troll Thrash, a candy crush-style puzzler with the art wizard Violet, a rhythm-stealth gauntlet with the mouse Pip, a Punch-Out boxing sequence pulled twice, an archery bit, the aforementioned shmup. Each one introduces a new mechanic and mostly delivers on its premise. But they're also the source of the episode's best story: chapter nine assembles all of them into a boss rush that Luke describes as a penalty and Alex describes as a game he kind of started skipping. After four to five attempts at the Thrash rhythm battle, Alex moved on. He took the skip on the candy crush section too. Luke's pride held out, but just barely.
Both hosts landed at 3 out of 5 — three brush strokes. Alex got there from below, bumping up from a harsher initial read because the imagination and visual beauty kept pulling the score back up. Luke coined the framework that best captures the whole experience: type two fun, a phrase credited to friend-of-the-pod Tyler's wife Ashley. Type one fun is fun in the moment and fun to remember. Type two fun is stressful or tedious in the moment and fondly remembered afterward — the camping trip where your kid sees a waterfall, the game you only beat for a podcast. The Plucky Squire is a three out of five that both hosts will probably describe as cool and charming at every dinner party for the next five years, having completely forgotten how many times Luke almost put his controller through the wall.
It's a great dad game for a weekend, a genuinely impressive art piece, and a mild recommendation for Devolver faithful and Zelda-adjacent fans. New gamers should probably find something with a gentler on-ramp.
Side Quests: Luke has been deep in EA Sports College Football 25 — just won a championship with Oregon State in dynasty mode, where the game's ongoing rain-too-much bug is at least thematically appropriate — and has been watching his brother-in-law play Marvel Rivals, which he describes charitably as "a horny Marvel game." Alex has been running his STRTSCRN and PocketPix short-form series on social, which by design means rotating through the collection: a new Game Boy Tetris from the Mod Retro Chromatic (modern quality-of-life on original hardware), the Game Boy shmup Solar Striker, and WarioWare Twisted on GBA for its motion-sensor novelty. He also caught Fantastic Four: First Steps in theaters, praised Pedro Pascal's Mr. Fantastic, and — in the episode's sharpest left turn — recommends a Hungarian animated film called Son of the White Mare purely on the strength of its psychedelic hand-drawn art. The story is not the point. The animation absolutely is.
This episode is unofficially brought to you by summertime ice cream runs, and the recovered memory of Alex eating half a dipped cone before trading back to a much younger Luke who thought they just had different flavors.
The Plucky Squire is available on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. Main story runs around 8.5 hours. Steam Deck over Switch if given the choice. Join our Discord and let us know what you’re playing on.
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