The Plucky Squire Review (Switch eShop / Switch)

Two years ago, developer All Possible Futures announced brave gentleman with a Nintendo Switch game trailer that’s both charming and gorgeous. The Plucky Squire takes place in two different worlds: the actual 3D world of a boy’s bedroom and the world of a 2D storybook, where the protagonist can jump around to solve puzzles while slashing monsters like in a Zelda game.

Jot, a brave squire, is on a journey to save the land of Mojo from the evil wizard Humgrump once again. Jot, you see, always wins. However, this time Humgrump learns a secret about their world: they are actually characters in a storybook. So he banishes Jot from the pages of the book, threatening the happy ending of the story.

Luckily, Jot’s eccentric wizard friend helps him find his way back into the story, and with new powers that allow him to leap off the page, he sets out to once again dominate Humgrump in a fourth-wall-breaking quest alongside a few lovable friends.

As advertised, the story is a delight. From dreamy snails to heavy metal trolls, every character Jot and his friends meet will make you smile, as will the countless mini-games and clever use of real-world methods to solve the story’s puzzles.

From a rhythm game to a Opposite-like a run and gun game set on the side of a toy box, The Plucky Squire brings creativity to each chapter-ending mini-game, which motivates us to continue. An early mini-game lets you invade the world of a fantasy card game to convince your inner elven warrior to lend her your bow to shoot down the bugs that are terrorizing the story’s snails. This triggers a turn-based battle against her that, while not difficult, kept us smiling the entire time.

The puzzles are the star of the story, however, and while they never overwhelm us and there aren’t too many in the short 10 hours it takes you to complete Jot’s quest, they’re all fun to solve. A sentence on the page might read, “The moat is completely dry.” To get to a switch, you’ll have to find the word “full” in a sentence elsewhere, pick it up, and carry it across to change it to “dry.” The moat will then fill with water, raising some lily pads for Jot to cross to reach the switch.

You can also change words to create some humorous effects without affecting the puzzle at all, like changing the word ‘giant’ in the sentence “The little frog watches the bug”, making the cute frog huge just for fun.

However, swapping two words is never that simple. There are often multiple words and sentences to swap, and to achieve them, Jot will have to jump through portals into the real world to manipulate the book itself. For example, he can flip pages to pull items from the beginning of the story, or seal items to prevent them from moving around in the book. It all comes together to create a completely unique and captivating experience.

Unfortunately, for us, the Nintendo Switch version doesn’t look and run as advertised, which is probably why the Switch code isn’t available in advance from publisher Devolver Digital. Playing version 1.0.2, when Jot is in the story or jumping into a drawing elsewhere in the real world, the game manages to maintain its 30fps target most of the time, although it does occasionally dip, with flipping between pages—more or less the world’s ‘screens’—getting stuck and taking a few extra seconds to load.

When Jot jumps out of the book to gain new powers, such as being able to lift half the book to make giant pigs and cheese blocks move in the story, the resolution drops to abysmal levels and can drop into the single digits when there are multiple enemies on screen. A lot of Switch games run a little better in handheld mode, but here we found it harder to follow the action on our OLED screen, with no noticeable performance improvement.

In turn, this makes other aspects of The Plucky Squire—combat and platforming—headaches. Like Link, Jot can swing his sword and has a spinning attack. When the game stutters, however, there seems to be some sort of lag that makes it hard to tell when your inputs are being registered, causing you to attack when you meant to dodge or swing your sword too many times when taking down goblins and insects.

The platforming is a little worse. In the story, it’s mostly fine, but we had trouble navigating the toy and paint sets of the real-life workbench, often failing to use the pedals that require precise button inputs to reach higher areas, and even getting stuck in geometry more than once.

Conclusion

Performance issues on the Switch, at least at launch, have buried an incredibly clever and charming adventure that we would absolutely recommend otherwise. The Plucky Squire is certainly playable on the Nintendo Switch, but we can’t recommend buying it here if you have other means of playing it. The fact that the Switch-branded trailers look great and that review copies aren’t available on that platform—though they’ve been sent out for other systems—suggests that this version of The Plucky Squire needs to be much more time on the drawing board before release.