Devolver Digital’s gorgeous new indie release is literally a storybook adventure, with homages to The Legend Of Zelda and more. It’s a problem as old as video games themselves: a new title is visually amazing, with a previously unseen standard of graphics, and yet it doesn’t play anywhere near as good as it looks. Most commonly these are games striving for photorealism, but not always.
The same inequality of qualities can also apply to more cartoonish art styles and while The Plucky Squire looks amazing it certainly doesn’t play that way. What’s so frustrating about The Plucky Squire’s faults is that the game does not suffer from a lack of ambition or imagination, or even a preoccupation with its presentation. There are many clever and surprising gameplay elements and while most are borrowed from other games some are genuinely unique.
The problem is that a lot of them just aren’t much fun. The main gimmick is that the game starts with the titular plucky squire (real name Jot) moving around and fighting in a 2D world, very much like the original The Legend Of Zelda. He’s in a literal storybook, to the point where you can see the edges of the pages and the desk it’s placed on.
As the story progresses it becomes clear the evil wizard of the story has realised he’s in a book and banishes Jot to the real world – where he suddenly becomes a 3D character. The visuals used to portray all this are amazing, not just in the sense that the real-world sections look v.