{"id":24998,"date":"2024-11-08T00:01:21","date_gmt":"2024-11-08T00:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=24998"},"modified":"2024-10-24T11:20:53","modified_gmt":"2024-10-24T11:20:53","slug":"the-plucky-squire-switch-ps5-x-s-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/08\/the-plucky-squire-switch-ps5-x-s-pc\/","title":{"rendered":"The Plucky Squire (Switch, PS5, X\/S, PC)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Jot is the Plucky Squire and the titular hero of a series of children\u2019s books in the game.\u00a0 In the books, he goes on all sorts of adventures with his two best friends: an artist wizard named Violet and the rock n roll mountain troll Thrash.\u00a0 With guidance from the wise wizard Moonbeard, the trio are able to defeat the evil Humgrump every time.\u00a0 But one day, Humgrump figures out how to break the fourth wall and take over the book, sending things in from the real world and kicking things out.\u00a0 So now it\u2019s up to the Plucky Squire to hop in and out of the book, manipulating the pages himself while solving puzzles and defeating enemies.\u00a0 The Plucky Squire is a (mostly) 2D action adventure game similar to Zelda, and it\u2019s available on most current consoles and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.<\/p>\n

As Jot, you\u2019ll be able to run, jump, and swing your sword in 2D top-down fashion.\u00a0 As you defeat enemies, you\u2019ll collect lightbulb shaped coins you can use in a shop to buy moves and upgrades.\u00a0 These let you throw your sword, or do charged and jump attacks.\u00a0 Since you are in a children\u2019s book, sometimes you\u2019ll see words and you can pick some up and place them in other areas to affect the story.\u00a0 This can open up paths for you among other things.\u00a0 When you see a green swirl, you can jump out of the book and move in 3D space on a child\u2019s desk.\u00a0 But the controls are still the same.\u00a0 Here you can bring in things from the outside world, as well as turn the pages or tilt the book to manipulate objects in the story.\u00a0 You can even dive into post it notes, dioramas, and other things on the desk, too.\u00a0 Sometimes, usually while fighting a boss, you\u2019ll play a mini-game like a Punch Out style boxer, rhythm game, or bubble popping puzzler.<\/p>\n

As you can probably imagine, The Plucky Squire is as charming as all get out.\u00a0 But unfortunately, it has a laundry list of problems, too.\u00a0 The game saves automatically, and when you quit it\u2019ll tell you the last time it saved.\u00a0 But I think there\u2019s no reason why you shouldn\u2019t be able to save at any time, or at least saved more often.\u00a0 And the green swirls that let you hop in and out of the book are hard to see sometimes, especially since they are on green grass in the book a lot of the time. Normally framerate drops don\u2019t bother me, and I usually don\u2019t even notice them.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t bother me here either, but I certainly noticed them!\u00a0 The font is sometimes a little too small and narrow to read well in handheld mode, and goals and objectives are not very clear at times.\u00a0 Lastly, the game is buggy as all get out.\u00a0 In fact, the game froze up on me right after I defeated the last boss, so I had to fight him twice!\u00a0 The game is still charming enough that I saw it all the way through, but it really needed a few more months in the QC oven to iron out some of the kinks.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Plucky Squire is rated E-10 with an ESRB descriptor of Fantasy Violence.\u00a0 You hit cartoony enemies with your sword and they just fall over and say \u2018argh\u2019 and disappear in a puff of smoke when defeated.\u00a0 This game has selectable difficulty levels, and you can even adjust things like one hit kills, automatic jumping, and removing collapsing platforms.\u00a0 You can even skip mini-game boss fights if they get too hard.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I had to do that a couple of times at the end myself because they were too difficult for me, even on the Easy setting!\u00a0 Reading skill is a must since you must use words to solve puzzles, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jot is the Plucky Squire and the titular hero of a series of children\u2019s books in the game.\u00a0 In the books, he goes on all sorts of adventures with his two best friends: an artist wizard named Violet and the rock n roll mountain troll Thrash.\u00a0 With guidance from the wise wizard Moonbeard, the trio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":24985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24998"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25029,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24998\/revisions\/25029"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}