Joy is a bit underrated, I think, but at Summer Game Fest this year, it felt like it was the closest thing to an ongoing theme. Astro Bot and Lego Horizon Adventures were both light-hearted, playful, exuberant family games where all the focus was on simply having fun. However, The Plucky Squire, an action game with a domestic dimension-hopping twist, probably just propelled them to first place in the race, which was the most joyful experience I had all week.
In fact, it was one of the most joyful I’ve had in video games for a while. The Plucky Squire is a delight.
The setup here included an opening scene in a 2D section of The Plucky Squire, the main storybook. What is striking is how the edges of the pages, although always visible, here just seem to melt away. You play a Zelda-esque top-down adventure here, whacking little enemy blobs with your sword or using a neat little throw-and-recall system for it, like a manually summoned boomerang. You jump over ledges and chasms of solid green swirls in the ground, which take you to corresponding green swirls on the other side. Then you hit an obstacle – a big spinning meat grinder that seems quite gnarly and, frankly, suspiciously out of place for this twee little pastel story – and jump onto another swirl and – oh! – you immediately jumped out of the page.
I’ll never get enough of moments like this. The world revolution of Fez, the portal hopping of Portal, the matching lines of Superliminal or Manifold Garden. Plucky Squire’s is different – it’s not an on-demand thing, but a shift that takes place in fixed locations – but it feels just as magical. Just as instantly transformative, just as effective at leaving me with a huge smile.
The first of these moments brought me into the 3D desktop world. Suddenly you are no longer in Zelda but in Toy Story, A Bug’s Life. You jump onto stacks of notebooks and past playing cards or dangerously, playfully balanced rulers – the telltale desktop of a procrastinator, I know a comrade when I see one. A small wizard, who sits on various fixed objects around the desktop, offers advice. Enemies will taunt you with attacks from ledges that you can’t quite reach with your sword, or are simply too high to jump. We’re in an old 3D platformer. I smell an unlockable ability.
I smell it right: all over the world there are other characters who need help, who in return grant you an ability. The most notable is a jetpack, which spits out a long tail of flames as you climb a little higher – a flame that is quite wonderfully lit, I should add, flickering and glowing, casting shadows over a world that seems to be somewhere in the future to play. around dusk.
Unlocking this jetpack took some work. I came across another small glowing warp vortex, this time on the surface of a mug. I went for the mug, which had a space cartoon theme, and a little rocket in distress. Its components are scattered across the desktop and need to be recovered. (If you’re wondering what the story behind all this 2D-3D crossing of worlds is, there’s a suitably charming magical explanation, by the way: the evil wizard Humgrump uses his magic to control the world’s story. you come from, and that seems to turn everything else upside down too.)
Now that the parts have been collected and the jetpack purchased, the quests continue. On a vertical wall, a portal takes me into a retro 2D platformer, with its own sketched crayon art style, a scribble on the wall, as I jump over ledges and avoid more patrolling enemy spikes and blobs. Another mission requires me to use my jetpack to find and, with its spouting flame, light several candles hidden around the world. A plastic toy tub creates a moment of real magic: a standalone game.
This is in fact a round of Resogun – Resotub? Does that work? – as the courageous Jott is transformed into an ’80s action hero with jetpack and laser gun, wearing sunglasses, and you fight your way through the cylindrical cockpit, surviving wave after wave of enemy spaceships and rescuing civilians. A different art style – something like a retro cartoon here? – another mechanic, another moment of impossible charm.
What you realize when you play The Plucky Squire is that this must be the inimitable work of an artist – and it is. James Turner, previously designer of Pokémon such as Golurk, Sinistea and Gigantamax Pikachu at Game Freak, is one of the founders of developer All Possible Futures. Turner explains some little bits of development magic to me: how the 2D mini-games and storybook segments were created by actually projecting these 2D elements onto a 3D world, for example, which I find almost impossible to understand. Suddenly it is impossible to miss the artist’s hand on everything – the shifting of art styles, for example, but also the shifting of perspective, the shifting of frame and angle. Even the collectibles are a wonderful artistic touch: each is a poster of a different character in the game, which is essentially the actual concept art for those characters from development.
And what you especially feel is the love that an artist has for his creations. The Plucky Squire is cheerful, delightful and inventive, but it is also a game created with undeniable care. The kind of care that literally jumps off the page.