Pure Xbox’s Craig Reid recently attended Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles, where he got a chance to preview a number of upcoming Xbox releases. Today, we’re sharing his thoughts on a hands-on demo of The Plucky Squire, where he sat down with All Possible Futures co-founder James Turner to play some of the game’s sixth chapter.
Every once in a while, a game is actually announced ABOUT to us. Plucky Squire was one of them. It’s been seven hundred and thirty days — two whole years — since it was first revealed at 2022’s Devolver Direct (I know…not that we were counting), so we were definitely pleased to sit down with the co-founder of All Possible Futures James Turner at the epic Devolver SGF Play Days booth and get ready with the game.
The Plucky Squire is an adventure game, presented to us as a children’s book. In just under an hour, and with our charming new friend James Turner by our side, we explored the delights packed into a portion of Chapter Six. Our preview began with The Plucky Squire, Jot and their friend Thrash in 2D form trying to climb the moustache-adorned Mount Trargg. Their mission: to put an end to the nuisance caused by the book’s evil antagonist, Humgrump, who was so fed up with losing to Jot that they kicked him out of his story—and into the real world!
After a few initial steps in the game, we were faced with a sprawling chasm too big for our brave heroes to cross. It was here that our narrative could have ended whether this adventure was limited to paper. Thankfully, Jot is able to survive outside the confines of his pancake-flat world and travel into our reality. It was this concept that first piqued our interest in 2022, and experiencing it first-hand was very satisfying indeed.
It would be remiss not to mention that The Plucky Squire clearly takes inspiration from the Legend of Zelda franchise, namely “Zelda: A Link Between Worlds” in which Link was able to slide his way up walls and picture. Having played through a number of Link’s adventures ourselves, The Plucky Squire’s gameplay felt familiar, natural, and transferable.
If you’ve ever played any 3D platformer, you’ll find the traversal and combat very straightforward. The aptly named Jot-it sword is shaped like a box, and swinging it in the name of artistic expression is both simple and fun. As we began our demonstration in Chapter Six, Jot already felt like an experienced swordsman. We could execute a 360 spin attack, ground slam and a boomerang attack quite satisfyingly. These were readily available in both the 2D and 3D sections of the game.
It was immediately clear that All Possible Futures wanted The Plucky Squire to be enjoyed by the whole family, regardless of skill or ability. This is reflected in the game’s difficulty options: ‘Adventure Mode’ for the bold and brave heroes and ‘Story Mode’ for the unsung heroes who want an easier journey. “Story Mode” changes the damage sliders in your favor and gives you the ability to skip the trickiest sections of the game. We were also helped by one of The Plucky Squire’s cutest characters – Moonbeard – who was on hand to give suggestions or direct us if needed. We didn’t actually need Moonbeard’s help for most of our session, but having him there was comforting all the same. Plus his beard was cold.
Jot’s 3D adventure takes place in a child’s messy bedroom. In the demo, we traversed a cluttered table, led by tall books, glasses and trinkets. During our trip, we noticed a book titled “Maiming Machines” that seemed to be missing its cover design. According to James, it’s because Humgrump recruited a bunch of big, scary machines to unleash savagery on The Plucky Squire and disrupt Jot’s quest: to restore creativity.
However, just as quickly as we were able to jump from Jot’s 2D origins to this new 3D world, we were pulled back into the storybook. The page flipped, revealing a land filled with glam rock bunnies and “horn sign” shaped topiaries. This rapid change between realities MUST feel dull and obtrusive, but since The Plucky Squire is about the dissonance between creativity and anti-creativity, flipping between “reality” and a heavy metal-inspired environment in which we saw the mini baphomets feel like perfect parallels.
Remember those missing Machines of Mayhem? Well, as we moved forward through the mountains of Trargg, our progress was halted by a pale chainsaw gate. To progress, Jot had to jump off the page and onto the table using one of the game’s glowing transition symbols and sweep reality for a special item that could break the pesky machine.
Our time with the demo and Jot came to an end after we had helped an adorable Baby Rocket collect parts of Daddy Rocket (aww?) that were hidden on the messy desk. After completing this quest, we were rewarded with a stamp – the special item needed to progress the narrative back into the storybook.
We walked into The Plucky Squire’s Play Days booth with high hopes and high expectations. For 45 minutes we laughed, smiled and asked James all kinds of questions like “will we ever see the kid who owns the book?” and though he said no, James said:
“In the future the boy (who owns the book) will become a famous author in his own right because he is so inspired by Plucky Squire. But if Humgrump, the evil wizard, takes over the book, then it becomes a much more boring book. He’s going to lose his inspiration and that might change his path in the future… So there’s a story outside of the book that you don’t see directly.”
There’s a lesson there for all of us, don’t you think?
While we may not have a release date for The Plucky Squire on the Xbox Series X|S outside of “2024,” we here at Pure Xbox had a lot of fun and are getting a bit of a taste of it for our upcoming sequel to the fascinating All Possible Futures adventure.