The Plucky Squire review – jolly adventures on and off the page

Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox series SX; Devolver
Meta spin on arts-and-crafty games has you helping an eccentric trio able to access the world outside their story to battle the evil Humgrump

There is a whole sub-genre of video games that use arts and crafts as the basis for their aesthetic, landscapes and storytelling: LittleBigPlanet, Chicory, the Paper Mario series, Yoshi’s Woolly World and Kirby’s Epic Yarn, to name but a handful. The Plucky Squire takes things one step further, and then things get very meta.

About two-thirds of this game takes place in a gorgeous children’s picture book with a hand-illustrated feel, wherein the player helps the titular Squire and his two friends – an apprentice witch with an affinity for painting, and a mountainside rock’n’roll troll with a knack for rhythm – face up against the chaos raining down from the evil Humgrump. But despite these twee beginnings, it gets pretty postmodern pretty quickly. The remaining third of the gameplay takes place on the child’s desk around the book. The Squire has the power to jump out of the 2D world of his story into reality. Here he can turn pages, tilt the book itself and smuggle objects from the chaotic, messy desk into the story to help him.