Dale Lane (@dalelane.co.uk)

Finished playing The Plucky Squire last night - such a lovely imaginative game! (If you're local and want to borrow my physical copy for Switch, feel free to DM me - happy to loan if you are tempted to give it a try) backloggd.com/u/dalelane/r...

loading . . .

dalelane's review of The Plucky Squire | Backloggd Let me get a gripe out of the way first: This isn't a very challenging game. As a puzzle game - I found it very simple. (And I say this as someone who tends to avoid puzzle games - I get frustrated with them quickly, and I'm too quick to resort to googling for tips, solutions and walkthroughs. It's unusual for me to find a puzzle game easy). The puzzle solutions were almost always immediately obvious, and even then, the game can't resist explaining the solution before you've even tried it for yourself. And it's not just the puzzles. The platforming is simple. It's obvious where the hidden collectibles are going to be. The combat is trivial. You get the idea. There are things I did to try and introduce more of a challenge - there's an NPC who explains the premise of puzzles, so I avoided him as much as possible to approach everything I could without an explanation. And there is a shop where you can buy weapon power-ups, so I avoided that to play through the game with just the starting weapon strength. Even with this, I breezed through the game more or less in one try, without anything slowing me down. But... that didn't stop me loving my time with this game. Because now I've got my gripe out of the way, I have to say - I think this game is amazing. The storybook premise is so clever, and perfectly done. It's not a one-trick gimmick, either - the game continuously plays with the premise - each time you've gotten used to what you're doing, it introduces another new idea and surprising perspective. It's one of the most delightfully inventive and creative games I've played in ages - with each new element building on top of the last. It gets far more mileage (both from a story perspective, and a game mechanics perspective) from the premise than I was expecting. Every element - game mechanics, art, sound, graphics, use of word art, narration - everything comes together beautifully with an impressive amount of polish. Yes, a higher difficulty mode would've improved my playthrough. But even without that... the experience was such a creative whirlwind that I couldn't fail to love it. https://backloggd.com/u/dalelane/review/3227381/