The Plucky Squire

A genuinely new idea, rendered beautifully

The Plucky Squire's central hook is the kind of idea that's rare in an industry built on iterating familiar formulas: Jot, hero of his own storybook, discovers he can physically climb out of his flat, 2D picture-book page into the fully three-dimensional desk and bedroom the book sits on, then dive back in elsewhere on the page or into a different page entirely. It's a genuinely inventive structural conceit, and critics responded to it with real enthusiasm — 83 on PC Metacritic, with console scores ranging from 72 to 83 depending on platform, and two nominations at the 2025 BAFTA Games Awards for Best Debut Game and, notably, Best Family Game. Steam's own player base backs up the presentation side of that acclaim emphatically: Very Positive at 84.8% across nearly 2,800 reviews, with the visual execution of the 2D-to-3D transitions drawing close to unanimous praise even from reviewers who have real reservations about everything else.

Where the acclaim is unambiguous

Nobody disputes the craft on display. Animation, environment design, and the specific moment of watching a flat storybook page fold and shift into three-dimensional space are repeatedly singled out by both critics and the overwhelming majority of Steam reviewers as genuinely special, and music draws the same consistent praise across nearly the entire review spectrum regardless of how a given reviewer feels about the gameplay underneath it. Boss encounters add real mechanical variety to what's otherwise a fairly standard top-down adventure structure, borrowing distinctly from other genres entirely — a Punch-Out-style boxing match, a Bust-a-Move-inspired puzzle sequence — giving key story beats a sense of surprise the core traversal and combat loop doesn't always deliver on its own.

Who the game is actually built for

Where a real, consistent slice of reviewers — disproportionately adult players judging by playtime and phrasing — land on the same specific complaint is difficulty and player agency. Multiple detailed reviews describe a rigid, heavily-guided rhythm: a few steps of movement, an interruption for dialogue or narration, a few more guided steps, repeated throughout. Puzzles are frequently solved by the game itself rather than by the player, with several reviewers noting the game shows the answer plainly rather than letting players work it out, and combat and platforming are described as clunky and imprecise in a way that stands out specifically because the presentation around them is so polished. The "jack of all trades, master of none" framing shows up independently across several detailed reviews, all making essentially the same argument: borrowing mechanics from many different genres for individual boss encounters means none of those borrowed systems get explored with any real depth.

None of this is really a flaw so much as a design choice the BAFTA voters explicitly recognised: a Best Family Game nomination is a direct acknowledgment that the difficulty curve and guided structure are built for a younger audience, not an oversight in an otherwise adult-oriented game. Adult reviewers who went in expecting a challenging puzzle-adventure on the strength of the trailers and central concept are the ones most likely to describe the experience as charming but ultimately shallow once that mismatch becomes clear, usually within the first couple of hours.

Bugs that outlasted the early patch cycle

A more straightforwardly negative issue concerns stability. At launch, reviews and community bug reports documented crash and softlock issues across multiple chapters and platforms — a mine-cart puzzle that could become uncompletable on PS5, chapter-specific softlocks on Steam Deck, and a boss-fight-adjacent crash serious enough to block progress entirely. Developers responded with reasonably quick patches to known issues in the months following launch. What's notable, though, is that reviews posted well over a year after release continue to describe game-halting bugs requiring sections to be replayed two or three times, suggesting the early responsiveness didn't fully resolve stability for every player, even this long after launch.

A confused tone for the audience in between

One more specific complaint deserves its own mention, since it's distinct from the difficulty question above: several adult reviewers describe the game's humour and its actual story and challenge level as pitched at two different audiences simultaneously, rather than one coherent one. The jokes and asides, several say, are clearly written with an accompanying parent's sense of humour in mind, while the story beats, pacing and puzzle difficulty are unmistakably built for the child actually holding the controller. For a solo adult player with no child audience to share the experience with, that split can land awkwardly — neither fully a game built to challenge them nor fully a piece of children's media they're simply along for the ride on. It's a smaller, more specific observation than the broader "too easy" complaint, but it's worth naming separately, since it suggests the game may be working exactly as intended for the shared, cross-generational audience the BAFTA Family Game nomination implies, even as it explains why some solo adult reviewers came away feeling like the experience wasn't quite built with them in mind either way.

Verdict

The Plucky Squire succeeds completely at what it set out to do for its intended audience: a genuinely original, gorgeously realised concept wrapped in family-friendly, gently-paced adventure design that earned its BAFTA recognition honestly on both fronts. Adult players hoping for a challenging puzzle-adventure to match the concept's ambition are the ones most likely to come away wanting more depth, and the persistent bug reports well past launch are a real, separate consideration worth checking current community discussion about before buying. For families, or for anyone happy to enjoy a beautiful idea without demanding it also be hard, this is one of 2024's genuine highlights.