When you think “storybook” in games, you think mostly of presentation styles in either a bright 2D form or cheery 3D aesthetics. A few whimsical titles come to mind: the Fable trilogy, Yoshi’s Island and Yoshi’s Story, and that one Bayonetta Origins game.

The team at All Possible Futures and publisher Devolver Digital are taking that keyword one step further with their new indie title The Plucky Squire. The storybook in question becomes the focal point and major backdrop of the game. After two hours of hands-on with a preview build featuring 4 chapters, the developer’s vision for a 2D-and-3D back-and-forth mashup feels fully realized and is all the more enticing for it.

A Page Turner

The Plucky Squire is about the titular character named Jot, who goes on another quest with his friends to defeat his nemesis Humgrump once again. This time around, Jot gets knocked out of the storybook he and his associates are from, and end up in a three-dimensional world outside its pages. Gameplay-wise, The Plucky Squire starts out as a simple top-down Legend of Zelda action-adventure-style title: you have a sword attack, you fight goblins and the like (and a few bosses), and solve simple puzzles. When you’re out of the book, the game switches to a 3D graphic perspective with the camera zooming out a bit at times, though the game still plays like a top-down action-adventure title.

While this aesthetical change isn’t exactly original tech, the way it’s framed and pulled off by All Possible Futures is very impressive and charming. The transitions and back-and-forths between dimensions is incredibly seamless and believable, opening new avenues for creative levels and dungeon layouts. The writing so far is witty and cheerful, as well as not afraid to go into meta territory, particularly about how the book The Plucky Squire was created in the first place.

The game makes it a point to remind people that Jot does write in his spare time, so puzzles that involve replacing words in a paragraph placed in the middle of a dungeon to change the environment are commonplace. For example, replacing the word “large” with the word “small” would turn a giant bug that’s blocking your path into a tiny one, letting you through. As to where the word “small” is located, you’ll have to solve a few extra puzzles to get to that point in the same dungeon.

Jot can also find special green teleporters that bring him out to the 3D world and back to the 2D storybook world, and even enter drawings, tapestry, and post-it notes that bring you back to the start of the dungeon once you’re done with it. Jot also gets special gloves that let him turn the pages of the storybook he’s currently in, which lets him quickly backtrack to secrets he missed and also find essential puzzle items that he can carry forth to the current page he’s stuck in.

The Plucky Squire also isn’t afraid to throw in some minigames to add more variety to the adventure. Within my 2 hours with the preview build, I came across a Punch Out! sequence against a roided-up honey badger and a bow-and-arrow portion where Jot suddenly becomes a muscle man and shoots arrows at bugs and mosquitos ala Rambo (sans flames). They don’t wear out their welcome and are easy enough to pick up and master, though I do hope the rest of the game’s boss fights don’t get relegated into minigame territory.

In fact, I had fun fighting the preview’s sole minibosses: a trio of centipede goblin things that laid out bombs while running around the place. Sometimes, a good old-fashioned Zelda-like battle in your all-ages kids story-esque game is all you need to ramp up the challenge a tad.

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My experience with The Plucky Squire left me wanting; two hours with this charming endeavour just made me curious about how Jot and his friends can get out of the endeavour. As well as find out the deal about the magic bookworm who appears to Jot at the most convenient of times. The bookworm’s mannerisms and speech are like one of those co-workers who recently found a thesaurus and just uses big words when speaking to people. Only in this case, the bookworm knows what she’s saying unlike those co-workers.

Devolver Digital’s latest is charming to a tee and has a ton of inventive twists and turns with its storybook presentation mixed with top-down action-adventure gameplay. We look forward to the full book and chapters when Plucky Squire comes out for PC and consoles on 17th September.