The Plucky Squire opens with a problem most games never think to have: its hero already knows how the story ends. Jot is a storybook knight, drawn to win, destined to beat the villain and close the book on a happy ending. Then Humgrump reads ahead, learns he is the loser written into every page, and does the one thing a fictional villain can do about it. He throws Jot out of the book.
What follows is the hook that carried The Plucky Squire from its 2024 release into the year’s conversation. Jot lands in a three-dimensional world outside the pages, and the game becomes a story about a story, one where the flat and the solid keep trading places. All Possible Futures, a British studio, built the whole thing around that swap, and Devolver Digital published it on 17 September 2024 for Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.
It is a platformer, a puzzle game and an adventure at once, and it is at its best when it remembers that the jump between worlds is the joke and the mechanic in the same motion.
Trailer, via DevolverDigital.
Jot, Humgrump, and the Book That Reads Back
The premise is the whole engine. Humgrump is not a villain who wants power or revenge. He wants a rewrite. Once he understands he is the villain of the book, destined to lose his battle against the forces of good for all eternity, he kicks the heroic Jot out of its pages and changes the story forever.
That is a clean, funny idea, and it gives the game a villain with a motive you can explain in one sentence. Humgrump is not evil because the plot needs him to be. He is evil because he has read the ending and refuses to accept it.
Jot’s job, then, is not to win a war. It is to restore the book’s happy ending and save his friends from Humgrump’s dark forces. The stakes are editorial. The hero has to get his story back.
The game keeps that framing tight. Jot moves between the 2D world of the storybook and the 3D world outside it, and the challenges change with the dimension. Inside the book, the rules are the rules of a page. Outside, they are the rules of a room. The Plucky Squire asks you to hold both at once, and it rarely lets the tension drop.
Boxing Badgers and a Jetpack
The mini challenges are where The Plucky Squire shows its range. Jot boxes badgers. He flies with a jetpack. He works through puzzles that only make sense because he can cross between the flat page and the solid world.
Some of these challenges hand control to Jot’s allies. Violet is a trainee witch and an artist. Thrash is a mountain troll and a heavy metal drummer. Both get their own playable stretches, and both widen what the game can be about without diluting what it is.
That variety is the point. A game built on one trick — the 2D-to-3D jump — could run out of road fast. The Plucky Squire avoids that by treating the trick as a doorway rather than a destination. The badger boxing and the jetpack flying are not filler between the real levels. They are the game testing how far its own premise stretches.
The perspective shifts too. The game moves between third person, a bird’s-eye isometric view and a side view, and each one changes how you read a room. That is a lot of camera work for a storybook platformer, and it mostly earns its keep.
A Storybook That Knows It Is One
The Plucky Squire is a kids’ game in theme and an action-fantasy in tone, and it does not pretend otherwise. It is single player, it is charming by design, and it wants you to smile at the bit where a painted knight discovers depth.
That is not a knock. The game’s confidence comes from knowing exactly what it is. It is not trying to be a grim epic or a systems-heavy puzzle box. It is a storybook adventure with a clever spine, and it commits to that register from the first page.
The fantasy here is literal. Jot is a character in a book who learns his world has an outside. The game treats that as wonder, not horror. The 3D world is not a threat to the story. It is a place Jot can use.
Where the game could have gone darker — a hero confronting the fact that his life is authored — it stays warm. That is a choice, and for the audience it is aiming at, it is the right one. The Plucky Squire wants to be read to, not to unsettle.
What the 8.8 Means
The Plucky Squire holds an 8.8 out of 10 critic aggregate across six outlets, as recorded by IGDB. That is a strong number for a debut studio’s first game, and it lines up with what the game actually delivers: a tight premise, a clean hook, and a mechanic that keeps paying out.
The score is not a promise of perfection. Six outlets is a small sample, and an 8.8 sits in the range where a game is clearly good without being a landmark. The Plucky Squire is not trying to redefine the platformer. It is trying to be a very good one with an idea nobody else had, and on that measure it lands.
The ranking of what matters here is easy to write:
- The 2D-to-3D jump, which is the reason the game exists and the reason it works.
- Humgrump’s motive, which turns a stock villain into a character with a readable want.
- The playable allies, Violet and Thrash, who keep the middle of the game from flattening.
- The mini challenges, which are fun but are seasoning, not the meal.
Put the jump first and everything else follows. Take it away and The Plucky Squire is a well-made storybook platformer with nothing to say. Keep it, and the game has a thesis: that a story can be entered, exited and rewritten, and that the character doing the rewriting might be the villain.
The Part Worth Watching
The Plucky Squire matters less as a platformer than as a proof of concept. All Possible Futures took one idea — a hero who can leave his own book — and built a whole game that never stops using it. Devolver Digital put it out on four platforms on the same day, which is a statement of confidence in a studio with no track record.
The 8.8 is fair. The game is charming, it is clever, and it is short enough that its best trick never wears out. It is also not the kind of game that changes what comes after it. It is the kind of game that shows a new studio can execute a sharp idea cleanly on its first try.
That is the detail worth holding onto. The Plucky Squire is not a landmark. It is a calling card, and a good one. If All Possible Futures keeps building games around single strong ideas the way it built this one, the next release is the one to watch.
The Numbers
- Title: The Plucky Squire
- Developer: All Possible Futures
- Publisher: Devolver Digital
- Release date: 17 September 2024
- Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
- Genres: Platform, Puzzle, Adventure
- Modes: Single player
- Critic score: 8.8/10 (IGDB aggregate, 6 outlets)
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
