2D or not 2D: that is the question, in Nintendo-inspired storybook adventure The Plucky Squire
Game The Plucky Squire Developer All Possible Futures Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox Series Release 2024
When you’re immersed in a particularly good book it becomes all-consuming: you can almost feel the enveloping embrace of its world around you as you read. That magic seems especially potent when you’re a child – perhaps because the most memorable fictional worlds come most vividly to life in the telling. Think of your favourite bedtime stories, where someone else’s words and your own imagination combine to make the intangible feel wonderfully real. When we talk about characters springing off the page, we’re speaking metaphorically, of course. But, well, what if they really could do that?
Last summer, The Plucky Squire’s debut trailer gave us an answer to that question. It begins with a firstperson camera gliding into a child’s messy bedroom, before descending towards a desk and alighting on a picture book of the same name. Inside it, we see protagonist Jot explore a fantastical world in two dimensions, largely from a top-down perspective – apparently, the game takes place within the book. It’s already an appealing idea by the time Jot reaches a clifftop at the edge of the right-hand page, and an unseen narrator points to the discovery of “something rather curious”. Stepping into a swirling portal, Jot pops out of the book and onto the desk, becoming three-dimensional in the process. The bedroom is not just there for the purposes of a CG intro, as we’d assumed; it’s there to be explored, too. During a Summer Game Fest short on surprises, here was a moment that produced gasps of real delight and wonder from the audience. And yet it almost didn’t happen.
It wasn’t that developer All Possible Futures didn’t realise that this was a big deal – quite the opposite, in fact. “The first trailer was built around that single moment, really,” co-director James Turner says. “But we also knew we could only do that once, right?” fellow co-director Jonathan Biddle adds. The two had discussed potentially holding back that reveal, so that no one would know about it until release. “I mean, the game still looks great anyway, right?”
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HERE WAS A MOMENT THAT PRODUCED GASPS OF REAL DELIGHT AND WONDER. AND YET IT ALMOST DIDN’T HAPPEN
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