Video games let their players accomplish many adventurous acts with a few taps of a button. Although one of the richest aspects of a game can be its story, many players skip over that in the interest of completing their quest. But what if toying with a book was the heart of a game — and a bridge between Zelda-like heroics and a reader’s imagination?
The Plucky Squire, released Tuesday, suggests that the video gaming pen may very well be mightier than its sword, and it does so in a stealthy manner that might guide gaming kids (and gaming kids-at-heart) back to the imaginative potential of illustrated books.
In this game, a villainous wizard named Humgrump realizes he’s trapped inside a children’s book, and has flipped ahead to learn that he’s destined to lose to you, a hero named Jot. With a wave of his wand, he ejects you from your comfortable, hand-drawn confines and into the massive, overwhelming bedroom of a real-life boy, Sam. Jot’s initial quest is to return to his storybook world and defeat Humgrump, but after jumping into and out of the real world multiple times, his purpose changes in surprising ways.
The Plucky Squire exploits its book-within-a-game conceit to joyous extremes. A player can manipulate the words in the book to change the environment, by having Jot, for example, dislodge an object near a mouse by adding the word “cheese” to the description, or jump out of the book, then pick up its pages to shake out obstacles, or run around Sam’s bedroom, then jump into and out of his fan-art sketches to get the edge on Humgrump.
In video game parlance, Jot jumps from 2-D to 3-D, but in storytelling terms, it’s more universal. “Jot is the master of his storybook,” Jamie Turner, the Plucky Squire co-director, said in a video interview. “When he gets kicked out, we’ve made sure it’s not an exciting thing straight away. He’s been this amazing main character up until this point, and now he gets set back to zero.”
This experience mirrors life for Turner, who left his hometown, London, in his early 20s for Japan to pursue a dream of making video games. “That was jumping out of one dimension and into another,” Turner, who founded his own studio in 2022, said. “I couldn’t speak the language. I was in a completely different world.”
Turner and his co-director, Jonathan Biddle, said their childhoods resembled the relationship between the hero character, Jot, and Sam. “The big thing when I was a kid was the Mario versus Sonic kind of stuff, and that inspired me to draw my own game characters at an early age,” Biddle said. For Turner, “imagining what might happen if the character was real, and what happens if the character could leave that book,” was the appeal. His experience reading picture books with his son inspired him to draw a children’s book concept, which morphed into the Plucky Squire.
Sophie Blackall, a children’s book author and illustrator, has never played a video game, yet she admits to optimistic curiosity about the Plucky Squire’s concept. “Being pushed out of a book is such a childhood experience,” Blackall said, noting that children are encouraged to read more advanced books before they are ready. “There’s an assumption that picture books signal immaturity; if you’re reading a book without pictures, then you’re a better, more sophisticated reader.”
Blackall also appreciates the game’s steps between dimensions as a way to “guide a kid in this act of taking a leap, leaving your comfort zone, and finding skills and experiences that can make you better equipped to deal with the things that are happening in your life.”
As an advocate for the accessibility of physical books — something that can be shared between adults and children without requiring a screen — Blackall suggests that anyone intrigued by the Plucky Squire’s concept should consider the subgenre of interactive, meta-narrative picture books, including “Press Here” by Hervé Tullet and “It’s a Book” by Lane Smith.
Ultimately, the medium matters less to Blackall than the relationship surrounding it: “The kids who are lucky enough to have parents who are engaged and present in their lives and curious about the media they’re consuming, and can talk about it together, is a very different thing from controlling the media that a child consumes.”
The Plucky Squire has already engendered serious engagement for at least one family. “The voice of Jot is actually my son,” Turner said, and his son has also doubled as Turner’s admittedly unpaid prerelease game tester — who, among other things, has helped Turner tune the game to an ideal elementary-and-up age recommendation (though like any good kids’ story, it can scale well for adult fans).
“I’ll just sit next to you and make notes,” Turner said to his son. “You get to enjoy the game, and I get a bit of useful feedback.”
The post How a Video Game Shows the Imaginative Potential of Picture Books appeared first on New York Times.
