This is a clever puzzle platformer that takes players from a children’s book into the wider world.
It might be a little strange to accuse a game like Brave Squire of being too realistic. This game features heroes from children’s fantasy novels who can jump out of the pages and roam around the bedroom desk where the book is read. In this game, you can move back and forth, from 2D illustrations to thick, squishy 3D, in the name of adventure.
But the table you end up sitting on is something else. Something familiar. And perhaps that’s what really brings this game into the realm of magic. The book is lovely, obviously, all bustling towns and raging swamps, all mysterious forests and towering mountains. But the table itself is a magical space, with ever-changing buildings made from old wood blocks and ink bottles, a bridge made from a ruler, and blocks of Post-it notes that snap together to form a rudimentary house.
It reminds us that childhood is often a time of looking at things closely for long periods of time. The grain of wood. The back of a worn playing card. I think there’s something slightly hypnotic about the domestic world when you’re a child. It has the ability to present an endless chain of possibilities, to blend day and daydream together. The Brave Squire captures this perfectly.
This, in turn, explains why a game made up of such simple and even basic elements (combat, some platforming, regular puzzles) comes together to create something unique. By constructing itself from the stuff a child uses to imagine the world, it turns a carefully constructed game into a clever and quietly amazing one.
It’s all very elegant. The brave Squire is a local hero in a fantasy world who discovers while fighting the evil wizard Humgrump that he is actually a character in a book. He discovers this as he is thrown out of the pages of the book into a strange close-up world of paper clips, pencil sharpeners, and notebooks, and someone has scribbled on the Squire’s face.
What follows is an adventure to stop the wizard from rewriting the book, by moving through a fantasy world within the pages, switching from top-down combat to side-on platforming combat, from colorful towns to shadowy caves, making a group of friends along the way, and then you have to move outside the book, navigating a 3D world on a tabletop, occasionally distorted into a 2D section when there are children’s drawings nailed to the wall or taped to a piece of cardboard.
When you have this sense of traveling between worlds, combat, puzzles, and platforming all feel fresh again. There are fun moments like violent movements shaking the pages, or a boulder drawn in ink reaching the edge of the page and becoming a real tumbling rock. Puzzles often depend on you making new sentences out of the surrounding narrative, like finding the right words to open a locked door, or freezing a lake so you can walk across it.
Even though you’re drawing in 2D graphics, it’s equally pleasingly physics-heavy. In the platforming sections, you have to pick up blocks to hold down switches – hardly revolutionary, but sometimes the magic you can bring these 2D blocks into a 3D world is so inherent that I always enjoy it. Combat, meanwhile, is simple but dynamic. Enemies squish and pop under your attacks, and you use a sword to deal with them, which I only recently noticed is also a pen tip.
Moving between worlds is also handled very cleverly. This is a puzzle game, not a sandbox, so there are set locations in the book that you can move from the 2D realm to the 3D realm, and you’re often sent to collect new items that will come in handy later in the book. In addition to the platforming gloves on the table, you can also collect a few gadgets that allow you to manipulate the book itself in interesting ways. I don’t want to spoil too much, but the simplest of these lets you turn pages, which means you can go back to earlier parts of the story and find useful things.
It sounds complicated, but it’s all spent on fairly simple puzzles. After all, this is a game for kids, but also a game for adults that happens to be about childhood. It’s also a game where the ideas stand out more than the individual puzzles. I loved one section where I left the book and went through the dollhouse rooms because it was fun to explore the dollhouse and it reminded me of my daughter’s dollhouse. The individual puzzles are good, but the framework is outstanding.
There’s a wonderful scene in the book where the Squire arrives in the main city of Altea and finds it filled with famous artists from our world. You can accept a quest from Magritte, and I didn’t expect I’d be typing this. The quest is a little weird, but again, that doesn’t matter, what matters is that Magritte gave you this quest. I’d do anything for him!
Inevitably, there are moments when the magic wears off a little. The repetition of certain puzzle ideas can cause the adventure to taper off. Perhaps, the game is a victim of its own fun: there’s so much innovation here that the repetition stands out more. There are also some pacing issues, especially with the game’s habit of interrupting its own flow to explain things. I think this is because the game has to balance two audiences – children and adults – but there’s still so much unskippable dialogue that even young players will want to keep playing.
These, and the odd mini-game (which can thankfully be skipped), are minor quibbles, though, given the wonderful content that Brave Squire offers players. It’s a collection of simple game ideas, tinged with magic and memory. It’s a game about the inspiration that can come from encountering the right piece of art at the right moment in childhood, and I suspect it will continue to inspire those who play it.
Plucky Squire review code provided by the publisher.
