The Plucky Squire

“Gameplay is severely reduced when the frame rate drops, input delay, game instability, and softlocks all increased due to it.”

“The gameplay is extremely hit-or-miss, though, which really detracts from the experience; long uninterruptible attack animations cause the controls to feel just unresponsive enough to be annoying, combat in the 3d world is clunky thanks to how erratically your attacks jerk you around, and the game's major story beats mostly being resolved via minigames (so many minigames) made it all feel a bit shallow.”

“The gameplay is simple (if not primitive) to the point of dullness, the few interesting puzzles and gameplay sections that are there are often immediately spoiled by your companions, the mini-games are fun but have bizarre difficulty spikes while the rest of the game is piss-easy, there's barely any flow or pacing as the game constantly interrupts you to explain something, and it has no respect for your time as everything takes waaay too long (the animations, the unskippable dialog and cutscenes).”

“Using a lot of GPU power for what are mostly fairly simple graphics, even after I turned on vsync and lowered some settings to try to reduce the impact, there were still gameplay stutters. I would not recommend this if you don't have at least a mediocre GPU (I have a 3060, which I guess is mediocre in 2025). It might have been overworking the CPU rather than the GPU, since it was clearly using physics it shouldn't really need to.”

“This game is a horribly optimized mess that will leave your computer wheezing unless you willingly make all 3D graphics uglier than the PS1.”

“A bit rough around the edges, for example, the textures in 3D sections were blurry, despite graphics settings being set to high.”

“The only thing I really think could have been better is the soundtrack, which goes from lackluster to downright annoying (the music in the Viking-inspired world is terrible, sorry to say that).”

“Also the music is terrible and monotonous, even though every biome has a different leitmotiv, it's all so lifeless, corporate.”

“Audio design felt weak, the music is too cute and childish while sound effects constantly missed opportunities to make funny gags.”

“I would warn that near the end of the game there are several game-breaking glitches that I experienced, forcing me to repeat sections over and over until the playthrough wouldn't glitch - which was very frustrating.”

“Next, the glitches and bugs are so bad that they, several times throughout the game, cause the game to freeze completely or slow down so much that you have to reboot your game system and restart from your last save.”

“I experienced a crash post-update, around half a dozen softlocks, glitches where characters would duplicate themselves for seemingly no reason, and many frame drops despite playing on a machine that outmatches the recommended settings.”

“However, if 90% of your game is me wandering around with flat characters, with a boring story, featuring monotonous puzzles and combat, you aren’t gonna get a high rating out of me.”

“Unfortunately, it is absolutely unplayable (choppy/stuttering image right from the opening video) and the team does not provide any kind of help (they just ignore messages).”

“This game is a horribly optimized mess that will leave your computer wheezing unless you willingly make all 3D graphics uglier than the PS1.”

“Additionally, performance on certain platforms—especially the Nintendo Switch—has been noted to suffer from frame drops and stutters, particularly during transitions between dimensions, though the PC version holds up much more consistently.”

“You'll need a second life for grinding.”

“The only mercies offered to you are that you can skip the very simplistic minigames (with no punishment), the game is short, and that they clearly realized at some point in development how obnoxiously tedious the more 'clever'/involved puzzles were and slowed down on implementing them, with how solving them isn't really hard but just tedious because even once you know how to solve them, you still will often have to go through a minute or two of rote gameplay where you already know what to do but to execute it you have to run across a room to a portal, use a special power, hop in a portal, run to a thing, etc., which makes it even more painful when the game extends the process even further with its insistence on obligatory unskippable text boxes to tell you what to do, despite having a little guy in most rooms with puzzles who will give you hints if you actually need help.”

“Running around to whack anything that might give you currency, puzzles that are easily solved but take a tedious amount of time to complete, shallow combat exacerbated by the amount of fighting needed to progress, upgrades that never feel like upgrades (I have max sword damage and I still feel wimpy), and the autosaving which I hate oh so much.”

“It never explores alternate paths or outcomes, which means there is little to no replay value beyond collecting glitch birds or art scrolls.”

“Replays/achievements: the game has almost no replayability.”

“It's not replayable and achievements will be a pain and waste of your time to attempt to get if you miss any on your first playthrough.”

“The main character is left somewhat vague, while most secondary characters do show some of their backstory and slight character development; nothing too complex though.”

“The writing and character designs are cute and all, but the constant interruptions with needless dialogue and handholdy explanations make it very difficult to do anything of your own initiative.”

“The atmosphere isn't sufficient to compensate for the lacking gameplay.”

“That's one of the reasons why I feel like the atmosphere of the game is truly a weak point.”

“It must be stressed that this is in no way meant to be a 'hard' game, but rather a comfy romp through a mostly chill atmosphere, and may also seem a tad too hand-holdy so if that kind of thing doesn't seem like your thing, you may want to pass.”

“Microtransactions - in-game purchases.”

“Microtransactions - in-game purchases.”

“I was looking forward to it so much and the advertising made it seem like the exact kind of game I'd love, but it falls short in so many ways.”