The Plucky Squire: a storybook hero who leaps from 2D pages into a 3D world

The Plucky Squire began as an artist's itch. James Turner, who had spent years designing Pokémon at Game Freak, left the company and started drawing a webcomic called Cosmic to fill the void; its characters and ideas later found their way into a bigger vision. Turner wanted a game built on his own minimalist, colorful illustration style, and the format that clicked was a storybook: a book's pages could present a different style of gameplay on every spread — a top-down adventure, a minigame, a choose-your-own-adventure — while exploring the physical object of the book itself.

With co-founder Jonathan Biddle, the idea became something stranger: what if the hero could jump out of the book entirely? The final concept contrasts a simple, colorful 2D storybook world with a realistic, beautifully lit 3D room around it, where characters can also leap into other illustrations printed on mugs, paper and toys. Players turn pages, rearrange the words of sentences to rewrite what happens, and pass objects between dimensions. Unreal Engine let the studio keep both worlds running at once, and an Epic MegaGrant helped the small team cover the craft it lacked.

The announcement trailer earned a reaction that surprised the founders. When The Plucky Squire shipped on September 17, 2024 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox and Switch, critics received it as one of the year's most charming family adventures; The Verge praised it as "as cute as it is creative" and cited it, alongside Astro Bot, as proof that polished all-ages games can flourish outside Nintendo, a gap Turner said the industry had under-served.