Decided to give
The Plucky Squire a shot, because it had been sitting on my wishlist a while & was on sale. Wow. What a mistake.
At first it was small frustrations. Like the fact that the core concept of it being a playable storybook whare the pages turned, & you could leave the book to do things was, while interesting, made for a lot of stop-start-stop-start cutscenes & gameplay was a slog in places (move Item A, leave book, pick up Item B, re-enter book through different portal, put down Item B, pick up Item C, carry it elsewhere onto page & put it down in correct place to remove obstacle to get key, leave portal & go back to... etc etc). Also you have 2 other characters tagging along with you who do nothing, who follow so closely that they get in the damn way constantly. Like damn back off & give me some space! There's also a section where you get a bow to use, & aiming is ass, but it's a short section. Also the bits in 3D, where you leave the book to do some platforming, have a camera that is a nightmare. There was also a bug that completely blocked progression at one point (was completely unable to leave the page I was on, & for some reason the character could only face left), though thankfully quitting & restarting fixed that. But there were some charming moments, some funny jokes & references, & by Chapter 6, with its metal music theme & aesthetic, it was growing on me.
And then the game throws you a rhythm minigame out of nowhere, using a character who has not been playable until now & has simply tagged along on the adventure, without telling you what you need to do. And while it was easy enough to figure out that there were only 2 buttons that did anything, & they both did the same thing (smashing a projectile thrown at you), it didn't seem to be having any effect. Smashing the things did nothing to the enemy's health bar, & enough hit me that I died quickly (couldn't see the path of most of them as they were thrown so high they went offscreen), so I must be doing something wrong, surely? Bearing in mind that otherwise, the game is stupidly easy. There's an invincibility mode where you get unlimited lives (which the game does not penalise you for using), sections featuring a new mechanic will have a little box telling you the relevant controls (sometimes that'll still display even on subsequent uses) & puzzle sections have an NPC sitting around who will give you hints for solving it (& really calling them 'hints' is an understatement). So this was an insane difficulty spike.
The first encounter is skippable, but the second is a boss fight, & the option to skip was greyed out. And it was worse because some of the projectiles this time were snakes that clung on to your weapon before being flung off, pretty much guaranteeing you'd be hit by the next projectile. Checked out a youtube vid & apparently there's meant to be a sort of halo around the pots being flung at you, that'll flash at the moment you're supposed to hit it, but I didn't get that. I tried quitting & restarting, but it made no difference.
Uninstalled the broken piece of shit. The fact that this got a nomination in the Indie Games category at The Game Awards, but Thank Goodness You're Here! didn't is an insult.
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