Plebby Quest: The Crusades is a deep strategy game with a humorous wrapper to move it along. It was built to seem familiar, sporting a Risk undertone prevalent throughout, but it’s much more than just a simple strategy board game. Much, much more.
Plebby Quest: The Crusades is what you get if you took the game of Risk, added a deeper historical perspective then twisted some humor and fun characters on top of it like a sliced lemon on a glass of ice tea. All the while knowing that, as you sipped on that ice tea, that there is a layer of yummy complicated flavors that will have you juggling an economy, military strategy, a series of mini-games in a religious wrapper, and quests to accomplish, all while running a country without getting invaded.
That’s a dangerous ice tea. Let’s drink this right the hell up.
The beginning of Plebby Quest started out questionable for me. You get a lovely set up with a young prince looking to take over for his father, a dying Sultan while trying to navigate the ins/outs of a Sultan’s duty without screwing it up. Oh, yeah…the prince is a complete idiot (or at least he starts that way), which makes you listen intently to what your prince-helper has to say. You get all of this with a large amount of dialogue, which was concerning when you’re not expecting a narrative-driven gameplay design for a Risk-esque game. Thankfully, all that dialogue and character development strangely fits into the gameplay design and helps to push along a tutorial that slowly unfolds with the game’s story. As you learn what you have to do as a prince to take over for your father, the narrative becomes a device to move along the tutorial and to explain exactly what you should be focusing on in the order you need to focus on them. And you don’t know this happening to you until you come to a point where you feel properly trained out of nowhere. It’s like the game-based learning theory in action, folks.
Anyway, PiedPipers Team did a magnificent job of properly and slowly settling the player in for a massive experience through Plebby Quest’s unfolding narrative. The first hour or so in the game gives you the barebones basics of the game, while also entertaining you with inside jokes and important plot devices. Through this method, you learn how to build up your army (train/upgrade/maneuver troops), learn about the religious aspect of your characters (and the KLAX-like game you can play for your religion — whoever is a KLAX fan, PiedPiper, good on you), learn how to take over lands, learn about diplomacy with other nations (or all-out war), and also learn that you have to keep an eye out for with your nation’s interest firmly in mind (questioning, defeating, and shoo-ing away people who frequent a city Inn who want to dethrone you). And all of the above are only the top layer of this gameplay design. It’s a helluva methodical entrance into the game.
As you dig further and further into the game, you also will run into a few designs that have a massive impact on your success. The game features metrics of your nation’s economy, which fluctuates depending on who you trade with and how successful you are with your battles. PQ also features the need to keep your people happy as hell and address their concerns as they come up. It’s a neat factor that is magnified and made more interesting by outsiders coming in to try and uproot good citizen attitudes and turn them against you. That aspect of the game is fascinating as hell. You can get rid of said people by paying them off, talking to them, or by simply killing them. You will find the game does a great job of making sure you pay attention to each and every city that is under your control while doing things like repairing when they are invaded. It’s as if the game truly wants to put you in the shoes of a powerful ruler.
The game also includes quests. As you grow stronger and more influential in your rule, you will have council meetings where people request you to help them out in some way (that is where the quests come in). Sometimes it is as simple as collecting items and sometimes it is as complicated as researching certain topics to open up options in the game. You gain items, money, and other things, like research points, by completing these quests, which only deepens the amount of expected gameplay in PQ.
Related, there is a research option in the game that allows you to expand your train of thought with religion, military strategy, and to possibly have a silver tongue in order to trade with visitors. You can gain research points in the game through completing quests. By opening up these research options on the research skills tree, you also end up completing other quests. It’s a circle of life sorta deal and it works well under the Risk umbrella here. It will certainly motivate you to focus on specific chores as a ruler, which will equal out to specific rewards. Those rewards will ultimately help you grow other areas of your rule.
And the game just keeps getting deeper.
As Plebby Quest continues, you can also hire/fire generals to help your nation out. These generals, who usually reside in the aforementioned Inn (above) bring their own set of attributes and skills, while silently demanding gifts and recognition in return. Keeping them happy means that you win wars. You want to win wars in this game and conquer lands.
Speaking of wars, each general is capable of holding a certain amount of troops that they command during fights. Troop morale depends on the general’s success. If you have poor troop morale, then the troops will retreat during battle when things get too hairy. Nope, you cannot stop low morale troops from running away, which means you lose battles. As generals’ popularity rises or falls, you can commend them or get rid of them (they won’t love you for this) at your whim. It adds to the motif of ‘ruling’ in Plebby Quest. It gives you a solid sense of self and how powerful you are by growing/stoking a great general’s fame, and equally gives you a sense of maniacal power by disposing of them if they displease you. This is a very effective game of risk. By the way, you can only have a certain amount of generals at a time — so choose wisely.
In addition to generals, controlling them in battle is a hoot. You have a variety of troops you can send in, archers/spears/shields are the basics, and you can move your troops back and forth depending on if you’re the giver/receiver of the invasion. During the actual battle portion of the game, on the surface, the game looks uncomplicated in its execution. It looks like a knock-off (be it a mini-version) of Castle Crashers. The troops move on an X-axis with simple 2D graphics pushing things along. Once you understand how you can position your troops in a 2D landscape, moving them back/forth at certain times, healing them when they need healing, and putting them up against different military troops — the game grows a lot more sophisticated. You understand that maybe your strong swordsmen can go into battle against two sets of archers, damage them, then slowly retreat out of range, heal, then go back into battle. This strategy keeps your troops from dying in massive quantities, while effectively laying the wood on the archers. Again, it’s amazingly more complicated underneath than it looks on the surface.
The above is just a scratch on the game’s surface to what else awaits you. There are artifact hunters you can meet, loan sharks you can deal with when you need extra coin (don’t go this route), and a bevy of crazy-ass gameplay design choices that simply make this more than you can see without playing Plebby Quest. Much like the opening dialogue of the game, I could go on and on with some real purpose, but I’ll wrap it up here.
Overall, Plebby Quest: The Crusades is a deep strategy game with a humorous wrapper to move it along. It was built to seem familiar, sporting a Risk undertone prevalent throughout, but it’s much more than just a simple strategy board game. Much, much more.
