Review: The Little Acre

After being invited to check out Curve Digital’s current line-up of titles, The Little Acre caught my eye above everything else. With its hand-drawn style, point & click style of play and involvement from Charles Cecil (creator of the Broken Sword series), I knew the this would be a day one purchase.

Set in a 1950s Ireland, you take the roles of both Aidan and his son Lilly. Following the disappearance of his inventor Father, Aiden uses one of his contraptions and is accidentally transported into a strange, dangerous world. Meanwhile back at home, Lilly has awoken to find her Dad missing and embarks on a mission to find him. What follows is gameplay similar to Broken Sword, switching between your two main characters as the story progresses.

Such a many point and click titles before it, your main aim will consist of taking an item and rubbing it on everything until progressing forward. Where The Little Acre stands out from the many who came before it is writing and that every direction is made logically with each character’s dialogue or surroundings leading you in the right direction. Just don’t expect anything as complicated as Grim Fandango‘s tedious anchor puzzle.

Unlike many modern day point and click adventures, The Little Acre isn’t just available on PC but both Xbox One & PlayStation 4. While the is no mouse support or special PSOne/SNES type of peripheral to emulate the experience, Pewter Games have instead decided to change up the controls to better suit a controller – much like the Monkey Island 2 remaster before it.

Being a huge fan of story driven titles such as this (The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge is my favorite game of all time after all), I’ve been pretty excited to get my hands on on a new experience that can capture the same magic of discovering the genre as a child.What I received in The Little Acre is the closest I’m going to find, but sadly it isn’t without its flaws.

Beyond its beautiful hand-drawn style of animation is a handful of technical issues that had disrupted my playthroughs with the game freezing, crashing to the PlayStation error screen or restarting my console altogether. Now it does seem that a lot of work has gone into fixing the game pre-release through patches, but I’ve still encountered the odd occasion where my console has required restarting. In one instance I’d used an item before a crash occurred and then upon loading my save up it had vanished, meaning I could not progress any further.

Another problem I found with the game was its length. Clocking in at one or two hours for my first playthrough, there are those that will not find the £9.99 price of admission worth the gamble for such a short experience. While I enjoyed playing through the game and taking in everything it had to offer, even I found myself feeling a little dumbfounded when the credits began to roll. I can understand a title with so much character and plain hard work being on the short side, but unfortunately, my experience had left me hungry for more.

Though short, The Little Acre is clearly a passion project that’s just oozing with charm and an admiration for other point & click titles that came before it.