The Little Acre

I’m not sure how I came across this one. It’s possible I was trawling through some list of some sort and saw that it the game cost less than £5 and wasn’t too long or difficult to complete. I took a chance on it and it turned out to be something of a minor let down. It’s hard to be too let down by a game that costs less than £5 though.

The Little Acre follows the story of Aiden and Lily, father and daughter, as they point and click their way into another world using Lily’s grandfather’s strange generator that can tear holes in space time. It’s a fairly solid game with lots of narrative drive and unlike Gone Home, the characters are more likeable and relatable.

The game play itself was massively frustrating due to control issues and my biggest bugbear by a long way was the item menu. You have to press Y to open the item menu and you can carry various items at once. Having more than one is a massive pain in the ass as scrolling through these items seems to be very disjointed as it’s nearly impossible to control the cursor. The amount of times I selected the wrong item because the cursor moved at an uncontrollable speed was ridiculous.

In addition to this, every time you pick up a new item, it automatically opens the item menu and leaves it open. This is annoying because nine times out of ten, you won’t need to use that item straight away.

Controlling the characters in the environment also feels very faffy and disjointed. It also flicks between a point and click cursor and roaming around the environment using button prompts to select things.

Another big criticism is that all of the dialogue and cut scenes are unskippable even on multiple playthroughs of the game so you don’t have a lot of control over what content you watch even if you have seen it before.

The music is also really annoying. It’s a very high-pitched attempt at positive happy sounding noise which is just irritating. I’m assuming that having to listen to jingle-jangle tunes constantly being repeated on adverts has none prevented me from having any kind of normal response to this kind of thing. But I do find this a lot with video games in particular that the music just makes me feel depressed. I may have to play future games on mute, especially as I’ve just downloaded the last two Walking Dead games which suffer from the same issues.

Achievement s – 1,000 Points – 27 Achievements

I have to confess to using a guide for this one. I gave it a go up until I got stuck and then powered through it as quickly as possible. 15 Achievements are story related and cannot be missed but the other twelve are missable, event related achievements that require you to do something well first time or just do something you don’t have to do.

I got most of these using the guide but there are a few that get special mention as they are made especially difficult due to the controls I’ve mentioned above.

One requires you to move an orb from one slot to another but the item goes into your inventory when you pick it up. This means you have to pick up using the x button, press the y button to open the item menu, struggle to select the orb and once you have selected the orb, you have to move the now unbearably slow cursor down to the slot where the orb goes. To get the achievement, you have to do this first time and you are on about a three second timer. I had to do a second playthrough to get this one and I even knew it was coming the first time. The difficultly is purely down to the faffy controls. There are a couple of these, ‘do it on your first try’ achievements but the others are easy compared to this one.

The other one combines everything I’ve said above. There is a speed run achievement that requires you to complete the game in under an hour. With all of the crap controls and unskippable dialogue, you can understand why this was frustrating.

Downloadable Content – N/A

In respect of the genre The Little Acre is okay. It doesn’t make a lot of narrative sense, nothing is really explained and characters don’t seem to make a big deal over the fact that they’ve been to a strange new world (there may be some underlying backstory here that I’m not aware of), but at least the characters are likeable and it’s a bearable gaming experience.