The Little Acre (PlayStation 4) Review

The Little Acre starts off strong and with plenty of promise. Players are introduced to Aidan, an unemployed single parents whose father has gone missing, and are immediately thrust into a puzzle.

The opening puzzle, which simply requires Aidan getting dressed without waking up his daughter, isn't particularly difficult, but it does an excellent job at introducing the world in a fast and clean way. Aidan has a daughter, he has a dog, he dresses in 1950s attire, him and his daughter are technologically savvy, his daughter is rambunctious, and he's clearly struggling a bit to raise her on his own. The low difficulty also serves to introduce the correlation between inventory and world interaction, which persists up until the very end.

After completing the puzzle, Aidan is free to roam and explore as he pleases. It's a slow-paced introduction, but the attention to detail in the world and the fluid animation keep it from getting boring. Through exploration, small bits of story are given away at a refreshingly patient pace. The Little Acre is in no rush to reveal what's going on and seems to be more interesting in a slow burn style of storytelling, which unfortunately makes the eventual control shift to Lily all the more jarring.

In a thematically satisfying move, Aidan goes missing just like his father shortly into the story, and control starts to shift between Aidan searching for his father in the lucratively stylised Clonfira and Lily searching for the now missing Aidan. On paper, this isn't such a bad idea. It reinforces the theme of missing paternity in the story through actual gameplay and motivation, an integration that many games lack, but Lily's segments are handled with less grace than Aidan.

Where Aidan's voice acting is fitting for the character, Lily sounds and acts nothing like an actual child. Her delivery ranges from completely flat to completely forced, turning otherwise charming lines into awkward quips. She also sadly lacks the emotional depth Aidan has.

Aidan very much lives in the shadow of his father; one of the first things learned about his father is that he is a brilliant inventor, and one of the first things learned about Aidan is that he's effectively unemployable. It's an interesting dynamic that leaves room for genuine analysis, but Lily never gets any backstory or character moments like that. Her personality can be summed up as brave and reckless, and she undergoes little to no growth throughout her journey.

What's worse is once Aidan is sent to Clonfira, it seems like Aidan's story will focus on him exploring the isometric, hostile world, while Lily explores her little Irish village in search of her father. Instead, Lily follows Aidan into Clonfira shortly thereafter and the story starts jumping between characters too fast to have any impact.

There are moments where Aidan will explore a room and then walk to the next, and control will shift to Lily for her to do the same. There are some great puzzles in the back half that keep things interesting and make sure control doesn't jump too frequently, but when analysed on a room per room basis, too little actually happens with each character to justify how fast control tends to shift.

For all its flaws, though, Clonfira certainly serves as The Little Acre's saving grace. Puzzles are not just engaging, but they've been given genuine tension. Failure seems very much possible, and while the consequences aren't particularly lasting, Pewter Games does a great job at making sure they feel lasting in the moment.

It's a shame the development team felt the need to split the gameplay between Lily and Aidan, and force them both into Clonfira so soon after one another, because there's a lot to be appreciated about The Little Acre, but it definitely feels like it needed a bit more time to figure out what was working and what wasn't.