The Little Acre (2016)

It's kinda charming but pretty janky and amateurish.

You play as a brother and sister waking up in their rural Irish cottage to discover their inventor dad has disappeared, and you have to get his wacky inventions running to find out what happened. So that's all pretty cute, and the art looks quite nice and the voice acting is endearing. There's a fun section where you're the whirling dervish of a sister trying to make her own breakfast and almost getting flattened by cabinets or setting the cottage on fire at every step, saved each time by your increasingly-exhausted dog.
But also, the brother's VO is all delivered twice as fast as it should be, the art all has that 'good but untrained artist using MS Paint' feel, and it took me a while to even figure out what my goal was. There's an inventory and the puzzles are all pretty easy but not mindless, but there's no inventory combining, it's a one-click interface, there are some irritating timed puzzles and bridge-switches logic puzzles, and at one point I got stuck simply because I hadn't realised that as well as all the exits with hotspots, there was one without. There's lots of other little jank as well, like juddery scrolling, line skip and quick exit only working some of the time, characters changing size mid-animation. Charles Cecil was the exec producer on this, and I would have hoped he'd have spotted and (indirectly) ironed out a lot of this stuff.

Apparently it's very short, so I'll keep playing unless I hit some major bump.

Okay, finished. Turns out you're actually playing as father and daughter, not siblings, which goes to show how spotty the storytelling is! It continued in the same vein throughout, with some charming aspects (forgot to mention the live-recorded trad Irish music which is pleasant to listen to) but not much thought gone into puzzle design or polish. I could only really recommend this as a gateway adventure to play with a young kid with a walkthrough to hand to get them past any bumps, and even then only if you already got it for free.

Rating: a lot of charm, a lot of jank.