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Well, here's a concept I never thought I'd see on the little old BBC Micro... a walking simulator! Acorn Island is the latest game from Waffle author Chris Bradburne, and is a quest to find one Lady Phoebe, who is somewhere within the large, scrolling titular island.

This is a game of some serious scale - the size of the island is comparable to Superior's Exile! - and, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. It's not a first-person walking simulator; it's rendered similarly to the Gameboy's Harvest Moon RPGs, keeping your short multi-coloured sprite in the centre whilst scrolling the island in the direction you move him. There are houses which you can approach, and some of these produce some on-screen text that may or may not help you in your quest. There are paths that can be followed too, but this is one of those games where you're likely to need to make a map if you really want to figure it all out.

The only real threat to your character comes in the form of what look to be whirlpools. You often spy these as you wander around, and they expel some black demons that try to home-in on you and deplete your energy. Avoiding the demons isn't hard - in fact, just walking in the opposite direction for a while works about 90% of the time. But what is hard is maintaining interest. Acorn Island is such a big, sprawling game that it becomes repetitive very quickly indeed. The biggest sin it commits is being so big that if you miss something important in one scene, you're likely doomed to spending half an hour wandering without aim as you'll have no idea how to find your way back to where you were, and no idea what you should have done even if you manage it. It reminded me of The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter in that respect.

It's almost a shame to review a game when you feel like you've barely scratched the surface but I've played it twice now and given up both times with the feeling that I hadn't really gotten anywhere. According to its author, "You need to walk into the rightmost red house in the village to the right of your starting location and go from there," to get started on finding Phoebe. However, my efforts to follow the instructions from the village to the woods never paid off and I just got hopelessly lost... again.

Acorn Island does offer something pretty unique in that, like many walking simulators, it feels quite relaxing to play, and just discovering new areas of the map feels like some type of progress. It all moves speedily and the sheer size of the map is pretty mind-boggling considering the code has been squeezed into less than 16K. However, I don't think as many people are going to flock to this as they have Chris' previous games. Whilst I'd like to say that this is an intrepid BBC adventure, the like of which we haven't seen before, unfortunately the reality is more that it just feels more like an "old person's game". Maybe I'll get around to finding Phoebe in a few more decades.