New smartphone game is Pokémon Go for grown-ups

Where once the Place de la Concorde might have been adorned with book- burdened tourists, heads buried in maps, straining to make out road names and locate themselves, unassuming pedestrians are now much more likely to bump into someone being taken for a walk by their iPhone.

No need for the old faithful guidebooks anymore; hands raised in front of them, slightly glazed looks, the tourists plod along, following the small blue dot of Google maps, unlikely to absorb anything that’s around them until their desired designation is reached.

Enter Kompl: a mobile location app for the curious minded. Kompl uses a combination of GPS, Wikipedia and search and discovery programmes like Foursquare to guide the intrepid traveller towards points of interest while allowing them to keep a sense of adventure. There are no maps and no walking directions, just a compass-like view which teases the user towards locations around them with pictures and limited information. It will tell you how many metres away the place is, but it’s up to you to find your way there — perfect for those too stubborn to backtrack when they take a wrong turn.

First introduced earlier this year, Kompl has just relaunched with an added gaming aspect. Choosing a character or “destiny”, the user can seek out selected restaurants, bars, shops, historical monuments or squares “collect” them and level up accordingly. A Pokemon Go for grown-ups, if you will.

Despite being someone usually rather fond of a dog- eared Lonely Planet and largely averse to mobile games (Candy Crush? Have some decorum), I grasped the concept of Kompl fairly quickly during a day walking around Paris.

Setting off in the Montmartre district, I could see on my 360-degree compass view that I was close to the Sacre Coeur. What it didn’t tell me of course was that I needed to wind my way around several small roads and climb up several feet of stairs to get there. But the beauty of the experience was that there was plenty to see en route.

I would ordinarily have walked past and ignored Le Mur de Je t’aime, an art installation just a few metres away. But with items from over 700 different categories pinpointed on my virtual radar, my interest was piqued each time I found myself close to one, and I started changing my path to find them. So this is how I came across Le Mur de Je t’aime, the Wall of Love; a stretch of wall decorated with the words “I love you” in 250 languages. THE INDEPENDENT