No Place Like Home, by its name you would think that it’s a peaceful game about family and for the most part you’d be only half right. Family is involved in the game’s story, and the game is peaceful. But, it’s also the post-apocalyptic world that humanity has left behind as they decided to all leave for Mars.
That’s right, folks! In No Place Like Home, humanity screwed planet Earth up so much, that we had to abandon our beautiful blue planet. Because we turned it a shade of brown that can only be expressed by looking into a toilet of a 7-Eleven. That has not been cleaned, in a week!
The story of No Place Like Home starts on a space station hovering above our giant brown piece of garbage and you receive a message out of the blue from your grandfather back on Earth. He asks that you come and visit him before you leave.
When you arrive back on Earth at your grandfather’s farm you discover it is buried in the trash. And that a talking chicken is giving you instructions and quests to complete.
As you help the chicken, you soon discover a note from your grandfather stating that he’s trying to figure something out. And that if he isn’t back within two weeks to leave to Mars telling you not to look back and don’t ask questions.
But, you cannot just walk away once you’ve arrived and soon you find yourself looking for answers from everyone who lives there. Rudy an old childhood friend, Mark an old shopkeeper who watched you put face paint onto Chickens. Then there is also the mysterious chicken Hero who fights for the people.
It soon becomes apparent that the only way forward in the hopes of finding answers is to get your grandfather’s farm back up and going. But, to do this, you need supplies, and that; is the core focus of No Place Like Home. It’s a farming simulation game, much like Stardew Valley. But, a bit more unoptimized and in 3D. Also, you can’t marry anyone.
No Place Like Home; starts like many farming simulator games. It forces you to wait to grow resources, and at times I felt like the resources may just run out leaving me stuck with no way to progress. I never had that happen to me while I was playing, but that feeling lingered with me.
Soon found myself counting my supplies and working to make my farm sustainable. Which early; in the game is something players will have to work towards doing first.
Gathering supplies early game was daunting because early in the game there is a good chance you can run out of supplies; if you don’t plan.
This is because supplies are scarce and materials don’t respawn an example of this. At the start of the game you need potatoes and you can get potato seeds by scrounging through piles of trash. Once you’ve grown the potatoes. You could accidentally turn them into food for your chickens, pigs, or even a dog.
After you do that you’ll no longer be able to grow more potatoes and lock you out of your upgrades needed to progress the game’s story. This is because the upgrades also require turning potatoes in to acquire it.
The farming aspect of No Place Like Home takes up a good majority of the game, the other part of it is exploration. Much like in Stardew Valley, you have to explore caves and other areas and in these areas are machines that humanity left behind that have gone rogue.
Not only are you fighting to gather materials so you can progress and grow your farm. But, you are also fighting machines to get the materials you need so you can grow your farm!
No Place Like Home balances very precariously on a farming simulator with just a little bit of exploration with combat to make something subtle and unique. Combat in No Place Like Home isn’t even that difficult, it’s pretty straightforward with a simple “there is an enemy, hit it with your drill weapon.”
My biggest grievance with the game. Is just how many bugs there are and the fact that you could potentially lock yourself out of the story. No Place Like Home has so many issues of objects clipping into the surrounding areas and that’s on the low end of problems, the biggest issue I’ve seen is that the font is not adjustable.
When a character is speaking to you; the character’s text never grows in size however; the text window itself will grow in size which makes me want to joke if this was a game designed for Ants.
I will say that No Place Like Home also has a variety of graphic options to improve gameplay such as adding blooming effects to improve visual prowess. But, it neglects to optimize those settings, and the worse issue of all is the default settings are atrocious. If you can play No Place Like Home on its default mouse settings you’re probably a better person than I am.
Now, despite there being a variety of issues with No Place Like Home they’re mainly superficial and not at all as serious as they could be. The biggest real issue is the font size and adjusting the game to ensure that players can still progress IF they run out of potatoes.
That problem could be rectified by ensuring all seeds when grown, give more seeds. I enjoyed No Place Like Home, the story is decent, the gameplay is good, and it seems like a fun farming simulation game. I would recommend this title because I had fun playing this game.
So if you ever get some money lying around be sure to check out No Place Like Home on Steam, and also be sure to recycle so we don’t screw the Earth up as we did in this game!
An autistic gamer with opinions on games who also enjoys making dumb videos on the internet!