No Place Like Home Review

Game: No Place Like Home
Genre: Base Building, Farm Sim, RPG
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Chicken Launcher | Realms Distribution
Price: US $9.99 | UK £ 7.20 | EU € 8,19
Controller Support: None
Release Date: March 17th, 2022

No review code was used, I purchased the game myself. 

No Place Like Home is a post-apocalyptic simulation game by Chicken Launcher and published by Realms Distribution. This game is all about cleaning up the Earth after most humans have left, building up your home base, and making the world better and prettier for those humans who were left behind.

Gameplay and Story

In this simulation title, you play as a young woman named Ellen. While she usually lives on the Mars colony, she travels to visit her grandfather, who has been incommunicado. She finds his farm covered in trash and ruined, and it’s surrounded by polluted waters, trash-covered fields, and toxic mountains. Ellen, determined to make the world more beautiful, starts to clean up the farm and surrounding areas, using the trash to craft a new home all while finding her grandfather and bringing him home safe.

As you start up a fresh game file in No Place Like Home, players are immediately presented with a quick tutorial on all the mechanics of the game. Once the tutorial is completed, Ellen is dumped into her new life without any preamble, and the world is now your contaminated oyster.

The Tutorial

The starting gameplay is actually a brief tutorial that gives you a good idea of how everything in the game works. A path stretches out before you, lined with signs and cluttered with trash. This tutorial delves into how to vacuum with Ellen’s backpack, how to break down trash towers, the crafting system, domestication, farming, and making Preserved Food, the main currency in this post-money world.

Every game should have tutorials like this; it’s a hands-on tutorial that forces players into learning the mechanics without lengthy written explanations, weird interruptive explanations by NPCs, or the other usual ways games try to teach players how game mechanics function. It can also be easily skipped with a ladder at the very beginning for those who have already played.

Into the World

Once players complete the tutorial, it’s onto the farm. There is so much trash in the way that Ellen can barely see the field where some vegetables are still growing. After clearing some space, upgrading her drill, and defeating some of the aggressive robots in her way, Ellen is finally able to get out from under the dirt enough to meet some of the locals.

Each NPC has a small store where Ellen can purchase building plans, upgrades for her tools and crafting stations, and even unlock higher defense and HP. You will be tasked with fetch quests for the locals as well as several quests to help clean up and restore areas for wild animals. The game’s questing system has its quirks, but is overall put together in a logical, easy-to-figure-out way that most will find intuitive.

Overall Story and Look

The environment is beautiful, the artwork is stunning, and overall the look of the game is immensely pleasing. A lot of care was obviously put into the way the world is presented, and the character models and portraits show a lot of personality. While not deeply story-rich, the visuals are there and the mechanics are interesting. You can keep a dog, cat, and raccoon as pets, and Ellen can even domesticate chickens, ducks, pigs, cows, sheep, llama robots, Cubebots, and more. Each of these creatures is a helpful friend with a personality and a strong desire for a human to pet them.

The game also offers a lot of opportunities to upgrade and decorate Ellen’s new home with furniture, wallpaper, statues, fountains, and other eye-catching decorations. The game is certainly not lacking in style, life, and beauty.

Some Pros and Cons for No Place Like Home

No Place Like Home is finally in full release, so I thought it was time to update this article. In the original, I wrote a lot about the performance issues. Most of this has been completely updated and fixed, which has made this game much more playable. I am finally able to enjoy it at full specs on my SSD gaming laptop. While some might not be able to get the settings as high as I can, just about everyone should be able to play this title now.

Another issue I had originally with No Place Like Home was how flat the characters and their quest chains were. This has also been upgraded in the new version, and it has made the game much more enjoyable. Recent changes that I love also include:

• Being able to put hats on domesticated animals.
• More animals available to befriend.
• More NPCs.
• An opening cutscene that actually describes Ellen’s quest.
• Less underground tunnels that lead nowhere.
• Fast travel was added.
• Loads more foods and recipes are available in the game.
• Recipes now have a use in the game; they give buffs to Ellen when she eats them.
• Recipes cost more than Preserved Foods so there’s a use for all the seeds you collect in the game.
• Chicken Launcher added a Sticker system for achievements, and you can take those and turn them into posters for decorative Ellen’s home.
• The decorations are now much better sized for Ellen’s home.

The game is by no means perfect, and there are some new upgrades I would love to see in the game.

• Higher quality recipe and upgrade pictures (they were downgraded in the last update a couple of days ago).
• Hints for locations of missing recipes, feathers, and other collectables.
• A better system for quests.
• There are still several points that players can get stuck in while wandering the world.
• There are several piles of trash that just can’t be cleaned up no matter what.
• Before giving one of every single crop to Lily, there is no way to get spare seeds if you run out of a specific food item. For example, I ran out of oat seeds once and there is no way to get any of them back.

Conclusion

For a farming simulation, there is a lot going on in this game. In spite of a few shortcomings, it’s one of my favorite games that I have ever played. I love just about every aspect of this game, and the additions after the full release have been great.

There is also a plan for more content to come; a recent post on Steam says that fishing will be added to No Place Like Home soon!

Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up: