No Place Like Home

by Aethyna Mar 19, 2022 | 0 Votes | 67 Played | 0 Reviews

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Genres:

Simulation , Adventure

Graphics:

Labels:

Adventure , Life Sim , Crafting , Farm

Platforms:

Publishers:

Realms Distribution Featuring an adventurous little girl who’s just looking for her missing grandfather, No Place Like Home is a fun little farm-slash-life simulation game with a dash of adventure! Explore the world while cleaning up literal mountains of trash and helping the few remaining humans who decided to stay behind on Earth. Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Featuring an adventurous little girl who’s just looking for her missing grandfather, No Place Like Home is a fun little farm-slash-life simulation game with a dash of adventure! Explore the world while cleaning up literal mountains of trash and helping the few remaining humans who decided to stay behind on Earth. Don’t forget to manage your grandfather’s farm in his absence and help him retrieve all the lost farm animals.

Plotline

A massive tsunami of trash covered the surface of the earth and most humans have decided to abandon Earth for the brave new world that is Mars where they can start anew

However, some humans decided to stay and make the most of what’s left with the hope that one day, Earth may return to its former gorgeous self.

This is where you come in!

Despite being bound for Mars, you became worried when your grandpa, your only remaining relative, hasn’t answered your calls. Unlike you, he has decided to stay. You’ve decided to set off on a journey to find your grandpa. Along the way, you’ll meet many interesting characters living in and around your grandfather’s farm. They will need your help and you’ll be happy to lend them a hand.

Gameplay

To put it simply, the gameplay in No Place Like Home can be split into two types – the stuff you can do at your grandfather’s farm and the other stuff you’ll do while you’re out exploring in the world. As you might expect, the farm activities you can carry out are pretty much the typical sort, from planting and watering crops to feeding the farm animals. You can even decorate the place, as well as your own cozy home on the farm property.

Since this part of the game is fairly sandbox-like, this means that you can place and build whatever you like given the game assets you’re provided, including structures like a chicken coop, crafting stations like the Kitchen, your farming plots or fruit trees, or decorations like a wheelbarrow filled with flowers. If need to, you can move the items even after you’ve placed them.

Exploring the world is another major aspect of the gameplay, and personally, is among my favorite part since it reminds me of Slime Rancher. The world is completely covered in mountains of trash and you’ll need to drill and vacuum your way to wherever you need to go. Despite being tedious at times, this action can be oddly relaxing, much like ASMR for some folks. The game also offers several different “biomes” with gateways/doors that are blocked behind harder-to-drill trash so there are plenty to look and explore.

To clear these obstacles, you’ll need better drill and equipment and all of these cost “jars” (of preserved food), the only accepted currency in this post-apocalyptic world. There are other useful perks that you can purchase provided that you’ve got the jars and the specific crops needed as well. To get more jars, you can “preserve” anything you produce at your farm, be it a crop or an animal produce.

Considering how big the game world is, I’m particularly glad that the game comes with strategically placed “Fast Travel points”, allowing me to quickly jump from one zone to another.

I also love that the game comes with some (not-so) hidden areas, usually small ones, that you can pretty easily find if you’re thorough and observant enough. Whether it is a manhole cover on the ground or an inconspicuous ladder propped up a tree, the game will have you look out for these little finds as you play the game since these hidden places will usually contain some nice loot.

As you travel about, you’ll also meet various characters, each with their own sets of quests to complete. Most of the quests are fairly simple, common MMO fare, such as fetch quests, and the quest items you need to find are often buried in or are placed among the trash that you’ll have to clear to access them.

Of course, there’s also the issue of saving various animals, some of which you can “bring back” to your farm once you’ve “bribed” the animal in question with its favorite food to become your friend. To my delight, I can have my farm animals wear a variety of fun hats and rename them as I like too.

As much fun as I had in this game, No Place Like Home does have its fair share of flaws. The number of typos for instance is jarring and the glitches, especially when it comes to vacuuming trash and watering crops, can be frustrating at times. You see, for some trash piles or crops, you need to be at a specific angle in order to either vacuum or water them for some reason or they won’t work.

Personally, I find the freedom in which to complete the quests in the order that I like quite liberating here. However, there are times when the quest text doesn’t really take into account that I’ve already completed the task the quest giver was about to give me, which is just weird.

Graphics/ Sound

The graphics here may not be top-notch since you can literally see the “age” in the visuals if you’re close enough, but they look great enough for the average gamer. The game features several unique biomes, each with their own look and feel. There are also some breathtaking scenes in this game, especially if you’re into the art.

Conclusion

To put it simply, No Place Like Home is a merge between two of my favorite games of all time, Slime Rancher and My Time at Portia. Featuring a vast world covered in mountains of trash to explore and clean up, the game offers fun little side quests in addition to the main one where you are determined to find your missing grandfather before embarking to Mars like most of the other humans on Earth. You’ll also get to enjoy the simple pleasures of owning and managing your very own farm where you can plant and grow a huge variety of crops and fruit trees as well as rear a number of farm animals.

The game, however, does have its flaws, from janky controls and some pretty bad typos to quests that don’t fit together because you’ve accidentally skipped the one before. So, unless you don’t mind all of these, you might want to wait a while for the devs to fix things up before buying.