No Place Like Home Review

Release Date: December 23rd, 2020 (Early Access) Full Release March 10th 2022

Publisher: Realms Distribution

Developer: Chicken Launcher

Platform: PC/Steam (reviewed)

Price: $19.99

Version Reviewed: 0.32.224

No Place Like Home is a post-apocalyptic survival game from developer Chicken Launcher. The basic concept is straightforward and reminiscent of the Pixar film Wall-E. People trashed the Earth and fled into space. It's up to you to improve your situation and that of others who have stayed behind by cleaning up the joint and improving your farm.

Your point of view character is Ellen. She returns to her grandfather’s farm to find he has left for parts unknown, with his farm and the surrounding areas inundated by a flood of trash that covers nearly everything. Your job is to find Ellen’s grandfather, clean and improve the farm and help the few remaining neighbors by reclaiming the area from trash, pollution and hostile robots.

The game begins with a reasonably good tutorial that gives you an idea of how everything in the game works. Here you will proceed along a path to learn how to vacuum trash, the crafting system, domestication of animals, farming, and making Preserved Food, the main currency.

Keeping animals happy is important so GOAT BUBBLES

With the tutorial out of the way, you are dumped onto Grandpa’s farm to find him gone, the whole region trashed and only an intelligent chicken named Cornelius to guide you. Yes, I said, “intelligent chicken named Cornelius.” After giving you some beginning quests to give you the feel of the game, he departs to become an occasionally recurring Easter egg, and you can clean your way outward to meet the few others who have stuck it out.

Each NPC will trade for building plans, upgrades for her tools and crafting stations, and better HP. You will be tasked with fetch quests for the locals as well as quests to help clean the surrounding areas.

The artwork is fine, and overall the look of the game pleasing, if unexceptional. Some aspects of the artwork seem out of place, nothing terrible but it's like a movie when an actor is miscast, some characters seem like they wandered in from another game.

Despite the setup, the game is not story-rich, the visuals are there, and the mechanics are interesting. You can keep pets, domesticate chickens, ducks, pigs, and robots called Cubebots. Each of these creatures is a helpful, but requires maintenance.

As you progress you will have opportunities to upgrade and decorate your home with furniture, wallpaper, statues, fountains, and other decorations. You can even give your livestock gifts like disco balls and cute little hats, because, uh, reasons. The game is most definitely not lacking in style, but It's obviously still in early access and the Devs have work remaining. In researching the game, I ran across several players complaining that the game was a first order resource hog, although the version I reviewed (0.32.224) ran flawlessly on my 6-year-old laptop.

Smart Alec remarks aside, the artwork is well done.

The biggest issue is one of design. The game is meant to be at least somewhat non-linear, but you can get into trouble if you don’t understand resource management from a fairly early point. Once you understand how it works, though, it becomes almost too easy. Gameplay is repetitive to the point of tears. Clean garbage, care for the farm, chip away at quests rinse, lather, repeat forever. Combat is marginal at best. You face off against different hostile robots that are either laughably easy to defeat or insurmountably hard. There are so few combat options that tactics don’t really enter the picture beyond trying to lure enemies away from groups to defeat them piecemeal.

Bottom line, the game has a lot of promise, but it’s still obviously not ready for prime time. The overall look and feel of No Place Like Home is good. It’s cute and refreshingly family-friendly, but the gameplay is less post-apocalyptic survival and more chore simulator 2022.

The Good:

Mostly well executed
Good art and design
Positive message and family-friendly

The Bad:

Repetitive
Marginal story
Repetitive

No Place Like Home (PC) Review