No Place Like Home is a decent game, but its insistence on hammering home the message that “humans are wasteful” every few seconds at the expense the narrative ensures that few people will ever play it, and even less will walk away with more progressive views on environmental issues.
Singleplayer.
No Place Like Home’s narrative is incredibly preachy, and while I (as a follower of Jesus Christ) fully believe everyone needs to do their part to combat climate change and clean up our oceans, being reminded every few minutes about how awful humanity is and how much we love to pile up garbage all over the planet makes for a terrible narrative.
When combined with flat dialogue and unlikeable characters, No Place Like Home barely ranks higher than Biomutant, one of the worst environment-focused narratives in recent memory, and is likely to make the average gamer care less about the environment and “preachy environmentalists” after wasting their money on what is essentially extremist environmental propaganda masquerading as entertainment.
While I fully believe that taking care of our planet should be discussed via the medium of video games, it should be done in such a way that something of value exists in the story beyond “humans & progress are bad”, especially if you want people to learn something, instead of just zoning out while NPCs rabble on about how this area has been ruined by greed and industry.
One of my favourite games growing up was Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town; back then (and still today), I felt it was one of the few games that perfectly balanced grind and progress by allowing players plenty of freedom to enjoy non-farm-related activities while requiring they made significant progress each day if they wished to make tangible progress towards restoring their farm and developing relationships with the local community (and that certain someone special!).
While No Place Like Home offers players plenty of things to grow and produce, there is almost no reason to grow more than the handful of each item required to unlock certain grades and new buildings, with honey, mayonnaise and jam (made by preserving fruit ) providing players with everything they need to reach the endgame.
To make matters worse, many crops have only 1 or 2 unlocks that require them before becoming entirely useless and in the case of items such as sunflowers, wool, and cocoa (found only in creative mode) serve no purpose at all.
No Place Like Home is the type of game that could have easily been possible on GameCube. While this may be a design choice to allow for thousands of physic-enabled pieces of trash to be present at any given time, I must ask, did we really need all that trash, and couldn’t trash be automatically accumulated by a combined drill/vacuum instead of requiring players to continually hold the space bar to add the trash to their inventory.
While I get it, the narrative requires everyone playing to think how evil and wasteful humanity is, making mining trash nodes the game’s entire purpose is unrealistic (when is the last time you saw a mineable trash node?) and very tedious.
After I had mined a few thousand trash piles, the thrill of “cleaning up the planet” was replaced by an overwhelming feeling of “here we go again”, as I was forced to repeat the same task for hours on end, and honestly made me feel bad for people who had bought this game in early access, and expected more activities to be added along the way.
For those who have a flair for interior design, No Place Like Home allows players to decorate multiple farmhouse rooms; unfortunately, smaller rooms clip constantly, and you will often find yourself looking through walls.
While No Place Like Home’s take on house decorating falls flat in places, at least “there was an attempt” to offer players something to farm for no reason and mine trash nodes.
Except for inventory management (which only gets worse as the game continues), No Place Like Home offers very little challenge.
Some puzzles are infinitely better than those found in Biomutant; however, once you figure out how each type of puzzle works, they offer no real challenge and become just another chore required to complete the area and get back to something hopefully more interesting.
No Place Like Home has one of the worst, if not the very worst, control schemes I have ever seen, with the player character having the agility of a cargo liner; despite playing a wide variety of games from FPS to third-person action RPGs, I have never played a game where I am forced to move the mouse 8-10 inches at times to move my character in a certain direction.
While this can partially be attributed to how low mouse sensitivity settings are by default, even when adjusting settings to more comfortable levels, there was always something “off” about how my character moved, a feeling that stayed with me for the entirety of my 10+ hour playthrough.
No Place Like Home has a lot more to offer than titles such as BioMutant when it comes to unique content; however, when compared to titles such as Stardew Valley and the Harvest Moon series, it has very little to offer beyond chores and a small selection of fetch quests, and while upgrading your tools allow you to access new areas, upon entering those areas you will essentially encounter the same chores and fetch quests you are already tired of, just with a new coat of paint.
Example:
While these are five separate quests on paper, they consist of the same activity: clicking on an animal and pressing e; hardly engaging content for even the most casual gamer.
It’s rare when the only likeable character in a game is a talking chicken; however, I can safely say that without my chicken companions, there would not have been a single likeable character in the entire cast of No Place Like Home. The fact I can put funny hats on chickens (and other animals) is one of the few things about No Place Like Home that genuinely made me smile.
No Place Like Home is a adventure video game developed by Chicken Launcher and published by Awaken Realms, it was released on 17 March 2022 and retails for $19.99.
No Place Like Home is available on the following platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
On average No Place Like Home takes between 12 and 20 hours to complete.
Estimated completion times are derived from various sources and may vary based on the skill level of each player.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
No Place Like Home is rated PEGI 7+ and contains:
No Place Like Home is not a bad game, and very young children and casual gamers will enjoy the simplicity of farming; however, it has very little to offer serious gamers, and I must admit to running out of steam shortly before the final area and watching the ending on Youtube, as I was so bored at that point, even one more hour of mining trash nodes and talking to preachy NPCs seemed like an eternity.
