Humanity has done what it’s known best for doing – Making a mess. The entire planet is now a giant pile of trash, somewhat similar to the Disney Classic – WALL-E. While the majority of the population has already left for Mars, a few didn’t have the heart to leave their planet.
This is where you come in. In search of your grandfather who once owned a giant farm, which now lies in complete waste, you decide to step in his shoes and bring the place to its former glory. Your job? – drill through the mountains of trash, vacuum every last bit of trash lying around, recycle and build new structures and farming needs. No Place Like Home by Chicken Launcher Studio was released for PC (Steam) on March 17th and published by Realms Distribution at a launch price of INR 529.
Story of the Wasteland
Your grandfather was one of the few that decided to remain after the entire population abandoned earth. You decide to visit him only to find him gone. After looking around, you come across a letter that warns you to not to look for him. This obviously raised more questions because the planet was now more polluted, mountains of trash lay all over the farm, animals were caged and robots trying to hurt anyone they come across.
This is where you decide to take things into your own hands. With the power drill and vacuum, you break through every single obstacle you come across. After cleaning your own farm, you set up the basics and come across a talking chicken who helps you build a chicken coop. Soon, you come across a shopkeeper, who recognized you well. He knew your grandfather’s whereabouts but tasked you to bring the farm to its former glory before you can also set out on an adventure. And this is where the great journey begins.
Simple Mechanics, but Too Simple
The game allows you to scavenge resources and convert them into usable structures or decorative items. You can break mountains of trash by drillings through them, and using your vacuum to collect the trash. Later, you can deposit the collected trash and convert it into resources.
During your cleaning campaigns, you will come across astray drones and robots that will attack you by leaping at you or throwing acid at you. You can respond by hitting the back or shooting them with water. After they are destroyed, you can recover batteries that you can use in repairing and expanding your farm.
Apart from spending your time cleaning the area, you will also focus on rebuilding the lands into beautiful and productive spaces. You can build patches of fertile land and grow different crops on them. Using your resources, you can build a Kitchen, Compositor, Chicken Coop, Dog House, Greenhouse, Recycler and many other farm-related buildings.
To further upgrade your farm and items, you can preserve food and trade them with upgrade blueprints.
Personally, while this covers a variety of stuff you can do in the game, it still feels scarce and unrewarding. The idea of a chicken coop is to collect all the chickens together and their eggs as well, however, to collect the eggs, you need to walk up to every single chicken and collect eggs. The same mechanic applies to all other buildings and at the end of the day, it mostly feels like a decorative simulator rather than an RPG environment.
Unprosperous Graphics
The first thing that you observe in a game is how it is presented to you. Right from the start, the animation felt clunky, The UI was not so user-friendly and the combat movement was a total disaster.
The tutorial itself felt all over the place and I couldn’t remember or take forward anything from it. The game felt like Fortnite: Save the World but at the lowest graphics and somehow worse. The skies are pretty, but the level design, barriers, interactions and all the other things felt like a very lackluster effort from a design perspective.
No voice lines, dialogues, unnecessary writing and repetitive music make everything worse than what’s already at the game. Overall, in terms of story, design and music, No Place Like Home takes a heavy beating.
VERDICT
No Place Like Home is an RPG based upon restoring a post-apocalyptic world into a beautiful green land with animals prospering and crops growing all over. The game may have a satisfying take on cleaning mountains of trash and recycling it into decorative items and resources, it mostly feels like a Trash Cleaning Simulator. With the lack of proper story writing, dialogues, poor graphics and repetitive music, No Place Like Home never had me hooked into it.
I give No Place Like Home a 6/10 and hope that in upcoming patches and updates, major aspects of the game can be improved upon. But until then, I would like to look at other games.
FINAL RATING – SKIPPABLE
DISCLAIMER: Code was received from the developers for the purpose of a review, without any riders.
