No Place Like Home Review (Snicker)
No Place Like Home is the sort of game that looks great on paper, but the more you play it, the more it looks like they used toilet paper.
On the surface, NPLH looks like your typical, casual farming sim: planting, watering and harvesting crops, managing domesticated livestock, collecting resources, placing buildings, etc. The story even starts out kind of interesting: Everyone is leaving Earth for Mars because the planet is covered in garbage. Like, literally covered. Miles and miles of piles and piles of garbage. Your character loses contact with her grandfather, who remained behind, so she decides to take her trusty super vacuum cleaner and gigantic drill and pop down to the surface to find dear old gramps. And thus begins the cleaning sim.
I'll admit, this aspect of the game certainly scratches a fine itch: Clean and rebuild all the things! It is quite satisfying to see chunks of garbage whisked away, leaving large, open swathes of land for you to later fill up with more garbage, like comically over-sized tea sets and ridiculously tiny paintings. So far, so good. There are even some cute touches like being able to name each individual animal AND place comical hats on their heads!
But, that's where the fun ends, and the frustration starts.
From the moment you land, it's apparent the developers couldn't decide what kind of game they wanted this to be: is it a farm-sim? Is it an open-world exploration? Is it a combat game? Is it a puzzle game? Are robots good guys or bad guys? At least one thing it is not: a Romance sim. There are absolutely no social aspects in this game: No romance plots, no birthdays to track, no gifts to give. Sorry Portia and Stardew lovers, this game is NOT for you.
The very first character you encounter is a talking chicken. No explanation of why it talks, but you have no choice but to start following its instructions in rebuilding the farm, rather than immediately seeking your missing grandfather. Which pretty much sets the theme for the rest of the game: Meet someone, do a large series of unreasonable tasks, only for them to tell you "sorry, your grandfather is in another castle," go to the next zone, lather, rinse, repeat. Once you finally do find him, the game inexplicably changes into a shooter game powered by... the talking chicken from chapter one, who is now a super chicken that you can launch (Ooooh... Chicken Launcher.... NOW I get it), destroying everything in its path, making that final level utterly pointless in the first place. I'd spoil the ending for you... except there really isn't one. Much like the rest of the game, it doesn't appear that the developers were able to figure out where they wanted to go, so they just kind of... stopped writing. I've seen better plots in triple-x movies. More satisfying, too. Still a better love story than Twilight, though.
The entire game is plagued with more typos than I've seen since the first Pokemon article appeared on Wikipedia. I get that the developers are Polish and English isn't their native language, but if they paid for localization, the least they could have done was paid someone literate to do it. Even using Google translate would have worked better than whatever they did.
While the bugs in the game are few (beyond the typos), those that exist are pretty nasty, and potentially, could destroy your hardware. Simple things like duplication bugs (which sometimes overwrite existing items), or accidental destruction of mandatory quest items exist, as well as the more serious achievements-running-backwards, and let's not forget the tiny "If you set your graphics too high, your video card might burst into flames" problem. That these bugs and typos still exist months after release while the developers are pushing out new games is exceedingly disappointing.
While not bugs, per se, the inconsistencies of the game magnify that frustration considerably: Why do characters and quest items change names with no explanation? Why can I stack 50 jars of preserved fruit, but only 10 stacks of the fruit I'm preserving it from? And why is it that pet food can be carried in any amount? Why can't I make an omelet with a duck egg? Why can't I make cheese and goat cheese in the same device? If jars of food are the currency(?!), why aren't fruit preserves considered jars of food?!?!
Is the game playable? Yes, I managed to complete it, as well as all 158 achievements. Was it enjoyable? At first, but that dropped off faster than a roller coaster. This is a game that had immense amounts of potential, but was failed by developers who didn't take the time to polish(heh) this very rough stone.
2.5 out of 5 stacks of garbage. In this case, fewer would be better.