We’re not in Kansas anymore, Ellen…
No Place Like Home is a cute and relaxing sim where you play as Ellen Newland. A girl who decides to visit her grandfather, on Earth, for the very last time before she moves to Mars. However, she soon discovers that her grandpa is missing and that his farm was recently destroyed. Clean the world, destroy mountains of trash, vacuum all the rubbish, and recycle resources to build your very own dream farm! Everything you need can be found and recycled from trash, and if you befriend local neighbours, they may prove very helpful during your farming and adventuring endeavours. Rebuild, refurbish and decorate your house into a cosy place of perfection. Find awesome decorations and items across the world and use them to personalize your abode. After all, there is No Place Like Home!
No Place Like Home is a game where you take over your grandfather’s farm, which is up the sky in rubbish for your character Ellen to hoover up. You take the rubbish and recycle it to create new objects to help your farm or other animals or neighbours. Robots will be hiding in the rubbish, ready to attack, but you can soak them and whack them to pieces for scrap. It’s essentially a farming sim set in a post-apocalyptic Earth with talking animals.
Yes, I said talking animals. The first person you talk to is a chicken who wants you to befriend his kind by giving them potatoes and building them coops. You can name the chickens anything you want and even plant ridiculous hats on them. And yes, I did name one of the chickens “McNuggets”…
As with these types of sims, there’s a day/night cycle and you are handed plenty of quests to keep you focused on what to do. There’s a nice underground area that links all the different lands and you can fast-travel between them when you reach them. It handles well and there is something quite satisfying about getting rid of the rubbish in a whole area. Doing the quests will net you blueprints for upgrades or new structures/machinery to build, as well as their appreciation.
The game isn’t without it’s flaws, though. It is currently a bit buggy with its inventory slots either choosing to not work or I found myself warping back home to have my blowtorch constantly on, with no way to turn it off other than to save, quit and reload the game. It does seem an effective way of getting rid of any weird glitches like that, but it does feel frustrating to have to keep on doing it every short while.
The game is made with the Unity engine and you can tell quite quickly, for better or worse. It’s not the worst looking game out there, but a PS5 version should be looking a bit better than this. It does run at a solid framerate though. There are a few blocky and buggy textures here and the animations can do bizarre things at times, though I do hope a patch will fix these issues down the line.
The Verdict
No Place Like Home is a fun and relaxing farming sim…most of the time. The rest of it can be a buggy and frustrating mess. Hopefully updates will improve things, but for now the score has to be…