Chaotic but Adorable

That was the description to the game, “No Place Like Home”. When humans have trashed the Earth, then fled for Mars. In this post-apocalyptic simulator, your aspiration is to return nature by farming to a world ravaged by rubbish and build your perfect farm. But first you have some cleaning up to do.

What it is about?

You, as Ellen Newland, your job is to break them down and recycle their parts for use on your farm. Like the metaverse, games, you begin with tools that can suck up junk, drill apart tough mounds of muck, beat robotic enemies to death, and water your plants. It’s like a big mix of weaponised Henry Hoover paired with Super Mario Sunshine’s FLUDD water pack, and it’ll be Ellen’s closest ally in her quest to find her granddad and restore the local village to its former glory.

Also, it is on trend because the mechanics are simple but make for a satisfying gameplay loop: break down junk, hoover it up, recycle, even if you think well, it is helping to create a habit to know how to recycle in real life. There’s a relaxing bliss in the act of tidying up across the game’s varied biomes, aided by its superb sound effects.

What can you learn with the game?

If you are not restoring, you will be helping with other things like replacing water filters, fixing up homesteads and repairing fox dens, are straightforward. Because as we already tell you, the land is sparsely populated by characters who remained on Earth rather than going to Mars, and they all want your help. And completing them actively improves the world you’re walking around in. To me, this means that you are learning the importance of being helpful with others, and we need each other to evolve.

On the other hand, we could say, it is a placebo, due to fastest achieve the goal (since it is a game). As an example, one early NPC tasks you with destroying the radiation-warped trees dotted around the map and planting acorns in their stead. Even then, it takes a process to have a result. This kind of quest doesn’t provide the same instant gratification that hoovering up trash does, but the result is verdant oak trees where once there were none and makes you satiated of accomplishment that all good farming games hope to get right.

What kind of genre it is this game?

This game is part of the post-apocalyptic genre. And it has been wrung for all it’s worth. But the developer has applied a healthy dose of absurdist comedy as an example, you can see well-dressed chickens, and a cast of colorful animal characters, etc. You can say it is an effort to lighten the mood. Rather than, say, the typical dingy aesthetic of the Fallout games, No Place Like Home features blue skies and lush green fields, even if they’re buried beneath tons of detritus.

It is a game where the bulk of your time is spent quietly cleaning up civilization’s refuse and admiring your handiwork, going toe-to-toe with angry mech-spiders that stick out like a sore thumb. But occasionally you’ll uncover acid-spitting, spider-like robots. And this makes you have conflicting emotions as a result of polishing off a heap of refuse to reveal a hidden foe, thinking: it took me long enough as it is to find relaxation in No Place Like Home’s repetition, and having to fight for my life pulls me right back out of it.