michelel72

Hello, world. I don't post much; I haven't been doing much. But I figured I'd make some notes of recent things as evidence to myself that I do anything.

Writing: I've been making stop-and-go progress on a story that I never meant to exist; it's ... 69,700 words so far, and it has so much left to go, and I need it to be in place for something else I wrote that follows it, and ... sigh. Why am I like this.

Beware of very mild spoilers beyond this point. Note also that I haven't been in an overly receptive headspace lately, so please know that I don't mean to denigrate anyone's favorites here.

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"No Place Like Home" (NPLH) is in early release with a full release that was originally planned for 10 March but has been pushed out to 17 March so far. It's an exploration/farming game with minor crafting and combat elements; if you've played "My Time at Portia" (MTaP), you know the look/feel and the general controls.

The setting is ... not quite post-apocalypse, but near enough: Humanity has trashed the planet and, with vanishingly few exceptions, swanned off to Mars (or at least Mars orbit). Your character (pale, female-presenting, and named Emily, all of which appear to be hardcoded) has been on that Mars station for some significant part of her young life but has returned to her grandfather's farm for reasons I've forgotten, only to find it buried in trash and abandoned. She has to break up and vacuum the vast trashscape to find items, generate crops and barter currency, and track down the where and why of her grandfather's departure.

First, the dings: Like many 3D-style games, it has places where your character can fall in a hole and become trapped. (Waterways have been my particular trap point.) You can zip home, though, so it's not a restart-the-game crisis when it happens. There are other early-access glitches and bugs (my save is stuck because saves from before a certain point just don't have the pieces necessary to get past a plot quest), though the developers have seemed very responsive to most of them. There are spelling/punctuation/grammar/syntax errors in character speech, with the worst of them in the newest areas of the game. The map is gigantic and complex ... which can make tracking down overlooked items frustrating. At various points there are little robots guarding (?) key points or maybe just the trash (??) for reasons (???), but fighting them isn't especially complex, and their toughness increases only gradually. The "you are here" icon in the character's map is hilariously inaccurate.

You apparently don't ever need to sleep, though you can; if there's a season system or even a calendar, I haven't found it. As of my last playthrough, the only reason to sleep was to recover health from combat, but food buffs have since been added and they might also address that. There's a cooking system (not my thing, but better than the ones in many games) and an animal system (decently balanced, though the feeder model needs work). You can gradually unlock more rooms in your house and then decorate them, though ... meh. (I don't see the appeal of that in MTaP, either.)

Cleaning up all. the. trash. can be very tedious; it actually reminds me a lot of the mining system in MTaP. At the same time, you actually can clear all the trash from a given area, and the landscapes are beautiful once you do. I have 38 hours so far and that's without being able to advance the plot to at least one more major region. I'm enjoying exploring the maps and plot. I'd say my biggest complaint so far is that the resource drops are too good -- I've had to build a ludicrous number of chests to store things Just In Case. (Rule 1 of gathering games: Never trash anything if you can possibly avoid it!) I've gathered enough farming soil squares to cover the character's property at least twice over, for example, even though most of the space is needed for buildings and trees.

I'm pausing for now because I don't know what changes will come with the major update, and I don't think I could face vacuuming that entire landscape too many times. But so far I'm enjoying this and can recommend it to those who enjoy the genre.