No Place Like Home

The Good
Despite a rough first few hours, the game finally bears its gameplay-loop to the user. There are so many up-front options it was very difficult to see which actions would reward me, which ones I should leave until later. But eventually, I saw and understood and had a much better time exploring the various environments. Each is full of trash to vacuum, greenery to restore, animals to befriend, missions to complete. None of it largely mandatory, but it is nice to see an area restored to natural beauty.

If you like cute games, this has it in spades, letting you put hats on any of the animals you've domesticated or befriended. There's even a little heart icon denoting how much they love you, and how much they will give you in goods each day. It's an ideal world, where you may keep animals traditionally kept for meat, but here they offer other goods (pigs are good at finding truffles, for example).

There's a definite atmosphere of being in touch with nature, simple living, and the satisfaction of a hard day's work.

For a switch game it at least loads quickly. You go from home screen to running around in game in as little as a minute. Area transitions are also mercifully short (as there are a lot of them).

The Bad
Sadly in writing this, I realised I really had to think about the good points, and I had a to justify to myself giving this a 2/5. As you can see, I managed it, but you may think I was being polite and vague. I was.

Despite ample (and misspelled) text, the tutorials are conducted via the medium of icons and diagrams on a billboard. This is a rookie mistake in thinking pictures offer clearer instruction than the printed word. I didn't know what I was doing at times, not helped by the optional nature of each lesson: I didn't actually know if I was doing it right! Several hours into the game, I finally had to search message boards to find out how you actually make money in this game! It's of course explained in a throw away one line by a talking chicken at the beginning of the game. But if you're reading this: Jars (currency) == Preserved Food (ingredients or meals you chuck into the food preserver).

And this pretty much sets us up for the rest of the game: not as clever as it thinks it is. Characters are discovered in the world by unburying them from literal mountains of trash, but have the nerve to be snarky, and wont help you with your main mission until you've helped them even more.

Environmental puzzles are so simple they must have been a check-box exercise - some can even be bypassed by standing in the right spot because by default the Untiy game engine measures distance (including how far away a switch through a wire fence might be so you can flip it, for example) in two dimensions.

Upgrades and blueprints for kit needed to proceed are blocked by arbitrary requirements. For example, to unlock the basic beehive, you must be in possession of an egg-plant. What? Some even seem largely pointless and expensive if you've gone another route - after unlocking the Sprinkler for 3 jars of jam, why would I pay extortionate amounts to expand my portable water tank up to three times?

Enemies are basically just viscous, moving piles of trash, and dealt with in the same manner: either by vacuuming or drilling. They don't move once you've begun to attack them, so just hold down the button until they are dead.

But your real enemy here (certainly on Switch, but probably any console, and PC if using a game pad), are the controls. This plays like a budget Playstation 2 third person game. Movement if floaty, imprecise, yet switching to an action like sowing seeds is overly precise and inefficient. I suspect a mouse is expected, but there are so many games that can make this work on a controller. Planting trees or placing buildings is a pain thanks to some largely arbitrary placement rules, and frustrating due to the fact you can't build if anything is close to being in the way, like you or an animal.

The visuals, whilst looking nice in PC screenshots are very bare on the Switch. It doesn't help much as performance seems to wobble around 30fps even if you've cleared out all the (admittedly impressive) mountains of trash. Thanks to the paring down of graphic fidelity, the world actually looked better and more interesting before you cleared it up. Even after green grass returns to an area, it still just looks like a PS2 game on an emulator running at 720p. Playing in handheld mode may require reading glasses, as the text in conversations and in menus is tiny, with no effort by the developers to change the layout. I can't imagine it looking that much relatively bigger on a 50".

It's a little on the nose, with the whole world covered in trash, and you have to clean it up, but I appreciated the environmental theme the game was going for - indeed, that's what attracted me to play. unfortunately, pretty quickly this message is lost, as progress in the game can only be made by inventing new solutions to the waste and new way of life - which surely is what got them into that mess in the first place? It's a common enough idea amongst the most naive environmentalists - we can invent our way out of killing the planet. Sadly, no. Thus some real though-provoking questions are simply unasked.

Music and sound effects are forgettable. I've been playing it many hours today, and I couldn't hum a single bar of any track.

The Bottom Line
A mess of ideas and themes, lack of direction, and roughly finished gameplay sub-systems make this a game only worth playing if you've already played much the better farming or clean-up games.