Review: Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the tropical vacation we need right now
At this point, there's really no excuse to not play this game.
Image: Nintendo
If I were to describe Animal Crossing: New Horizons in one word, it would be cosy.
This is the cosiest, comfiest warmest ray of sunshine you will ever enjoy. This game is a hot cup of cocoa on a cold rainy day. This game is a fuzzy blanket after a long day of work. It’s a hot plate of your mother’s cooking. It is every dewdrop on a field of grass in the morning. It’s the opposite of the Game of Thrones finale.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a lovely game that’s hard to dislike, despite several flaws that are equally hard to ignore. The game does feel like it was dragged kicking and screaming into 2020, due to an awful implementation of online multiplayer and a couple of frustrating quality of life problems. Regardless, none of these issues kept me from coming back everyday to live my fullest virtual life on Tom Nook’s debt-ridden island getaway.
I don’t understand how this game works. Where are the guns?
There is so much potential in how you want your island to look. People have made detailed Japanese cities and zen-themed bamboo villages. I plonked a Godzilla by the entrance and planted some flowers. You can do whatever you want!
Animal Crossing is a life simulator similar to games like Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and The Sims. You basically just spend your days doing chores and decorating your island in imaginative ways while time passes by in real time. Each real-life day brings new resources, new things to do and potentially new villagers moving to your island - depending on whether you actually want them or not.
At first, your goals are laid out clearly before you. You play as someone who got sick of city life and moved to a tropical paradise for a lengthy vacation. Almost immediately, you find yourself in debt to the money-grubbing but extremely adorable raccoon Tom Nook, and his two ambiguously related partners, Tommy and Timmy. You’re now on a lovely island with two other villagers, and quickly get put in charge of cleaning the place up and making it the paradise you know it can be.
If you’ve played the Sims and Harvest Moon, you know the deal with life simulators. You start small and messy, and build up to something big, beautiful and entirely of your own creation. Here, you build up a small island to a bustling little village filled with cute animal characters, shops, houses and furniture. That begins with a humble tent and an island full of weeds and resources to mine for. The game feels heavily scripted during its early hours - handing you one goal after another with no rest in between. Collect some Bells and pay your moving-in debts. Collect some wood and make some tools. Mark spots for neighbours to move in. Perform tasks to get new shops built on the island. You get the idea.
Build the island paradise of your dreams
It might take a while before you get your island to where you want it to be, but you can still have a lot of fun with it in the meantime. Plant flowers, try different clothes and dress up your house a bit. The only limit is your creativity - and how many Bells you're willing to spend.
These goals help you along the tutorial sections of the game, giving you a straightforward path through all the nooks and crannies of New Horizons’ mechanics. Eventually however, the credits roll and the objectives stop coming (maybe a month or less into the game) - but you’ll quickly realise that your adventures have just begun.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons puts you in a literal sandbox, with an entire island to shape however you want. Doing menial chores like digging up fossils and watering plants might seem exhausting at first. However, the game not only manages to make these activities fun, but a deeply addictive and fundamental part of gameplay to boot. Toss in gorgeous visuals, eye-catching animations and satisfying rewards into the mix, and you’ve got yourself a game you simply can’t put down.
I found myself running out of things to do on my island every once in a while, only to come back later just to walk around and fish for an hour. That’s how addictive this game's wholesome atmosphere is.
Welcome to multiplayer, or in other words, hell itself
You can donate every fish, fossil and insect you find to the museum, and fill it up over time. The museum in this game is really something to admire. It's beautifully massive, and comes to life in the most satisfying way once you've donated enough items.
We have now arrived at the part where I reluctantly point out New Horizons’ flaws, which feels a lot like choking a unicorn for being the wrong shade of pink.
Nintendo has an unfortunate habit of doing the absolute worst job of implementing multiplayer services into their games - to the point their already-cheap Nintendo Switch Online service feels like a rip-off. At some point in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you’ll probably find yourself jonesing to visit a friend’s island for any number of reasons. Maybe you want to pick their native fruit, which is unique to every island. Maybe you just want to say hello and leave mean notes on their bulletin board, which is entirely reasonable too.
The island isn't a lonely place, either. Over time, you'll gain the ability to invite new characters to come live on your island - and you can even decide where they live and how their houses are decorated. I've played for quite a while and so far, all of my villagers are lovable and unique in their own ways.
Going to other friends’ islands is a frustrating process, however. First, you visit the airport and click through an excessive amount of speech bubbles. Once you fly over, the other player’s game freezes - whether they’re in the middle of a conversation or not. Then it freezes again while you leave. If more than one player visited my island at a time, it became a nightmare of the game pausing every five seconds to signal a new arrival and departure. That made force-kicking everyone a regular habit of mine, because having a queue of people waiting to leave basically renders the game unplayable for a long time.
If you’re thinking of playing local co-op, you might be disappointed to hear that the game also has a strict policy of only allowing players one island per Switch. That means every profile on the Switch essentially gets one shared save file. There’s no such thing as multiple players having different islands of their own on the same console. But hey, it’ll help sell more than one Switch per household, so Nintendo wins.
Why are we only allowed to craft one item at a time?
Having to donate items to the museum is a real headache. Most of these quality of life issues don't seem too harsh at first - but they only become more of a pain over time.
As smooth as New Horizons’ gameplay loop feels, it does have a few quality of life issues as well. For example, the game only lets you craft one item at a time - which is insane to me. If you just want to make bait to get fish for example, you have to endure clicking through the same menu 10 different times just to make a stack of bait. When you’re buying multiple flower seeds in a shop, you’re only given a choice between one and five. You’ll have to repeat the interaction from scratch if you wanted any more or less than that.
There are a bunch of little things like these that get tiresome after a while - like running back and forth across the entire island just to deposit some Bells in the ATM machine, or clicking through too many lines of dialogue to help a washed-up sailor for the hundredth time. New Horizons is a slow, methodical game by design - and sometimes, that works. However, so much of it reeks of antiquated design choices, which is a shame because most of the overall package feels fresh and original despite these glaring flaws.
Verdict
This is a fun game.
The beauty of Animal Crossing: New Horizons isn’t that you can play it forever. It’s that you actually want to. This game boasts an adorable artstyle, gorgeous textures, villagers with distinctly lovable personalities, game mechanics that encourage replayability and a museum that is every collector’s wet dream. It’s the perfect game to keep you looking forward to the next real-life day so you can spend it doing new things on your virtual-life island. During this difficult time of quarantines and lockdowns, there is nothing more precious than a fun routine you can get into at home - and this is it.
The game is unfortunately dated in some aspects, but make no mistake - that hasn’t kept me from coming back day after day. It’s a peaceful, calming game that never punishes you for doing things wrong. Instead, it gently nudges you to embrace your creative side and build something truly unique on this strange little island.
Just don’t get on Tom Nook’s bad side. I get the feeling that raccoon is one Bell away from turning into the smoke monster from Lost.
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