If the news is right, Animal Crossing: New Horizons might just be the only thing keeping us sane in this time of crisis. There’s no denying that New Horizons is charming, comforting, and absolutely addictive, and the multiplayer functionality introduces a whole new level of social interaction to the experience, expanding upon the simplistic village visiting of previous titles.
A DEBT SIMULATOR
The introductory scene to New Horizons should be familiar if you’ve played any core Animal Crossing game before. Shortly after beginning, you find yourself indebted for a ridiculous sum of money to Tom Nook, an enterprising tanuki businessman who both welcomes you to your new home and also serves as your landlord. His newly-established travel agency is offering “island getaway” packages, and you’re his first customer; however, you arrive at your tropical destination to find it nearly completely deserted. So begins your journey to pay off your substantial debt to the tanuki agent that “scammed” you, by collecting bugs, gathering fruit, and catching fish.
Fortunately, you have as much time as you want to collect the Bells you need to clear your monetary liability — at no interest even. This lack of time constraints keeps the game chill and laid-back, comforting even, but the debt acts as a clear goal to work toward should you need a purpose to your endless gathering. And as you complete each of the game’s major milestones, whether it’s expanding your home or upgrading the Nook family shop, the effects of your accomplishments feel very, very real, both emotionally but also visually in the island around you.
Now, I’ve been talking about gathering and selling resources like it’s work, undesirable labor that you toil at for hours a day. Actually, those saleable resources come about naturally as you explore. Sure, you can dedicate real hours (and I mean really, this game runs in real-time) gathering berries and fishing. But you can also spend a bit of time hiking to a hidden pocket in your island, naturally shaking trees and picking fruit on the way, and still come back with something worth the effort.
This isn’t to say there’s no grinding involved. Progression is slow, much slower than in previous Animal Crossing titles, and some milestones are frustratingly mysterious about their requisites. With the game still in the early stages after launch, many features and characters that would normally take up your time in Animal Crossing just aren’t available yet. Some milestones appear to be locked behind time-sensitive events, and so I found myself, on occasion, with nothing meaningful to do but turn off the Switch and wait.
CLUNKY INTERFACE
Menus are slow, clunky, and have terrible flow. In a game that’s so tightly designed, it feels almost offensive to have the menus, the medium through which we interact with the game world, so bad. For example, to fly to another island you must speak with Orville at the airport, but before you can get on the plane you need a ticket. Any reasonable person would expect to be able to purchase a ticket right there at the airport, but the designers thought it would be better if you had to run all the way back to the Community Center snack machine of all places. You also can’t craft more than one item at once, making an important part of the game unbelievably time-consuming. Your time Animal Crossing: New Horizons is scattered with strange little user interface quirks.
Animal Crossing: New Horizon marks the very first time an Animal Crossing game is released in high definition and it definitely benefits from the additional pixels, even if it’s not the type of title to really test the Switch’s capabilities. Although there was an undeniable charm in the low-resolution visuals of previous titles, I prefer not to be forced to infer what exactly I’m looking at. The actual visual style of New Horizons is simple but eye-catching, with bright colors and simple yet pleasant animations.
MULTIPLAYER – MILEAGE MAY VARY
The value and enjoyment you’ll get out of the multiplayer function will be different from player to player. Every player’s island only grows two kinds of fruit, which is randomly generated at the beginning of a game. This means to gather all the fruit you’re expected to travel to other players’ islands. The game also has a dynamic economy of sorts where the price of commodities will rise and fall by some unknown market influence, further incentivizing social interaction. However, for a game so focused on multiplayer gaming, there’s surprisingly little interaction to be had when you visit another island or when a friend visits you. You can still catch things and pick things and do all of the solo activities you’ve been doing so far, and you can do them side by side, but there’s almost nothing in the game that you do together. As it’s implemented now, the multiplayer in New Horizons feels more like playing a single-player parallel to another person than a real multiplayer.
BIGGER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
I’m fairly certain there’s some black magic involved in the development of Animal Crossing. It’s a franchise that throws you into debt within the first few minutes of play, then tasks you with spending the rest of your game time paying off that debt. There are several ways to go about doing so, but none are particularly challenging either mechanically or mentally. In fact, much of the work you’ll be doing in an Animal Crossing game is categorically mundane — catching fish, picking fruits, collecting bugs. The interface is clunky and slow, and there’s a lack of group activities to do in multiplayer. Also, none of the fruit on my island are worth anything.
Yet, it works. You’re enraptured from the moment you set foot on your island. When Tom Nook tasks you with gathering materials, you immediately set off, no questions asked. But in Animal Crossing we don’t sweat the big stuff. It’s in the details; how the characters move, the way they talk, how they word their questions and recall previous interactions. It’s a simplified but convincing facsimile of real human interaction. So, it’s no wonder some people speak about their virtual villagers as they would a real-world friends.
If you take any individual mechanic from Animal Crossing: New Horizons and put it under a looking glass, you’ll find it lacking — it’’s too simple, lacks variety, moves too slowly — but when you put them all together, you get the island getaway you were promised after all.