Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Switch)

Whether you’re tidying up the house, completing a personal project, or simply enjoying some idle time outside, there are some acts in life that are incredibly satisfying but would be hard to classify as entertainment. The Animal Crossing series is built around adapting these simple pleasures into video game form, adding gameplay goals and rewards to these kinds of daily activities on top of plopping you down in a village filled with anthropomorphic animals. Animal Crossing: New Horizons aims to take things a step further, the design still focused around making the mundane tasks of life appealing while also adding a new layer of fantasy as it structures the experience as an island getaway.

Players of Animal Crossing: New Horizons are whisked away to a deserted island by the business-minded tanuki Tom Nook and his apprentices Timmy and Tommy, the player able to customize their own appearance and the name of their decently sized tropical island. From there, you become the representative of the small population of this previously deserted island, and the opening parts of the game definitely have a strong flow and sense of progression built into them. There is plenty to do as you’re starting out to help improve the island. Players begin by plucking weeds and cobbling together wooden tools with the branches they find scattered about, and as you continue to make progress on beautifying the island, new options for expansion and development become available. The owl Blathers comes by to make a beautifully detailed museum to house the fossils you find, fish you catch, and bugs you snag with your net, the Able Sisters move in to provide an incredible amount of clothing for purchase, and areas like the town’s store and plaza continue to get upgraded to more respectable buildings as you help them out.

As you start selling the fruits from your trees or creatures you catch, you begin to earn the game’s currency of bells, and you can use these to continue to customize your island in a variety of different ways. You begin in a rather plain tent when you arrive on the island, but soon you’ll be able to purchase a house and continue to add new rooms to it. Players can either buy new objects or craft them with materials they find around the island to populate both your own home or the island itself, and soon public works become available to make your little island more navigable like bridges and the inclines that let you climb up to high cliffs. The game doesn’t necessarily require you to engage with any of these if you’d rather focus on something like building up a flower garden or working on your museum collections, but the more improvements and beautification you invest in, the more that becomes available over time. Traveling merchants will start to visit your island with unique things for sale. You can find new villagers by visiting other islands and have up to ten animal neighbors, the player in charge of not only placing their houses but determining the placement of every area on the island save for things like the plaza and dock. The endgame of sorts will hit once your island has reached a three star rating based on its appearance and livability, the player finally being granted the means to reshape the land to a surprising degree. You can’t tamper with the beaches, but you can start to build or destroy cliffs, reshape rivers, and develop most of the island in whatever way suits your specific vision for what you want your tropical island to be.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons ties much of its progress to the calendar though, and that’s where it both gets some of its charm and a few of its flaws. One appealing aspect of the game is coming back to it for a bit every day. Gathering fruit that’s grown, seeing what’s in stock at the stores, and collecting new fossils means it’s easy and quick to come back to the game for little chores that still feel enjoyable because they play into your long term personal goals. If you aren’t interested in intrinsic rewards though, the game also has a Nook Miles system where Tom Nook will give you special points for reaching certain milestones or completing a task a certain amount of times such as fishing or interacting with villagers. The Nook Plus Miles take this even further and give you the points for small daily tasks like chopping wood from trees, shooting down presents that float by on balloons, or tending to your flowers. Nook Miles can be redeemed for different rewards than your bells such as unique furniture and the tickets to visit other deserted islands, although you can also visit the islands of other players online mostly just for the sake of hanging out, trading, and showing off your work.

There’s definitely parts to the day-by-day play that make it fun to turn on and play a bit, and some things like the changing prices for special crafted items or the turnips can even mean you get huge payouts that can then be funneled into your personal projects, but some daily limitations seem to hamper the game instead. The visitors to your island can be mutually exclusive, and while some visitors like Redd bring works of art (provided you can suss out if it’s authentic or counterfeit) and Gulliver who will reward you with items based on world cultures, having someone like Sahara appear who provides something simple like rugs instead can make you resent seeing them and the time between seeing the more unique visitors can end up a little agonizing. There are events and items tied to the time of the year as well, and while returning to the game in a month to see what new bugs and fish are around or visiting for a holiday is all well and good, you can also quickly exhaust most unique species pretty early in a month and some holidays like Bunny Day pollute the item pool as Easter eggs start appearing on the end of your fishing rod instead of fish. The different seasons are an interesting idea as winter provides icy furniture and summer has more outdoorsy items in the shop, but then there are things tied exclusively to specific times like the rare meteor shower or K.K. Slider’s concerts. Luckily, if your game schedule and real life schedule continue to align poorly, you can tinker with the Switch’s clock to experience the things you’d otherwise miss if you do it cautiously enough. People generally frown on this and doing it constantly could undermine the game’s pace, but there is little punishment for it and it makes engaging with things like the Sunday morning turnip sales more feasible for people who would be busy at that time.

There are a few other minor problems that are worthy of mention. Crafting is an interesting way to get new items that gives you ways to get new items without spending money, but tools like your shovel and axe will inevitably break and need to be replaced even at the point in the game where it’s just a nuisance to go and rebuild them. It limits your early game properly so you don’t get ahead of yourself, but so does the recipe system that requires you to learn, find, or purchase the recipes so that could have limited having too much power at the start instead. Some items like the teacup ride might inspire an urge to build your own little island amusement park but then the game offers very few appropriate items for that angle, but at the same time there is an incredible amount of objects that can be used to customize your island that you can definitely build a beautiful and rich world despite the occasional underfed item theme. The animal villagers who move in can be cute and funny, sometimes even providing you new items if you interact with them, but a lot of them have interchangeable basic personalities, especially when they have their entire character built around something as simple as loving exercise. Some of the more important characters like Blathers on the other hand bring a delightful bit of character to their functions, and while navigating the menus of someone like the dodos running the airport can be a little cumbersome, they still bring some charm to the island services you’ll consistently be interacting with. Local multiplayer requires everyone to share their island’s limited resources though and the lack of a concrete endgame means the game eventually peters out unless you set a specific end goal for yourself, but the good news is the game still has hours and hours and days upon days of interesting life simulation play to keep you going.

If you set your sight on something in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it can be very rewarding to work towards it. You can make your own designs for clothes and canvases so you can even further change how your character and world look, you can participate in small activities like the fishing challenges or try to impress the Happy Home Academy with your feng shui, and you can go for big payouts like making the conditions right for rare insects or cultivating huge orchards of the fruit worth most on your specific island. Small touches like getting letters in the mail, finding out it’s a villagers birthday and celebrating, or suddenly seeing some new bug on the side of a tree keep the world filled with small surprises, and nothing ever really requires immediate action or threatens to do you harm save a few bugs like wasps whose stings are easily recovered from with no real punishment. It may not appeal to everyone, but as a relaxing canvas for you to build the best island life you can with the materials and items the game provides, Animal Crossing: New Horizons certainly provides a lovely experience within its niche.

THE VERDICT: Before you reach some of the do-nothing days or truly feel the repetition set in, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has plenty to work towards, a wide variety of items to obtain, and a wonderful charm to it that keeps things easygoing and satisfying. The degree of customization is incredibly freeing and makes it very easy to concoct personal goals that are gratifying to work towards. Decorating, building, collecting, and crafting all are rewarding before you factor in things like the island’s progression or the Nook Miles challenges, and while there are little niggling points like the sometimes vapid villagers and schedule woes, Animal Crossing: New Horizons still ends up a relaxing and enjoyable life sim that’s perfect for some low pressure personal fun.

And so, I give Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Nintendo Switch…

A GREAT rating. Starting off strong with the constant work towards bettering your island and riding high on the continued introduction of new options to improve it over time, Animal Crossing: New Horizons definitely has enough interesting stuff front-loaded to please even the most goal-minded players before you are encouraged to start developing your own objectives. The game already offers some areas like the museum that keep something concrete to keep shooting for, but making your house look just how you want it or building an interesting area on your island also offer plenty to do and a reason to keep returning to the game day by day to work towards those aims. Many of the systems are simple enough that they don’t feel like the chores they technically are until you’ve already gotten a lot of what you need or are working towards something big, but the simplicity of trying to catch a fish or craft new furniture still ensures the game never gets aggravating or too complex for its own good. The game’s schedule could be more lenient in parts, tool crafting becomes antiquated quickly, and the villagers would definitely benefit from having more to set them apart and more interaction options in general, but the Nook Miles goals, plethora of items, and incredible openness to customization means there is still a lot to do and a lot to love within its design of brief daily play sessions.

It would be a tall ask for any game to retain enough appeal that daily visits never grow dull, but Animal Crossing: New Horizons does a lot to ensure that even a considerable time investment can still be entertaining or personally rewarding even as some of its systems soon lose any novel appeal. If you’re ambitious enough you can continue to work towards goals you invent for a long time, and if you’re only interested in some outlined goals there’s still a pseudo-ending to work towards when it comes to unlocking the ability to customize the land. Different seasons and holidays offer reasons to return even after you’ve run out of things to do on a regular basis, and the game is a good host for considerable creativity so that if the spark strikes you right, you can make the game into your personal canvas. It might resist you in parts and some things are slow for the sake of it rather than playing into the rewarding slow burn of working on a personal project, but Animal Crossing: New Horizons still offers a lot to anyone looking to enjoy a simple but satisfying virtual island life.